INTERVIEWER: ALIA FARAMAWI
EDITOR: NADA KHAFAGA
About Mohamed Farouk Radwan: He attained his bachelor degree in Engineering and he worked in several companies until he finally created his online project: 2knowmyself.com, where he became a dot Com millionaire at the age of 28. He wrote and published around 3000 articles with the help of his team. He published 11 books. Farouk is also a sports person who loves working out and does martial arts. He appeared on T.V several times, and recently he is the founder of a new project: Speeli.com.
INTERVIEW
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: How can a job applicant psychologically convince an interviewer and impress him/her during the interview and, perhaps, be accepted in the job too, all without having many years of work experience?
Farouk Radwan: The interviewer is a person who has goals just like the job applicant has goals. The interviewer always looks for the person who can help him/her achieve those goals. If the candidate studied the company’s needs perfectly he/she will be able to understand what exactly the interviewer is looking for and impressing him/her won’t be a hard task.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: From your own professional experience and educational background, how can a human resources manager help the employees to improve and generate better results in their work through using psychology?
Farouk Radwan: The two major problems inside almost every company are:
- People are not in the right place.
- The employee doesn’t believe the company can help him achieve his important goals.
The solution to both problems begins by perfectly understanding the psychology and the background of the employee in order to be able to put him/her in the right place and to help him/her get motivated.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Some HR people receive very exciting and interesting CVs with great experience but actually the person behind this CV is not that qualified, do you have any sort of advice to the HR employees who review these CVs in order to save time for the company?
Farouk Radwan: This can be very tricky because people can lie in their CVs and write them in a deceiving way. I believe that the only way to find out is making more than one interview with the candidate until it becomes clear whether he/she is really capable of doing what he/she wrote or not.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: As the founder of 2knowmyself.com you have a huge number of subscribers that you send them daily articles and advice. Some of your articles carry a very grabbing and exciting title that makes the viewer feel that, by reading this article they will be newly born and all their problems will be solved. Do you think that all the readers will be able to implement the solutions and advice included in the article?
Farouk Radwan: Of course not. A coach can give advice but if this advice is correct, it will never work before the receiver does an extraordinary amount of effort to implement. Some people mistakenly believe that getting advice is enough, but that’s a wrong way of thinking. It’s like knowing what kind of medicine you should take then not doing any effort to buy it or take it on time.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: How can an employee fix his/her performance at work while going through a relationship breakup?
Farouk Radwan: Most People fail to recover from breakups because they have false beliefs about relationships. Once a person acquires the right set of beliefs, after studying the psychology of breakups, breakups won’t be more dangerous than a cold. Their pain will last few days then go away.
People remain broken simply because they don’t know about the right way to heal and not because breaks ups are that painful.
A person for example, who believes in “the one” concept will always feel that there is no way to heal as he lost his “one soul mate”. When that person realizes that he can fall in love with any person who meets the list of items in his subconscious mind, called “the subconscious love list”, that person’s ability to recover will become much higher. That’s just a simple example, the recovery process involves so many different steps and stages. I documented everything about it in my book which is available on 2knowmyself.com as an ebook and also available on amazon as a hard copy.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Do you consider your current career different from what you studied in college?
Farouk Radwan: It has nothing to do with what I have studied. I studied industrial engineering, but my current career is all about computers, psychology and the internet.
However, the engineering way of thinking helped me throughout the different things I did. When you study engineering, you learn how to solve problems no matter what your career is. The fact that I managed to use this skill in the stuff I was doing helped me a lot.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: In one sentence, tell us how can an employee calm his/her own manager after making a work disaster?
Farouk Radwan: By providing a clear action plan for solving that problem he/she just created and promising, that he/she will get it done in a specific time frame.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: I noticed that 2knowmyself.com is a one man show. You are the author of these books and articles. Do you have a hidden crew members working for you? If no, how is it applicable to carry on all this amount of work and success on your own?
Farouk Radwan: It’s true. I work with few part-timers, but there is only one fulltime employee helping me with marketing. It’s very stressful to handle everything on your own of course and I wish to delegate many things to other people in the near future.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: How do you manage to recruit your writers and what are your criteria?
Farouk Radwan: I make a series of invisible tests without letting the writer actually know he/she is going through a test. For example, I don’t set a deadline for submitting the articles the writer has to submit to apply for the job, to find out how many days will the writer take to complete them.
People who keep asking about deadlines, article length or any other questions are usually ignored. That’s another test, as I always look for people who have the “can do” attitude or the ones who get things done without wasting anytime.
I also try to get a peek at that person’s private life, for the activities the person does has a direct impact on his working style. It’s all about finding whether people are really the working type or whether they just want to have a job to get a salary to believe that they are useful.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: You practice martial arts, to be specific boxing, and you used to practice Aikido. How does the ethics and philosophy of martial arts affect your business lifestyle, your self-motivation methods and your management style?
Farouk Radwan: Everything in life is connected and there is a connection between martial arts and business. In martial arts, you learn how to keep receiving hits until you develop endurance, and the same exact concept helps a lot in the business world. The business world can sometimes be tough, and if a person is not prepared to take the hits then he might fail.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: As a published author, what sort of advice would you recommend to new authors who want to establish a recognized name?
Farouk Radwan: Build a community online by providing free content (articles). Then, release their first book through a publishing on demand service, such as Amazon’s create space. By doing so they will take no financial risk.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: What are your remarks regarding HR in Egypt?
Farouk Radwan: I believe that HR is misunderstood by most people who work at HR. They think that the job of an HR personnel is recruiting or firing, while the real job title of an HR personnel is to manage humans, put them in the right places, understand their personalities, know what motivates each person and help each person inside the company achieve his/her full potential.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Why did you create Speeli.com? How is it different from 2knowmyself.com?
Farouk Radwan: 2knowmyself.com is a psychology website for people interested to learn more about themselves and others. Speeli is a totally different thing. It’s the internet’s summary. It’s a place where you can get extremely fast information about topics instead of wasting a lot of time researching about them
A Speeli article has no header, intro, footer, it’s only formed of bullets and each bullet point has a maximum of 300 characters. Our goal is to summarize the internet’s knowledge and help people find information faster than when they search Google.
HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine: Thank you so much Mr. Farouk for sharing this beneficial information with us.
Facebook Pages:
https://www.facebook.com/Speeli/?fref=ts
https://www.facebook.com/2knowmyself/?fref=ts