Lines blur between non-profit and for-profit workplaces

,

Jobs in the nonprofit sector are growing at a faster rate than jobs in the business sector. But this might not even be the big news. The big news is that the difference between the nonprofit sector and the business sector is shrinking, according to nonprofit veteran Seth Rosen who blogs at technovist.com.

“As the nonprofit sector professionalizes and the most successful for-profits recruit people with a drive to do something that includes a real public benefit, the culture of the sectors will look more alike. In twenty years the difference between nonprofits and for-profits may simply be their IRS classification.”

One of the biggest issues Generation X and Generation Y have is that they want to have impact. Nonprofit giving among Gen X, for example, has become very grassroots, as Gen X wants to be able to see clearly what change they are helping to instigate. And Gen Y has made it clear that working at a company where they don’t understand how they fit is absolutely untenable – they want to make a difference. Everyone wants to know how they make a difference – whether it’s for-profit or not-for-profit.

In the old model of nonprofits, individuals are removed from the bottom line in a way that undermines the meaning of their work. Take Andrew Broderick, for example. He used to do fund-raising for hospitals. For him, the worst part of working at a nonprofit was how far removed the compensation system was from the bottom line. “I could raise $35 million or I could raise $1 dollar and I’d earn the same amount of salary.”

Recently, he switched to a sales position at Royale Printing, a short- to medium-run printing company in Madison, Wis., where his compensation is a combination of salary and commission. He feels more connected to the bigger picture, “If I make $10 million for the company I’d get paid accordingly.”

Nonprofits are responding to defectors like Broderick. “As there is more and more competition for resources there is clearly an awareness of how to be more efficient,” says Russ Finkelstein, associate director of Idealist.org, a job listing service for the nonprofit sector.

For example, Echoing Green is a foundation that gives grants to social entrepreneurs to create groundbreaking change in the nonprofit arena. The idea that these start-ups are accountable for creating measurable results is much more in line with the values of today’s workforce – no matter what sector they come from. And employees of nonprofits manage their careers with the same focus and drive as someone in the business sector.

Jen Cormier works at Make-A-Wish in Boston. She networks with people in her field, she thinks of herself as a marketing specialist, and she plans her path through a few jobs and then graduate school as carefully as anyone going for an MBA. Similarly, in the old model of the business sector, you earned a lot of money and left the doing-good stuff to the nonprofits. Today, though, companies understand the need to make a difference no matter what sector you are in.

“There are a lot of companies that are doing things that are more socially responsible because creating this sort of work atmosphere retains people,” says Finkelstein. Morgan Stanley, for example, gives employees time off to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. Salesforce.com set up a foundation to afford employees paid time to help in their community.

It’s not surprising that the gap between for-profits and nonprofits is blurring because the search for meaningful work is permeating the whole workforce. People at all levels are looking to learn and grow in their work, according to Jennifer Deal, senior researcher for the Center for Creative Leadership and author of Retiring the Generation Gap: How Employees Young and Old Can Find Common Ground. And while nonprofits have typically been the places to feed one’s soul, the business sector has woken up to the fact that one of the best ways to retain young employees is to help them grow.

One of the most shocking turns in today’s workplace is that it used to be that young people went to the Peace Corps to grow. Now people go to big accounting firms because they are leading the way in retaining young workers, by infusing work with meaning. You get a mentor, you get rotating responsibilities, and you get opportunities to volunteer, on company time. A study by Deloitte found that volunteer opportunities attract a stronger candidate pool in the business sector. And Ernst & Young rewards high performers with a Social Responsibility Fellowship.

Cormier says people discouraged her from working in the nonprofit sector as being unrealistic and a poor career choice. “A lot of naysayers told me wait until you get to the real world.” Other people will view socially responsible business with cynicism – firms providing do-gooder opportunities merely to win the war for talent. But you could also look at this as a sort of version of a golden age of capitalism: Finally, companies are giving back to the community in a way that touches employees at their core, and finally nonprofits are being run efficiently in a way that really does get help to the needy, and this, after all, is good for everyone.

