I read an interesting article today about strategic philanthropy, but what really caught my attention was the first nine lines. As a recruiter and placement specialist, I have had the hardest time correcting this one area with my qualified candidates; using proper English when speaking.

When Gilbert Maurer was chief operating officer of the Hearst Corporation, he encountered many bright college graduates. But he noticed something odd about them. “They could write okay, but they couldn’t articulate,” he recalls. “If ever they had to give a presentation, it was ‘like’ this, and ‘you know’ that. I called it
verbal landfill.”

Maurer, now retired but still on Hearst’s board of directors, decided to do something about it. “In my father’s day, you had to take something called ‘rhetoric’ in school, in my day it as ‘oral English’. It’s a teacher’s euphemism for ‘being able to express yourself’,” he says.

A few years ago, he broached his concern to the president of his alma mater, St Lawrence University, a small, private liberal arts college in upstate New York. “I asked him: ‘What do you think would happen if a St Lawrence graduate could have a leg up on other college graduates because he could speak and express his ideas more effectively?’”

St Lawrence immediately began working on the idea…

The most important piece of advise I can give a candidate is to not use the words, ‘like’, ‘you know’, ‘um’, or ‘a-a’.  Mr. Maurer calls it, “verbal landfill”; I call it, “interview or career advancement suicide.”  A client once told me that he didn’t hire one of my candidates, who was far more qualified than the rest, just because he said, ‘you know’ after every thought. That one flaw in the candidates character drove the Ph.D. interviewer crazy. He said, “how is it possible that an Ivy League M.P.H. (Masters in Public Health) couldn’t speak proper English?”

It all starts with parent’s and teacher’s, and if not corrected early, the habit just gets re-enforced by our current, myspace,  hip-hop and MTV influenced society.

Coaching Tip:

One of my coaching tips is to have the candidate record themselves and count how many times they say one of the above no-no words. Then practice daily, re-recording themselves until the bad habit is broken.

Marcus Ettinger DC, BS