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A Right Recruiting Newsletter, 9/2008
Some of you will be laid off, either this year or next year. Luckily, most of you will not have this unhappy experience but those who do will not find it pleasant. For some it may take awhile to find new jobs. It will affect those people deeply but only for a short period of time. Some will take longer to find new jobs and, when they do, the jobs will be a step back monetarily and from a career perspective. Those people may never fully recover. And then there are an unfortunate few who will be devastated. For some reason, they will never get back on track.
This downturn will be nowhere near as bad and hopefully not as long-lived as 2001-2003. But, some people will still face layoffs and the resultant problems; emotional, financial, marital, etc. For those affected, it might be a life-changing experience. No matter your experience level, a badly handled job search and poor decision making can set your career back for years, if not permanently. That can mean significant loss of income, lack of promotional capabilities and other unhappy occurrences for you and your family.
Layoffs can magnify poor career decisions made in the past and put your career on a downward arc. Once that happens, it is difficult to turn things around. What was once a promising future can become a series of average jobs at average companies for a diminishing amount of money.
Take a fictional example of a fellow (Joe) who graduated in 2002 and has worked in the same company for 6 years. He doesn’t love his job but doesn’t hate it either. He hasn’t been promoted yet and is a little underpaid. But he is comfortable where he works so he keeps putting off looking for a new job. In other words, Joe’s become complacent and believes that he will have the luxury of leaving whenever he wants to leave.
Joe is laid off in December. After being out of work for 4 months, he will take a job for a little less money than he was making and, frankly, it’s not a very good company. But at least it’s a paycheck. The market stays soft for a few years and we already know this fellow is a little complacent (lazy?) about his career. After 3 years in that second job he decides to look, primarily because of money. Joe is 20% below where he should be and his wife is bugging him about finding a new house. Now, here is where it gets tricky and here is what many people learn too late about career management.
Joe now has almost 10 years experience. However, his job experience has been very narrow and his never been promoted beyond his initial duties at either company. To a good potential employer, Joe is basically working at the level of someone with 2-4 years. Joe sees himself as a 31 year old making the money of a 25 year old. In his mind he’s a bargain. A company sees Joe as doing the work that a 25 year old can do – two very different viewpoints. Most good companies are suspicious of bargains. Many candidates do not realize this. When I present a candidate who is significantly underpaid to a client, it creates a pause and concern in my client’s mind. They ask themselves two questions; “Is there a hidden reason the person is underpaid?” and “Why hasn’t the person shown more self-direction and ambition?”. To date, Joe has looked at his career like an hourly job with seniority raises. The ramifications of that will hurt him in small, but accumulative ways throughout his career. It will snowball.
Joe has a few interviews and seem to do well but comes in second. Candidly, people with Joe’s profile can get interviews based on their resumes but often fall short in an interview when compared with more ambitious, energetic people who may have less experience but who project more upside potential when they are met face-to-face. Remember this – good companies expect to grow and want people who they can picture will grow with them. Bad companies basically look at their staff like contractors who get benefits. Joe can do a job but hasn’t shown he can get promoted. With 10 years of experience, Joe should have received at least one promotion. With that background, unless he interviews exceptionally well, he comes across as an underacheiver. That limits his options only to those companies who will look at him as a bargain and, in doing so, continue to pay him less that he should be making, reinforcing his downward arc. In 20 years, Joe’s resume will show a series of jobs, each lasting 3-4 years, at a progressive series of lousy companies with no record of promotion anywhere. Basically, he will be a gypsy drifting from one layoff to the next.
There were two crucial periods in Joe’s career that put him on this downward arc. He stayed at his first employer too long and the layoff in a soft market hurt him. Basically, he was forced to look for a job at the time when he would have the least number of options.
The goal of this is not to depress you. Joe chose to be Joe. You don’t have to do the same. Some of you will be thrown out on the market with no experience in seeking a new professional job. Maybe you are being laid off for the first time and this is the first time you’ve been unemployed while job hunting. For whatever reason, how you handle a job search during a layoff can keep you on an upward arc or put you on a downward arc.
I can’t stop you from getting laid-off. If you fit an assignment that we have, we can get you an interview but we can’t get you hired. Most of the heavy lifting needs to come from you. The most important thing that you need to do is to take it seriously. The longer you are out of work the more likely you will be seen as damaged goods. You need to make intelligent and informed decisions that balance your need for a day-to-day income with your desire to find the best job out there.