/23 Comments

5 Ways to flub a job interview

,

We spend so much of our careers doing good work, meeting interesting people, and learning new skills. But it really all starts with one moment: the interview.

Once you get there, you need to be able to package everything together for a nice, neat presentation that’s memorable in exactly the right way.

Here are five mistakes a lot of people make — even people who are great at doing interviews:

1. Not preparing for a phone interview.

Most hiring managers screen candidates on the phone before they bring the candidate in for an interview. This is to make sure there aren’t any glaring problems.

A phone interview saves time. If you can’t get the answers to basic questions right on the phone, there’s no point in interviewers watching you botch those questions in person. Also, the hiring manager is looking for you to make a mistake that would rule you out. For example, not knowing that you shouldn’t take a call with a screaming baby in the background.

So instead of thinking of the phone interview as a precursor to the real thing, think of it as something you can prepare for. Learn the rules.

2. Misunderstanding the point of a face-to-face interview.

Hiring managers today have a lot of tools at their disposal to figure out if you’re qualified for a job. The Internet reveals your history, and often the content and quality of your work;LinkedIn can provide a plethora of references from people who have worked with you, whether you actually provide them to the employer yourself or not. And a phone screen can give a sense of your verbal abilities.

So what’s left? Whether or not you click with them — whether they like you. Remember that intangible thing that happens on a date when you decide if you like the person or not? The same thing happens with hiring.

This is what the face-to-face interview is all about. So make a great first impression, and focus on making sure the interviewer likes you.

3. Neglecting talking points.

When President Bush walks into a press conference, he doesn’t worry what journalists are going to ask him because he already has the answers he’s going to provide — no matter what the questions are. Such answers are called talking points.

Politicians want to frame an issue, so they listen to a question and then decide which of their talking points they’ll use to answer that question. In this way, each question they’re asked is an opportunity to get their own points across.

I once had a media trainer teach me how to stick to talking points, and it works for a wide range of situations — including job interviews.

You control what five topics you want to discuss, so you should pick five things about yourself that you want to get across in an interview, and each point should come with some sort of story or example. You listen to each question and then figure out which point fits in well for a particular question.

You’re not George W. Bush, though, so you can’t totally ignore questions that don’t have pat answers. But you’d be surprised how often you can answer an interview question with one of the five answers about yourself that you’ve prepared. This is a way to control an interview and make sure the focus is on your strengths.

A great resource for helping you understand how to frame your answer for any question is the “The Complete Q & A Job Interview Book” by Jeffrey Allen.

4. Thinking the job description is set in stone.

When you start an interview, find out what you’re interviewing for. Typically, the person who writes and publishes a job description is not the person making the hiring decision. Ask the hiring manager what the goals are for the position, and ask who the new hire will work most closely with so you know who’ll have the biggest say in whether or not you get hired.

And, if you get the job, remember that it could change all over again. Immediately. So don’t ever assume you know what your job is until you investigate. The only constant about your job description is that you must be invaluable to your boss in order to succeed.

5. Failing to close.

A job interview is a sales call, and all good salespeople know that you don’t have a deal until you close it. An almost-deal is not a deal, in the same way that a good interview is not a job.

So toward the end of the interview, if you think things are going well, say, “Do you have any reservations about hiring me?” Most hiring managers will answer this question truthfully, and it’ll give you a chance to assuage their fears.

This is a hard question to ask, because you’ll be faced with your weaknesses right there in the midst of the interview. But if you don’t take the time to explain how you’ll overcome those weaknesses it won’t come up, and you’re much less likely to get the job.


/31 Comments

Twentysomething: The rising rift between gen X and gen Y

,

Rebecca Thorman is 24 years old. I met her when I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and spoke at an event she put together. I’ve been reading her blog, Modite, ever since.

By Rebecca Thorman – As the workplace weather changes, Generation X isn’t happy to see Generation Y as the rainbow in their persistent rainstorm.

Both generations have similarities, sure. Technological savvy and the willingness to rebel against boomer norms brought us together for a short time. But as more of Gen Y enters the workplace, Gen X is becoming increasingly marginalized, and the fundamental differences of how we operate are now dividing us along fierce lines:

1. Different job markets
Generation Y is a demographic powerhouse entering into our choice of jobs. With the world conspiring in our favor, we’ve already pushed the limits of the foundation Generation X laid.

Generation X tried to change the status quo while entering into one of the worst job markets since the Great Depression. They scorned the good ole boys, but had to play by their rules anyway, while millenials are able to create our own rules.

The fact that Gen Xers worked hard with little success beyond casual Fridays means that they are “only mentioned to be polite” in generational discussions. This is aggravated by Generation Y’s readiness to assume all the leadership positions when the Boomer generation retires. Gen X can’t seem to win and Gen Y reaps the rewards.

2. Cynicism vs. Idealism
Since the Gen Xers weren’t able to create the workplace change they desired, it’s no wonder that I get the feeling that Generation X is inherently skeptical of who I am. They’re weary of how easy success comes to me, of my desire to bring them into the mix, and of my idealism.

Unlike our older co-workers, Generation Y doesn’t operate out of fear or distrust, but the possibility of what can be done. I realize that Generation Y is new to the workplace. To Gen X, I just don’t get how the world works. And while it’s quite possible that we won’t change the world like we anticipate, why shoot for just the possible? Idealism is what changes the world.

3. You vs. Us
The Gen X focus on distrust makes them solitary workers, preferring to rely solely on their selves to see a project through, while Generation Y tends to want to support and work together. A Gen Xer is often found at the office, squeezing by on their flextime, and blocking out the world with their iPod.

Generation X is no doubt feeling like a stepping stone generation, and many are, in fact, choosing to align themselves with Generation Y rather than fade into the background. The founder of MySpace went so far as to lie about his age.

I say the more the merrier. There is strength and value to realism, and there is strength and value to optimism. That’s why we have to work together. What can I say? I’m a team player.

Rebecca Thorman blogs at Modite.

/165 Comments

How to choose among many terrible job offers

,

People ask me this question a lot: If it’s such a good job market for young people then why can’t I find a good job?

The answer is that there are tons of really bad jobs being offered. For all the talk of flexibility in the workplace, very few companies are actually offering engaging jobs with flexible hours. You usually have to pick one or the other.

But many people are looking for special setups with a job – for example you need a lot of flexibility so you can write a novel, or you have no idea what you want to be doing and you want time to think but you don’t want to starve, or you only want to work for six months before you travel in east Asia.

Each of these circumstances screams: Retail. Or some version of a bad job that is similar to retail.

When I graduated from college the job market was terrible, so I have a lot of experience in retail jobs (and getting fired from them). So I thought I’d give you a primer on how to select a job from a smorgasbord of terrible jobs offers.

Get the word on the street
There’s tons of gossip about what it’s like at brand-name entry-level jobs. If you want to train during the day for the Olympics, work at Home Depot. It’s their specialty. If you have big medical issues work at Starbucks. Even people working part-time are sometimes eligible for their great benefits.

Alex Frankel wrote Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee. He spent two years working in the service sector and he gives the low-down on each of the big name brand stores that he worked at. And there’s a preview in Fast Company this month, which I will summarize.

Gap: Bad. Endless shirt-folding.

Apple: Good. Great employee education process.

The Container Store: Picky. You’d better love their product if you’re applying for a job.

Conduct your own interview
Look, it’s not like the service sector is overflowing with applications. Even though you are looking at dead-end jobs, you are still in high demand. This is still an employee-driven job market. So leverage your demographic luck and turn the tables on the interviewer. Conduct your own behavioral interview to determine if the manager at the terrible job will be good. (Note: If don’t know what a behavioral interview is, click here. If you want to know how to ace one yourself, click here.)

Kronos is a firm that teaches retail businesses how to hire good managers. Steve Hunt is from the talent management division of Kronos, and he says that the best way to tell if your manager will be good is to understand how the manager got hired. The company should have a clear set of guidelines for evaluating management candidates and the company should hire managers. Hunt recommends that you ask how the company measures and evaluates a manager’s people skills. How your manager answer this question can tell you a lot about how serious they are about making sure their managers aren’t jerks.

If all the jobs are lame, pick a mentor who is good.
I used to work for Esther Williams – the bathing suit beauty queen who was still sending a headshot from 1950 even in 1995. Well, actually it was I who was sending the headshot, since signing her autograph was my job. It was a great job because I was playing beach volleyball all day, trying to get on the professional tour, and I could deal with Esther’s fan mail at night.

It sounds fun, maybe, to people who like reading sappy letters from lecherous men, but signing the autographs was no walk in the park: She was always telling me to make her E loopier. But there was a redeeming quality about the job, and that was that Esther is a marketing genius. And I learned a lot from her about how to build a brand. This is when I realized that it’s not the job that matters but what knowledge the person you work for can share with you.

/21 Comments

Roundup of recent networking columns

,

Recently, I went to Cornell to speak to the MBA students about networking. Whenever I go somewhere to speak, there’s a lively Q&A session afterward, and Cornell was no exception. I love the questions after a speech becuase I always learn so much from the discussion. I couldn’t stop thinking about the topic, so I wrote two posts on the plane trip home:

Yahoo Column: Three Common Networking Missteps. Actually, I had a list of four missteps. But one of them was that you need to be vunerable in order to connect with people. I linked to my post about my marriage falling apart, and my editor was like, If someone told me this, I’d think they were crazy. So now the list of missteps is only three.

Cheezhead Xtra: Networking with Jerks. This post is on Joel Cheesman’s new site. And he proves his likability by letting me write a post about why he is a jerk.

/15 Comments

Underreported hazards in early-stage startups

,

It’s Tuesday, which is usually the day for the Twentysomething column. But Ryan announced last week that he’s quitting as a columnist. I’m not surprised. He’s gone through a huge transition – quit his job in Washington, DC, started a company (with me), and moved to Madison, WI – two blocks from me.

It’s a small town, so it’s not like he was ever going to move ten miles from me – I mean, ten miles from me in almost any direction is a corn field. But it’s funny to me to have him so close.

I ended up going over to his house a lot in the first few days, to check in on him and Ryan P without saying so. Almost immediately my kids saw the situation as new neighbors. They refer to “The Ryans” and when we went apple picking, the kids thought of the Ryans immediately.

So we brought over a bag of apples. The kids did not really understand the concept of red all over, so the apples were not ripe. And I couldn’t tell if the Ryans noticed, but they were very grateful, because it was when the Ryans first got here. When they were grateful in general.

Now it’s been six weeks. And Ryan is thinking that maybe his new blog will be about how crazy life is working with me.

I asked for examples. He gave the one about how I invited the Ryans over for dinner. I picked a night when my husband wasn’t home because there is too much tension between us to put the Ryans through it as well. I also picked the night my kids wanted an impromptu Halloween party.

So there was our nanny, who is actually a guy who is a college sophomore taking a year off to establish residency so his University of Wisconsin tuition goes down. And there were fake eyeballs and pumpkin glitter. And it was like a frat party with toddlers instead of girls. To me, that is the weird part. To Ryan, it’s weird that I didn’t cook.

“You ordered burritos!” he says.

I tell him it was better than Batman spaghetti O’s.

He shakes his head in disbelief. He thinks I’m eccentric, which I probably am, but I think this is not the best example.

Other mentioned eccentricities: I have been working out of a coffee shop for a year. Ryan can’t believe it.

The women who own the shop are probably my best friends in Madison – I see them every day. In the summer they noticed me showing up in my obsessive long sleeves and long pants so the sun doesn’t get me, and in the winter they saw me fighting with my husband at the curb when he drops me off. I always imagined I’d have some great post about how the owners let me do radio interviews from their land line (radio producers hate cell phones) and they buy Lean Cuisines especially for me so I don’t have to eat their muffins for lunch. It was a great setup.

Til the Ryans came.

They said everyone in the coffee shop is annoyed by my talking on the phone, which is probably true. So we went to their apartment. Like it’s not eccentric for me to be spending my days in the apartment of two twentysomething guys.

But as we were leaving the coffee shop for good, new art was going up on the wall: Phil Porter. I loved the art. Ryan hated it. So I gave a lecture right before we left, about why good art forces you to see things differently and the Ryans only like art with naked women on it because it doesn’t challenge anything that’s already in their mind. (Yes, they have a painting of a naked woman in the apartment. And yes, it sucks.) Ryan called me a snob.

He is a snob, too. For example, Ryan does not wear black shoes with khaki pants. I have never heard of this rule, but I confess to immediately putting my khakis aside until I got brown shoes, just in case he’s right.

Maybe we get along because we’re both snobs. Or maybe our excessive judgementalism, which probably makes for good blog posts, gives us a sort of detente.

I went out to dinner with Ryan P’s parents. I can’t ever recall going out to dinner with a co-worker’s parent. But here’s a tip. You know how when you go out to dinner with a boyfriend and his parents, you end up liking him even more? I am not sure why, but this always happens. And I have to say that the same thing happened in this situation: I liked him better. He has the same odd speech cadence as his dad, the same bright smile as his mom. It was nice to see.

Nice as long as I could squash my jealously; I don’t recall a time when my parents drove across state lines to dote on me.

Now I wake the Ryans in the morning. They are not morning people. I know you expected this post to be about starting a company, and this sort of is, because the first part of starting a company is learning boundaries.

A startup is inherently intense. Founders are so dependent on each other, and there are almost always only two or three people involved. I have two close friends who have startups: The woman’s company is three women and the man’s company is three men. I think that most startups with a both genders involve sex, and/or marriage, and those that don’t require navigation of a difficult and dicey new language of boundaries, (which I have touched on before).

There is a lot written about work spouses. That is, people who feel like they spend so much time together that they’re married. But they are not. The context for these relationships is usually a big company, where there is safety in numbers, and there are office conventions to keep boundaries in place.

A startup usually has none of these safeguards, and a startup usually entails longer hours at the office. Maybe this is why so many startup teams are all men or all women, but not mixed. And maybe this is why my friend, who has a startup team of three guys and will not consider hiring a woman as the fourth, is making a smart decision.

Meanwhile, we continue to draw boundaries at our own startup. For example:

Ryan P comes to the dining room table that is also our office and says, I have a rash.

I start thinking about my kids.

Where is it?

On my leg.

Can I see?

No.

Why not?

It’s too early. Ask in twenty minutes.

Tyeptyeptyep type

Can I see it ?

No.

While Ryan P is typing a blog post about how he would rather work for man than a woman (yes really: he says men bond better with men) I look under the table. I don’t see the rash, but the light is not that good.

What are you doing?

I need to see it.

It’s not on my leg. It’s on my groin.

And this is the moment. The boundary moment. I look away because some boundaries are clear. But I also think of my kids – some boundaries are murky — and I navigate the best way I know how as CEO of a startup:

Does it itch?

/42 Comments

Forget email bankruptcy; try Getting Things Done bankruptcy

,

I used to write a lot about productivity, until I started reading blogs and discovered David Allen’s world of Getting Things Done. I discovered that some of the most popular blogs are about productivity, and my blog audience is full of productivity gurus. They gave me a lot of recommendations to improve my productivity ignorance, and each person mentioned the book Getting Things Done.

This was a little after the time that my blog started taking off, which meant three things: I was changing my job from a columnist to a blogger, I was writing five columns a week instead of two, and my email load went up about 500%. For a few months I was sleeping four hours a night. Crazy, right? In fact, many readers who caught me emailing at both 2am and 7am commented that maybe I needed to take a break. Especially after I posted about how important sleep is.

