I’ve noticed a run on ‘Highly Effective’ list posts lately!  It seems like everyone has the inside scoop on how to be highly effective at everything! Highly Effective Leaders. Highly Effective Managers. Highly Effective Productive People. Highly Effective Teacher.  If you want a post worth clicking on, just add an odd number, the words ‘highly effective’ and a title.  It goes a little something like this (hit it!):

– The 5 Highly Effective Habits of Crackheads!

– The 7 Highly Effective Traits of Lazy Employees!

– The 13 Highly Effective Ways To Hug It Out at Work!

Blog post writing 101.  The highly effective way to write a blog post people will click on and spend 57 seconds reading.

I figured I might as well jump on board with some career/job seeker advice with the 3 Highly Effective Habits of Annoying Candidates!

1. They don’t pick up on normal social cues. This means you don’t know when to shut up or start talking.   Most annoying candidates actually struggle with the ‘when to stop talking piece’.  Yes, we want to hear about your job history. No, we don’t care about your boss Marvin who managed you at the Dairy Dip when you were 15.

2. They live in the past. Usually, annoying candidates are annoying because they were annoying employees and like to share annoying stories about how great it was in the past when they weren’t thought of as annoying.  I guess you can’t blame them. If there was ever a possibility they weren’t annoying, I’d probably try and relive those moments as much as possible.

3. They lack a shred of self-insight.  That’s really the core, right?  If you had any self-insight, you would understand you’re just a little annoying and you would work to control that, but you don’t.  “Maybe some would say spending a solid ten minutes talking about my coin collection in an interview wouldn’t be good, but I think it shows I’m passionate!” No, it doesn’t.

You can see how these highly effective habits start to build on each other.  You don’t stop rambling on about something totally unrelated to the interview because you don’t notice Mary stopped taking notes ten minutes ago and started doodling on her interview notes, but you plow on because you told yourself during interview prep to make sure you got out all of your bad manager stories.

Highly effective annoying candidates are like a Tsunami of a lack of emotional intelligence.  Even if I was completely unqualified for a job I think the feedback afterward from the interviewers would be: “we really liked him, too bad he doesn’t have any the skills we need.”   Highly effective annoying candidates have the opposite feedback: “if this person was the last person on earth with the skills to save our company, I would rather we go out of business!”

What annoying candidate habits have you witnessed?