The best that I can do is give you an education. Over the next month, starting with this email, I will be sending out a series of “lessons” on a job search. Today’s will explain the differences between seeking your first, entry level job as a fresh grad and your next job as an experienced engineer. The processes can be shockingly different. If you assume they are identical and handle them the same, you can make a whole series of mistakes. Over the next few weeks we will include other “lessons” on things like salary negotiations and working with recruiting firms. Some of these topics are from earlier newsletters but have been updated and enhanced.
Let’s begin:
Moving To Your Second Job
There are many differences between the interview processes for a fresh grad and for an experienced professional. Expectations, timing and other variables, unless understood, can be very frustrating for the professional seeking their second job. A little context can alleviate a lot of unnecessary frustration on your part.
Let’s use an example to demonstrate the differences between the two markets. John Jones will be our fictional candidate and let’s pretend that he is getting his BSME from Penn State. He could just as easily be a business major or accountant.
As a fresh grad, John will interview with as many as 20 companies on campus. Most of the firms will be large. On-campus recruiting is mainly done by larger firms for a few reasons. One, they have the HR infrastructure to send teams of recruiters to schools throughout the country, a luxury small to mid-sized firms don’t have. More importantly, larger firms have the internal infrastructure that allows a fresh grad to be trained. No offense to John Jones, but unless he has worked in some great summer jobs, he won’t be productive for a quite awhile. Small and mid-sized firms are often too busy to make that type of investment. Very few smaller firms hire raw fresh grads. They prefer to get people who have been trained in the specific skills the job requires. Frankly, it’s more efficient for them. So, as we see so far, John has been exposed to an interview process that is formalized and is skewed towards larger firms. It is a process designed to evaluate a large number of candidates for interchangeable jobs over an extended period of time. It’s impersonal, which explains why they often have to take your picture in these interviews. Without that, they might forget who you are. John is participating in a process that includes meeting with a HR Recruiter in a formal setting on campus and maybe getting a company visit invitation a week, 2 weeks or months later.
The industries and jobs John Jones interviews with as a fresh grad can vary dramatically, from a maintenance job with a petrochemical company to a design engineering job with an electronics firm. John is a blank slate and is equally trainable for a wide variety of mechanical engineering careers. He is not being interviewed for his specific skills. He is being interviewed for his potential. Almost any job within the Mechanical Engineering field is open to him and his competition for those jobs basically has no more experience than he does. His resume does not eliminate him from any career track because, frankly, his resume is no better or worse than that of the people with whom he is competing.
OK, let’s fast forward 2 years and pretend that John has worked as a Project Engineer at a chemical company handling capital projects at their process plant. He decides to look for a job and answers ads. He remembers that when he came out of college he interviewed for design engineering jobs and thought they were interesting. He sends his resume to all the companies advertising for design engineers and waits for the phone to ring.
After sending out 20 resumes, he finally gets a call from a company a few weeks later. He has an HR phone screen and is invited in to meet the manager. It’s a job where he will be designing pumps so John figures that he has a good chance because he sizes pumps in a lot of his projects. Great.
John interviews and, even though it is clear he has some technical gaps, he feels he does well. After all, even if he hasn’t used a CAD system since college, he knows he can learn in a few months. He can always dust off the college textbooks and get familiar with those calculations again. John is a little surprised and dismayed when a few days later he gets a letter telling him that they aren’t considering him for that job. They want to find someone with better experience designing machinery.
John is a little frustrated but he analyzes the situation and decides that maybe he is straying too far afield. He begins responding to ads within his industry for Project Engineers. He gets a few more HR calls and starts to get a few more interviews. Each interview seems to go well but he is still getting rejected. For some jobs he doesn’t have enough experience. For other jobs he may not have worked with the right control system at the plant. But, after a few interviews he finally hears from a company that wants to make him an offer. Hooray!
Over the next 3 weeks John still has 2 more interviews scheduled with other firms. No problem. He figures that when he gets the expected offer the next day, he can tell the company that he will give them an answer in a month. After all, that’s what he did when he was a fresh grad. One company even gave him 3 months to get back to them. That will allow him to keep the offer and see if the other opportunities are better. Great.
John is a little surprised when he gets the offer. It comes on Monday and the letter says the company wants a decision by the end of the week. John is dismayed. What about the interview with the other firms? His first impression is basically that this is unfair. He asks for more time and the company gives him a week. It still doesn’t help him and he is forced into a place he doesn’t want to be. Rather than looking at the positive (hey, he did get an offer) he is focusing on the negative. His emotions are preventing him from stepping back and making a logical decision about what he wants to do.
He needs to understand what is happening and why.
Here are a few points to remember for anyone beginning their first job change.
- The criteria that companies use to evaluate fresh grads are not complex. After all, grades and personality are about they have to work with. Everyone is at the same experience level - none. Compare that to the variables in the decision making process for experienced people - salary, varying experience levels, and varying experience specificity in candidates. Comparing 3 candidates for a $65,000/yr job is a lot more complex than comparing 3 fresh grads. Sometimes the comparisons will work for you and sometimes against you. For some jobs, others will have the stronger background and for others, you will have the competitive edge.
- Your future desires are not as important as your experience in qualifying you for a job. I got a call once from a BS ChemE who had been a Sales/Application Engineer for a chemical firm for 5 years. He was answering an ad for a Maintenance Engineer. When I told him I didn’t think we had a match, because he had no plant or maintenance experience, his answer was "But I want to do Maintenance!". He was offended that he would not be considered even though his experience was not relevant. But really, why would a company hire him over someone with 5 years of much more direct experience? He was drawing conclusions about his marketability in certain areas from his entry-level job search experience. Back then, one company was interested in him for a maintenance trainee job. Your career trajectory is established the day you start work for the first time and narrows every day after that. The longer you are in a job you don’t like, the fewer options you have when you decide to change fields.
- You will have less time to make up your mind than you did as a fresh grad. One of the reasons for that is that, frankly, if you end up turning the job down there is always another fresh grad on their list to hire. They don’t need to go to a lot of trouble to restart the process. On the other hand, when companies look for experienced people, they want to know if they have an acceptance or rejection as quickly as possible so they don’t lose other candidates or so they can re-start the process quickly, if need be. It’s not fair or unfair. It just the way it is. Balancing an existing offer, like John Jones above, against other possible offers is an art that requires honesty, communication skills and judgment on the part of the candidate. As a fresh grad, without understanding how this can and can’t be done, you may assume that you have the luxury of time that you do not really have. In making this mistake, you may not understand that the request for a quick answer to an offer is not unwarranted pressure. It is, in fact, a normal part of the process. By misunderstanding a potential employer’s process when making your first job change, you may prevent making a large mistake on your part. We will be exploring ways to do this in a newsletter over the next few weeks as part of this series.
- The actual interview for an experienced professional is also very different than for a fresh grad. You can easily embarrass yourself if you don’t know that. Your campus interviews usually started with a very pleasant, informative chat with either an HR rep or a rep from a specific department in the company. They explained the wonders and glories of working at their firm and really seemed to sell you on their firm. They seemed like very important people and were very very interested in you.
You never saw that they really represented the beginning of a large funnel. It may be shocking to you, but campus recruiting is not exactly the glamour job of a company. At best, it’s a day out of the office and an expense account meal. At worst, it’s the beginning of a week long road trip being forced to smile at 500 eager faces. Whichever it is, it is ALWAYS superficial.
There is nothing superficial in the experienced employment world. There is also very little “selling” done. In many cases, the HR person who you meet will be looking for reasons to eliminate you rather than to sell you. This is the real world and the people you are meeting will have dozens of things to do that day, leaving them no time to stroke your ego. From their perspective, it’s a match or it’s not a match. Let’s find out ASAP. The candidate who thinks the first interview will be a pleasant chat about their philosophy of life can get flustered when the first question is as direct as, “How strong is your Solidworks experience?”
Don’t confuse efficiency with rudeness. The best companies can be the most direct companies. Touchy-feely is not an option in the business world. Of course, there is no excuse for a company or it’s reps to be rude to you. But, that doesn’t mean they won’t be in a hurry to get to the point. Be ready for them when they do.
Lastly, now that you know there are differences between your fresh grad experience and what you will experience moving forward, I hope you will pay attention to the next few newsletters over the next few weeks. Balancing multiple offers, negotiating salary and working with recruiting firms are some of the topics we will cover.
Enjoy your career and don’t forget Right Recruiting for all your employment needs and questions.
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