So I tried Getting Things Done (GTD). I went whole hog: In less than a week I changed my whole to-do list and whole filing system. I was the Queen of Outlook, with more folders to choose from than Imelda has shoes.

I had a A list a B list and a C list. I also had a spreadsheet of links that I had collected over six months as a blogger. I had links filed by topic and could sort my topics and links in ten different ways to come up with quirky, linky columns that addressed questions readers had sent to me – which were also searchable.

I was also adhering to the GTD holy grail of the empty inbox. But the empty inbox, I confess, made me crazy. I found myself deleting emails in the name of that cause, and not because I had actually dealt with them. Also, I was filling in my Outlook calendar religiously, by moving emails directly into my schedule. But I was not looking at my calendar religiously. So I often missed meetings.

I was getting things done. Sort of. I was probably annoying a lot of people along the way.

And then the worst thing that could happen for a GTD-er happened to me. My hard drive crashed and I didn’t have Outlook backed up.

Please, do not send me smug details about your great backup system. Of course I know how to back things up. Everyone who didn’t back their stuff up knows how to back their stuff up. It’s like telling someone who eats French fries that your system of eating salad is healthier. DUH!!!!!!

At first I panicked and imagined that the email of my lifetime was somehow locked in that Outlook view that will never come back. But then things got sort of cushy. For one thing, my B and C list totally went away because people reminded me about stuff on my A list, but no one said a word about the other stuff and I couldn’t remember most of it.

Have you ever read about the joys of declaring email bankruptcy? Well I think my situation was like inadvertently declaring GTD bankruptcy, and it was marvelous. I slept well. I opened up a gmail account, and I had an empty email box all the time – maybe because I also had no record of email addresses, so my outbound mail slowed down significantly.

So, this week, my hard drive came back. I looked at my old to do list and I laughed. I did not need to save all that stuff. I needed to get some perspective. And GTD bankruptcy gives you just that: Perspective. And getting a clear picture of one’s work is really what GTD is all about, right?

/17 Comments

Teaching old tropes new tricks: Community-building with a 21st-century twist

, ,

During the middle of the 20th century, the social fabric of community unraveled. Families fled to the suburbs, where they lived isolated lives. Baby boomers became hyper competitive – almost a necessity of being part of such a huge generation – and then baby boomers raised latchkey kids, and Generation X felt so isolated from community that it actually defined the generation.

So it’s no surprise the pendulum is swinging the other way right now. Generation X is consumed with their families and integrating them into the community. Fund-raisers know that if you want to get money from Gen Xers, talk with them about local, grassroots action they can be a part of. (via Giving Back)

Generation Y is the teamwork generation. The majority of these young people did community service as a high school graduation requirement, or, for the overachievers, which is most of them, a way to spruce up their college application. But they discovered that community service is rewarding in itself. This is a group that is so team oriented that they are not comfortable doing things on their own. The teamwork in school means soccer, but in adult life it often means community.

It’s a great time for new ways of thinking about community and how to make life better for yourself and those around you. Here are five new ways to think about community:

1. Schedule community time because frequency matters.
This comes naturally to people in college. Daniell Ouellette, a junior at Northeastern University, and her friends live together, eat together, and even watch the World Series together. When college is over, people tend to separate from their friends and making new, close friends is very difficult.

But it’s worth it. When you belong to a group that meets each week, you are likely to live longer than people who don’t. And a Gallup poll, published in the book Vital Friends, found that if you have a few good friends at work it’s nearly impossible to not like your job, because a group of friends can absorb so many bad feelings about the office.

It’s a tall order to find these people, but remember the key is not picking the perfect friends, the key is getting together with them regularly.

2. Find your community first, then find a job.
Today, people place so much importance on community that Rebecca Ryan, a frequent consultant for city governments, finds that the best way to stem brain drain from midsize and smaller towns is to focus on the fabric of community. In her new book, Live First, Work Second, Ryan finds that people today want diversity, culture, and gathering places – the core community aspects we lost during the flight to the suburbs.

3. Become an influencer by growing a community.
Paul Gillin, author of the book, The New Influencers, describes how blogging has allowed leaders to emerge in communities that used to be closed to new leaders. Gillin marvels at the amount of influence a blogger can have by growing a large community of readers. What is remarkable, though, is that the premise is community. The influence brokers today trade on grassroots community building rather than power coming down from the top.

4. Get flexible work by leveraging your community.
Michelle Goodman, in her book The Anti 9 to 5 Guide, describes the steps people take to get out of cubicle life. She has handy chapters about negotiating and temping, but the biggest value of her book might be the underlying theme of community. The best way to get control of your life is to figure out how to integrate yourself into a community and get work and ideas from the people around you. The book is full of ways to learn from other people, help other people, and weave your own community fabric to meet your career goals.

5. Use community roots as a way to make a smooth transition.
One of the most stifling parts of college is that everyone you hang around is at the same place in life you are. And one of the hardest parts of making a life transition is trading one community for another. Northeastern addresses both these problems with the cooperative education program. Students take longer to finish school but they work intermittently during their stint at college. Ouellette is part of this program and she sees it as a way to get a foothold in the local marketing community before she goes out into the work world.

And this, perhaps, is the newest aspect of community: Community used to be a way to hold you back and enforce rules. But today it’s a way to create new roots, find freedom, and follow a dream. No wonder community is such a popular buzzword with young people.

/13 Comments

What if the interviewer never calls you back?

, ,

Every once in a while I’ll publish job-hunt questions people ask me a lot. And it’s that time again. But today I’m publishing a question that stumped me:

“Why don’t interviewers get back to me after the interview? I go to the interview, I feel like we click, and the hiring manager or human resource representative never says another thing to me again. Ever.”

I sent this question to my well-placed, hot-shot human resource friend who works at a company that a slew of you want to work for but cannot be named in this blog, and this is what he told me about the issue:

The primary reason candidates don’t hear back after the interview is that most recruiters and/or interviewers don’t shut the discussion down when they know it’s a non-fit. This is rooted in human nature and avoiding conflict.

For example, two weeks ago I interviewed a terrible candidate. I spoke with him for a half-hour, and then told him, “You know what? I have to be honest with you that I’m going to pursue other candidates who appear more highly suited for this role. I want to be transparent about that because I know you may have other job opportunities you are considering, and I want to be up front that compared to other candidates I’m considering, they appear to be more strongly suited for the role.”

Most people won’t have that conversation in the moment, and instead say, “Thanks for your time, I have some more people to interview, and then I’ll get back to you with the decision on whether we’ll be moving forward.” This closing remark creates more work and clutter, and then the “getting back to them” never happens.

By not being transparent, the interviewer feigns that there will be more evaluation, and I believe interviewers think that it makes the eventual turn-down more palatable. But in all honesty, it just creates inefficiency and friction in the system.

Another way to look at this problem though, is that it’s simply poor execution, because the opportunity cost of letting people dangle doesn’t have to be absorbed by the interviewer. Example: If you interview with me, what are the consequences for me treating you poorly? Not any really. You as the candidate don’t want to burn a bridge lest [my company] should happen to call you in the future, so it’s not like you are going to take me to task.

In the mix of hundreds of candidates in process, there’s no clear measurement of what is really going on, unless you write a letter to my boss or blog about it (which few people take the time to do).

So what can you conclude from this? The people who get back to you and tell you flat out no, or, better yet, are transparent enough to tell you no right there in the interview, are the people who are the best to work for. And that’s not helpful, is it? I mean, they are rejecting you. So what are you going to do with that piece of knowledge?

Here’s an idea for candidates in the post-interview process. How about sending a thank you note, placing a followup call or two to show interest, and then if you don’t hear anything, move on?

