BE HONEST, IS IT TIME TO LEAVE YOUR JOB?

Rowan Manahan gives his expert view on job melancholy - and says research shows three-quarters of people who quit their jobs do so for reasons other than salary

Why all this unhappiness? In a word, because of lies. People lie, exaggerate, distort and misrepresent. Organisations spin, embellish and, according to George Bush, “disassemble.” Orwell said that society was “founded on a system of organised lying” and he was not wrong. Napoleon said the surest way to remain poor was to be an honest man and he was probably not wide of the mark either.

Now don’t get me wrong; I am happy to imply that the squawling pink blob that I have been handed is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen and I will cheerfully eat sacrificial burnt offerings washed down with cooking vinegar and tell my hosts that they are delicious.

But lying in the jobs market? In this day and age? That’s just stupid.

Wanted: Machine Operator. Must be 1.98 meters (6ft 5ins) tall, left-handed, fluent in Mandarin and Spanish with a high degree of manual dexterity and 100wpm typing speed. I have never seen a job advertisement quite that specific, but from reading it, I can tell you that there would be NO point in applying unless you had ALL the attributes specified. And yet people misrepresent themselves to the market every day.

Companies do exactly the same – offering training, advancement and incentives which somehow never quite materialise. Baaaaad idea! It’s like lying in the personals ad and expecting the relationship to last. It can’t and it won’t.

So if you have that colicky sensation as you face into a long autumn and winter in your current job, it is time to ask yourself why. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who is the fibber, what matters is lessening the stress. Work used to be a pain in the neck – back pain was the number one cause of workplace absenteeism. Now, work has become a pain in the head as stress is the primary occupational hazard in the 21st century. The world is hectic enough, why invite more stress into your life because of your day job?

Unless you have a long-forgotten aunt who is going to bequeath you her logging company, your job is likely to be your sole source of revenue. As such you need to nurture and protect it – and make sure that it is doing you no harm.

Right now, what does your gut tell you? Move or stay?

If it’s stay, well and good; if it’s move, then it is time to dust off the good suit and get your CV out of the bottom drawer.

My key piece of advice to any job-seeker in 2005 is to TAKE YOUR TIME. Unless you have a pressing financial need to get a new job tomorrow, take the time to prepare yourself, research the market thoroughly and make sure that the next move is the right one, with a good fit – you for them and them for you.

Modern job-hunting is all about the application of knowledge. With the surging growth of the internet, that knowledge is not hard to come by and organisations now have very high expectations as to candidates’ preparedness and level of research. That part of the job-hunt is tedious but relatively painless to accomplish. What is more difficult is ensuring that the HR Manager isn’t doing a Mata Hari job on you.

 

2c WORTH OF ADVICE TO AVOID UNHAPPY ENDINGS

INTERVIEWERS With Silly Season firmly over, your family holiday a dim and distant memory; it’s back to business. The headcount freeze has been lifted and you need to hire someone. Let’s make it a good hire for both parties. So: • Remember that hiring is just another purchasing decision. Bad hires are very costly (Gallup estimate it as high as 3.2 times the person’s salary). So take your time and get it right. • Exhaust your network before casting your net wider. It’s always better to hire someone on the basis of references from people you know and trust. • If you are going the placement agency route, get value for money. Make them do the background search, the initial interview and ensure that they give you a written summary on why they are recommending each candidate they put forward. • Go back to the drawing board and build a person and job specification (qualifications, experience, further training, personal attributes). Have you ever tried to assemble a flatpack bookshelf without a set of plans? If a candidate asks you, “What constitutes real success in this role?” can you answer? • Further refine your specification wish-list into must-haves, nice-to-haves and icing on the cake. • Get a second, or third, opinion; this requires that you explain exactly what you are looking for to the other interviewers. If you are concerned about nepotism or bias, use external interviewers whose sole interest is finding the optimal person for the job. • Build a loooong list of questions to use. Do this in advance, run it past the other interviewers and then whittle it down. • Drill down! If a candidate claims that (s)he boosted profits by 86% over three years, they should be able to give you accurate start, finish and in-between numbers. • Then you can start into the “how” of the accomplishment – status quo at the outset, project goals, stakeholders, obstacles overcome, exactly who had responsibility for what … Get specific and stay specific! • Be patient – the vocabulary of interview is an alien tongue to most people. Give the candidates every chance to explain ‘how’ they do things. • Be honest! Do not try and lure/seduce high-flyers in with false promises. Continuity with a happy, productive employee will be better than flash-in-the-pan every time. • Do exit interviews and get to the heart of what is good and bad in your organisation. Then act on it!

JOB-HUNTERS Friday’s Irish Times is getting nice and thick as the recruitment market gears up again. Miserable where you are? Would you like to be in a new job come January? Get ready to hit the job-hunting trail … • For CVs, one size fits no-one. Not in working clothes and not in CVs. Tailor every time. You know how irritating it is to receive endless junk mail? Employers feel exactly the same way about generic, unsolicited CVs. • Having read your CV for 30 seconds from among a pile of 100 similarly-qualified, similarly-experienced applicants, do I want to meet you? A CV that details responsibilities is not going to distinguish you from the crowd. All cost accountants do roughly the same job, as do insolvency lawyers, QC analysts or whatever. What makes you stand out are your contributions and accomplishments. Focus on those and you will get on to the short list far more often. • Manahan’s Mantra: If you have to lie to get your foot in the door, this probably isn’t the job for you ... • An interview is the equivalent of landing the leading role in a play. How much rehearsal would you do if you were going to stand up in front of everyone you know as Romeo, Juliet or Lady Macbeth in a couple of weeks’ time? And yet people saunter into interviews with a few half-formed ideas and wonder why they don’t get the job. • 20 Questions: Few interviewers use the chestnut, ‘soft,’ biographical interview questions now, but they do still pop up. Know them, build your truthful answers to them, and be ready to deliver those answers with fluency and credibility. • The most common mistakes made by candidates: (1) Inadequate preparation. (2) Body disagrees with what the mouth is saying. (3) Lack of enthusiasm. (4) Underselling yourself. (5) Being “me” focused rather than “them” focused. (6) Not really listening. (Common sense again. Everyone reading that list says, “But I would never do any of that.” But everyone has, at some point in their career. Maybe we should call it ‘uncommon sense’ …) • Never show up to an interview unless you have at least two meaty questions to ask them. (Hint: meaty questions do not include “How much will I be paid?” “Will you pay for my MBA?” or “How big will my company car be?”) • Crunch question: “Out of all the highly-experienced, highly-qualified applicants, why should we hire you?” Most people don’t know (or can’t articulate) what makes them memorable, effective and special. If you don’t know it, how can you expect the interviewer to discern it?

Rowan Manahan is MD of career consultancy Fortify Services in Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin