Conflicts (from our vault)

April 28, 2000

We all know that Jobhunting is the pits, except for those rare circumstances when you are offered a new Job with better benefits and a higher salary shortly after starting your Jobsearch.

Which is a good thing to keep in mind during your Jobsearch - odds are about 10-1 in your favor that you'll land a better paying Job, unless you're switching careers and have little experience in your new field. And pay is not the only factor to consider in Jobhopping, you'll need to think about crucial matters like location and work environment.

If you like the area you live in, you may not like the fact that the Job offers you are getting require a long commute or change in address. How will your personal relationships stand up to the combined stress of a new Job, new living arrangements, and possibly long distance communication? What kind of people will there be at your new Job? Will they be friendly and welcoming, or will they have well established cliques that are standoffish?

Most people leave their current Jobs (or are relieved of their current Jobs!) due to personality conflicts rather than inability to do the tasks that the Job requires. The last thing you want to have happen during your Jobsearch is to lose the Job you already have before you're ready to leave. If you are having difficulty maintaining your composure at work, now is a good time to practice the art of seeing the lighter side of work.

Getting along at work requires gaining a perspective on what is going on around you. If someone just yelled at you, it may be because someone just yelled at them. They may have had to take their car back to the service station for the same problem three times in the last week. Or they may have recently found out that a friend has cancer. People rarely do things to intentionally annoy others, unless they are already good friends and are playing a game.

The next time you want to blow up and attack someone at work, take a deep breath and think of a funny way to defuse (rather than escalate) the situation. Trust me - coworkers and supervisors alike will value your ability to lessen the office tension. You can be the grease that keeps the work gears spinning smoothly. When you jump ship ex-colleagues will say how much they miss you, rather than 'good riddance'. For perspective, keep copies of Dilbert and The Far Side at your workstation.

If you can keep your perspective, then you are more likely to control events than to have them control you.

-Mark Poppen

Comparison Shopping (from our vault)

April 26, 2000

How much are you getting paid?

Depending on the status of the Job, workers will have different answers to this question. Entry level employees in low wage Jobs tend to respond with an hourly wage, e.g. I make $9/hr. Salaried workers think of their pay as an annual amount, or if they are living paycheck to paycheck, they might refer to how much they earn (take-home!) each week. So you might say, I'm making $30K/yr, or $600/wk, or after taxes are stolen, maybe $475 every week.

Higher up on the socioeconomic scale, Employees (& Independent Contractors, Consultants, and their ilk) don't have a ready answer to this kind of question. It is either considered impolite to talk about the fact that they are making three times what their friends earn, or they are unable to figure out what their compensation really amounts to at any given moment. They're not necessarily stupid, it's just that with health benefits, club memberships, company car, stock options, and assorted perqs, it's just sooooo hard to come up with a clean figure that reflects how much they're getting paid.

As a rule of thumb, divide your annual salary by two, and drop the thousands to calculate your hourly rate. $24,000/yr is about $12.00/hr, slightly over the average annual wage in the US. This is because Americans work almost 2000 hrs/yr, which is forty hrs/wk times fifty paid workweeks in the year. American workers, on average, put in 5% more work hours per year than Japanese workers, and roughly twenty percent more work hours per year than their European counterparts.

Before you take off for that cushy European Job that promises six to eight weeks vacation every year, consider that their unemployment rate has been hovering at nearly double the US rate for many years now - and Job security for Yanks is rarely a priority.

So when a recruiter offers you thirty thousand a year with no benefits, you can compare it to your present Job at $13.50/hr with medical, dental, and retirement plan and tell them to find you a better offer.

-Mark Poppen

Winning With Mediocrity (from our vault)

April 26, 2000

Few Hiring Managers will admit it, but they don't really need to hire the 'top 10 percent' of Job applicants anymore. They're happy with simple competency from new hires as long as they show some willingness to improve over time while being able to get along with their co-workers.

Given their new mindset in these days of a tighter than usual labor market, there are several things you can do both to get your next Job and also to make a good first impression once you've accepted the Job offer. Of course, you should have already done some research on your particular field of interest, because labor markets are fluid and can range substantially from one Job Title to the next. Software Engineers may be highly sought after, while retail clothing Assistant Managers may be a dime a dozen.

Generally someone with even minimal experience doing the tasks the Job requires has an edge over someone who only knows the Job 'in theory'. Street smarts wins out over book smarts in the eyes of most Hiring Managers. Getting experience by interning or apprenticing is a common modus operandi for new entrants to an industry.

Repackaging your past experience and skill set so that you appear to have 'easily transferable skills' is a common means around the "No experience - No Job" dilemma that we've all faced before. For example, a hot Job at the moment is 'Internet Customer Service Rep'. Internet shoppers throw away two-thirds of the items that they originally put in their virtual shopping carts, primarily because they can't get sufficient information about the products. If you have telephone sales/marketing experience, these skills should be easily transferable to this new Job title.

Once you get a Job offer and start work, find out what skills are highly valued by your supervisor and learn them on your own time. Spend an extra ten hours a week mastering a skill that sets you apart from your colleagues, and within a few weeks your Boss will earmark you as a 'fast learner' destined for promotions. Those first impressions will allow you to coast along at work for a long, long time.

In the workplace you don't have to be smarter than everyone else, but it helps to appear smarter.

-Mark Poppen

Team Player (from our vault)

April 25, 2000

In the back of every Hiring Manager's mind is One Question: Will this Job Candidate be able to get along with their coworkers? (In the front of their mind is the Question: Can you do the Job?).

The equally important corollary is: Will they be able to get along with you? The last thing an Employer wants is to hire someone who disrupts the work environment negatively and lowers the amount of production. Relatively speaking, it's not so bad if you are merely incompetent but fairly amiable - every business survives with a number of workers that fall into this category. While it sure isn't what a Hiring Manager is looking for first, sometimes they only need a body to fill a chair.

What kills Managers are new hires that are always on edge and itching for a fight with coworkers and supervisors. These Employees are not only time-consuming, but they are morale murderers as well.

Training a new hire the necessary skills to do the Job takes some time and effort, but generally is within the bounds of OJT (On the Job Training) that Employers expect to conduct. Modifying a new hire's disruptive behavior, however, is a much more difficult task. How we get along with our friends, coworkers, and people on the street is engrained behavior, and Employers are legitimately loath to embark on the Pavlovian task of changing how you treat your fellow Man.

Theoretically the screening process that you've survived to get to the Interview stage should calm the Hiring Manager's qualms about your rudimentary skill set. On a simple level, the Interview is conducted to find out if you can "talk the talk" that is outlined by your resume. While it is important to resolve lingering doubts about individual accomplishments and abilities, the larger issue is about your personality.

On a more complex level, the Interview is a psychological war. The Hiring Manager thinks she's got a round hole of a position - are you a square peg that will cause friction on all sides if she tries to slip you into their cozy work environment?

So when you earn an Interview with a target company, remember what they're really looking for when they talk to you. Look out for Questions like these:

• Describe some of the conflicts that arose out of your last Job.
• What frustrated you most about your last Job, and how did you overcome it?
• How would you resolve the following personality conflict at work?

These are designed to answer the one real Question that must be answered before you can get a Job offer, "Do you play well with others?"

-Mark Poppen

Resume Tips (from our vault)

April 24, 2000

Successful Jobhunting usually requires submitting resumes to organizations that will most likely only throw them away. While frustrating, the thing to remember is it's their loss. They could have had a hardworking, competent, and decent person working for them - You. And there are a few techniques that can get your hard copy resume noticed, rather than filed in the proverbial circular file.

Paper resumes that arrive at most firms are scanned into a database and searched at a later date for certain key terms or phrases. Hopefully your research about the target firm will have educated you as to what these 'industry keywords' are, so you can pack your resume with them. Because your resume will enter a database via a scanner, it is important that it is set up to be scanner friendly. Some keys to scannability are:

• Use a laser printer for higher quality scans
• Print on one side only, using white, letter size paper
• Font sizes should be 12 to 14
• Standard typefaces like Courier, Helvetica, or Arial
• Skip the use of formatting niceties (no Bold, Underline, Italics, etc.)
• Don't staple or fold the resume (one page really should be sufficient)
• Information should be set up chronologically
• Please spell check (includes having a friend look it over)

Don't forget the Job code and/or title of the Job you are applying for - generally it goes at the top of the resume you are sending. Your contact information should follow the Job title at the top of the page. Include sufficient contact information (name, address, phone, cell, email, and fax) so that you are easy to track down. What could be worse than losing the Job simply because they couldn't get in touch with you?

Use short and sweet headings that concisely tell a reader, at a glance, what they should expect to find in the text immediately below. After the electronic scanner gives your resume the once over, it gets passed on to the human scanner for further review. Clarity and keywords are the way to get past the first scanner - and quality of work experience or references is the best way to get by the human scanner.

-Mark Poppen

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