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Few things can be more confusing to a professional than trying to figure out the rules of the employment process. However, this confusion is often magnified when someone is changing jobs for the first time. There is a profound difference in the employment process between that for a fresh grad coming out of college and the rules for an experienced professional. Expectations, timing and other variables, unless understood, can be very frustrating for the technical 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 - fresh grad vs. experienced employment. John Jones will be our fictional engineer and let’s pretend that he is getting his BSME from Penn State.
John will interview with 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 period of time. Small and mid-sized firms are often too lean 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 can see so far, John has been exposed to an interview process that is formalized and is skewed towards larger firms. He is used to meeting with a HR Recruiter in a formal setting, getting a company visit invitation a week, 2 weeks or a month later and being part of a process that can last for months.
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 market is wide open.
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.
Well, John interviews and, even though it becomes 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 have found someone else for that job. They hired someone with 3 years experience designing pumps and compressors.
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. It’s about time.
Over the next 3 weeks John has 2 more interviews scheduled with other firms. No problem. He figures that when he gets the 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 upset because now he can’t 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.
Here are a few points to remember for anyone beginning their first post-fresh grad job change.
- The criteria that companies use to evaluate fresh grads are not complex-grades and personality are about they have to work with. Everyone is at the same experience level with the same experience - 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 comparison will work for you and sometimes against you.
- What you want to do is often not as important as what you have done. 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 that is what I want to do". He was offended that he would not be considered even though his experience was not relevant. Logically, 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 fresh grad job search experience. Your career trajectory is established the day you start work for the first time and narrows every day after that.
- You will have less time to make up your mind than as a fresh grad. One of the reasons that you get a lot of time as a fresh grad is, frankly, if you end up turning the job down there is always another fresh grad on their list to hire. They don’t have to go to a lot of trouble to restart the process. On the other hand, when companies look fore experienced people, they want to know a candidates intentions 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 is what it is. Companies base offers on internal equity and budgets, not on how much you need. If you are well paid for your skills as a 2-year experienced employee, don’t expect much more when you change jobs. An earlier newsletter that is accessible at our web site explains how companies decide salary offers. Occasionally, the phrase comes up from candidates that "they shouldn’t change jobs for less than a 10% increase". I first heard that in 1980 when inflation was 9%. That made sense than. With inflation at 2% that formula makes no sense anymore, if it ever did.
In closing, as you learned when you left college and started work, it’s a complex world. Don’t get upset or personalize the frustrations you might experience when you change jobs for the first time. You’ll learn what to expect and how to react. You will probably change jobs 5 or more times in your career. It gets easier. Thanks for your time. Jeff
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