Job Hunting Skills: Are They Common Sense?

One of the authors of the CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Candidates Blog posted an interesting entry earlier today. The author wrote that she applied for a job and received an email from the employer saying that he’d like to meet with her. For those of us who are so far past the point of applying for our first professional position, the natural reaction would be, “great!” But the candidate doesn’t know what to do. Not because she’s dumb, but because she lacks experience. She simply has never experienced this before. While it would be nice to advise her to use her common sense, I don’t believe in common sense. I simply don’t believe that such a thing exists.
We all are born with certain skills, such as the ability to breath. Those are instincts and not common sense. But everything else that we do, including responding to emails from potential employers, are learned behaviors. This candidate has not yet learned what to do in this situation. As soon as she’s gone through it once, she’ll know it forever. But in the meantime, she doesn’t know how to proceed.
I wish that more human resource professionals and hiring managers would keep in mind that entry level candidates are, by definition, inexperienced. Not stupid. Not lazy. Just inexperienced. They don’t know what to do and must be trained. And that includes not knowing how to respond to a request by an employer to set up an interview date. Hopefully most employers don’t get too frustrated by the inexperience of these candidates and instead understand that with a little guidance and training, they can and often do turn out to be phenomenal stars.