And instead of spending time whining about how rude the interview process is, focus on turning the next interview into a job offer. If you get good at interviews, you don’t have to worry about people who don’t let you know about rejection because you won’t get rejected.

/148 Comments

What to teach kids so they’ll do well at work

,

The skills that help us most in life are not the skills we learn from homework. In fact, Time magazine reports that homework is wasting kids’ time on a number of levels, and in his book “The Homework Myth,” Alfie Kohn rails against the massive amount of family time that’s lost to homework. Finally, Harris Cooper, who studies homework at Duke University, found that too much of it can be counter-productive to learning.

Ambition, self-confidence, and goal-setting are better indicators of adult-life success than doing well in school. So instead of harping on homework and test scores and insipid parental competitions over childhood metrics, help your children learn the skills that really make a difference in their future success or failure:

1. Teach your kids to persevere.
Persistence is what gets us what we want in life, and persistence without the risk of failure is not persistence — it’s monotony.

Some people think persistence is perfection, but perfection isn’t rewarded in the workplace — it’s penalized. So don’t teach your children to be perfect, teach them to try things that are very hard and not likely to go well. Then watch them overcome their fear of failure and try anyway.

You know that parental instinct to tell your kids everything will be all right, and that failure isn’t really failure? It’s not realistic, because persistence is moving forward even when you recognize that the odds are bad. So teach your kids to recognize bad odds, and help them move forward regardless.

2. Teach your kids to make decisions without doing all the research.
We all know we need goals, but most adults are hindered by their inability to commit to something big and meaningful. After all, how do you know what’s best for you to be doing at any given time? You don’t. We never know what’s best for us, because we’re limited in our knowledge. But we have to take action anyway.

Teaching your child to set a goal — even if it’s not perfect — is a great tool, because making a decision with imperfect information is a key to adult life. You can’t teach a kid to shoot for perfect decisions, because there aren’t any. But you can teach your child how to take action in the face of the information that could change.

(One of my favorite discussions about this sort of decision-making is on the blog Mind Your Decisions by Presh Talwalker, who writes a feature called Game Theory Tuesdays.)

3. Make yourself a positive thinker so you can teach it to your kids.
The biggest indicator of how happy someone is in adult life is how positive their outlook is. Adults can change their outlook with practice, and parents can help their children learn and practice positive thinking.

You can start by training yourself to talk to your children in terms of the good things they do. In his upcoming book “The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child,” Yale psychologist Alan Kazdin helps parents focus on the positives in their children’s behavior instead of the negatives. If you always focus on the bad behavior instead of the good behavior, your child will learn to do that for herself. Kazdin advises, for example, to say, “You did a great job cleaning your room — don’t forget to put the clothes in the hamper” instead of “You’re not done — there are still clothes on the floor.”

Did your child do something good? Make a big deal out of it, because as an adult, if you can’t focus on your achievements it’s unlikely that you’ll have any.

4. Teach your kids frugality.
A parent’s instinct is to provide as much as possible for their kids. This probably worked very well in the prehistoric era, when children would freeze to death if they didn’t get enough animal skins. Now that we’re dealing in iPods rather than skins, the need to provide isn’t so urgent.

The best way to learn how much you can live without is to live without it. I was forced, by a series of crazy circumstances, to learn how to live without almost all my possessions. I thought I needed so much more stuff than I really did.

It was a great lesson for me, and it made me realize that the only way to teach frugal living is to force it. If you impose frugal living on your kids, perhaps artificially, you end up giving them the freedom to focus on a future career for reasons more important than the stuff they can buy with their salary.

5. Know your own limitations.
Your children are growing up in an environment much different from the one you grew up in. The rules are different, and the measures for success are different.

So don’t find yourself stuck in old ways of thinking. Challenge your own assumptions first, in order to give your child the strongest foundation for adult life.

For those of you with older kids, here’s a list that will help you give advice during the college years.

/17 Comments