You’ve been fired, so how do you go about explaining this regretful incident to a future employer and more importantly, is s/he going to believe you when you say that it honestly WASN”T your fault? The answer to this question depends on how you present the facts.
Although this may be uncomfortable for some of you, the very best way to deal with this problem is to tell the employer straight away what your situation is. (If he has to go digging for that information, or if it only comes up at the end of your interview, he could logically conclude that you were hoping to hide this little detail. By raising it upfront, yourself, your prospective boss is likely to be a more enthusiastic about hiring you.
This way, too, you will be able to ‘set the stage’ and relate what happened just prior to the layoff. Maybe it was a series of contracts that weren’t renewed; perhaps it was the fact that a competitor just trotted out a piece of equipment that trumped yours, or it could have been that your company was purchased by another firm who already had enough people in the accounting department, thereby making YOUR position superfluous.
A good time to approach this topic with your interviewer is when s/he asks you to talk about yourself. The usual way this question is framed is ‘Tell me about yourself.’ Bingo: that’s your entrée!
Whatever you do, don’t load the guy down with a batch of extraneous and complicated details. Try to portray your story in the simplest of terms. Two or three paragraphs about the incident will generally do quite nicely. Any more than that, and your interviewer may suspect that you aren’t exactly telling the truth. Get in, get out and then move on to talking about what how you can help the NEW company.
If you lost your job due to the recession, by all means say so! Anyone with a half a brain will understand this, and realize that you haven’t done anything ‘wrong.’ Try to provide your new employer with the actual number of those who were cut when you were. It sounds a whole lot better to be able to say, “a total of 350 of us lost our jobs this past March’ than it does to admit that you were having problems getting along with the boss, and he fired you!
A little humor goes a long way, so make sure you tell your interviewer what you’ve been doing since losing your last job. Say something like, “Now that I am looking for a new position, I’ve been busier than a dog with two tails….and you know, I sure am looking forward to having a new job so that I don’t have to do so much work in the future!”
If your future employer doesn’t get a chuckle out of that one, then maybe you don’t want to work for him after all!
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