Tayna Longina is an interview and career expert and coach

The First Phase

She started her career in sales and her communication skills and ability to engage with people were critical for launching her career. She quickly learned that the secret to being happy at work is to have a career, not a job.

As she hired her team, she hired people that were engaging. She built teams that got great results and had high employee retention rates. As her sales statistics rose and her team was so successful, the human resource department started noticing her and her ability to put people in place who were motivated to do a great job. They were people enjoying a career, not a job.

Because making decisions can be challenging, as Tayna was trying to make her decision to transition to human resources she sought advice from her mother. Her mother’s advice was that when people want you or see something in you, you need to take advantage of it or at least explore it. So Tayna made a career change and started her career in Human Resources (HR).

Hiring Strategies

Using similar strategies to hiring sales teams, once in HR, Tayna worked to hire the right people for the right job. She was hired in a way that she married the employee with the role so that they could have a career and not just a job, but also fulfill the needs of the company.

When you aren’t doing something that you are passionate about, you are more likely to leave or move on. Changing hiring models and even job postings, shifted from hiring transactional employees to people who wanted a career and wanted to meet goals. Therefore, really seeking out the right talent and competencies helps with employee retention and company success.

Likewise, listening and observing intentionally what people were experiencing in their job roles is how Tayna has been able to build successful teams. Doing so allows her to identify what people’s passions are today as she works with her clients in the second phase.

The Second Phase

Tayna now uses her HR skills to coach people who are looking for careers, not jobs.

With some intentional work, you can identify what people really want in a career. People no longer just have to take any job to pay the bills, they can have a career doing something that they are passionate about. Something that they love and fulfill them.

One job posting will have several hundred applications. It is important to write the job description to find the ideal candidate.

Tayna now coaches career seekers by helping them look at and identify their values, visions, and passions so that they can find the right fit for employment. She also coaches them on interviewing and communicating their strengths and expertise.

How Interview Candidates Fail

There are three reasons that candidates fail in their interviews:

Unprepared – didn’t do research on the position and how they can effectively answer questions in the interview.
Unable to communicate – communicating and articulating experiences and value that they can bring to the company and hiring manager. The problems they can solve for the company or hiring manager.
Can’t connect, lack of confidence – Not connecting with the hiring manager because of a lack of confidence, not connected with the company, the competitors, or the needs of the company or hiring manager. The unknowns cause a lack of confidence.

The Personal Brand

In a nutshell, this is a personal brand. You have to be able to communicate your expertise, the problem you can solve, the value you can provide, and why you are the expert the company and hiring manager needs.

For that reason, Tayna helps her clients identify their stars and elevate the situations where they have really been able to shine and effectively share their success stories. She helps them present their personal brand and make experiences relevant to the specific pain points that the company has. This is a differentiator for candidates for a successful interview.

It’s about crafting a story that completely resonates with the hiring manager and makes a connection. This makes a difference for career seeking vs. job seeking. As a career seeker, you are marketing yourself and leveraging your expertise.

Certainly, if there are gaps in your experience, it’s important to sure them up so that you are more confident when interviewing. Be able to tell your story better than you’ve ever told it before.

Three Things People Can do to Interview Successfully

Discovery – identify the landscape where you want to be, and where you want to play. Define your point of difference, and what is special about you.
Differentiation – point of difference. It may seem painstaking, but it is critical.
Delivery – practice and prepare, work on delivery, and become more confident in how you express yourself. It is not bragging it is articulating your messaging and point of value and uniqueness.

Passions

Tayna’s passion is making a difference. One of her strongest passions is diversity and inclusion. She has seen a lot of bias in the workplace and is now working to eliminate bias in the hiring practice and recognizing and celebrating differences in employees to retain them and support them. To really identify the uniqueness of individuals.

We all come to the table with bias. The bias comes from experiences we grew up and they are unavoidable. But it is about recognizing the bias we all hold and being intentional about making our choices and being accepting of the value of differences.

Addressing Bias

Diversity, inclusion, and commitment around this work, you have to understand where the bias comes from. It isn’t enough to just say I have them. One can no longer say, that is just how I’ve always done it.

The starting point is understanding where the bias and isms begin. Where does racism originate? When you understand the genesis of bias, you can be more accepting to be more intentional with changing the bias.

About 97 percent of our brain does things automatically. The remaining 3% is intentional work. We have to make intentional efforts to not make decisions based on a name or other factors. It’s about not reacting and being more intentional.

Bias Assessment

Harvard has an excellent free bias assessment. It is not possible to trick the assessment to produce results of non-bias.

Tayna does both corporate and team training on diversity and inclusion as well as private coaching. There is no judgment and shame, just guidance on how to change and improve the decisions we make.