We are programmed to win whenever there is something to win. We’ve been taught to set goals and achieve them.
When you’re job-hunting, the instinct to win the prize can take over. You can expend a lot of energy trying to get a job, and then realize once you’ve got the job that it’s not the right job for you at all.
Nearly everyone has done it at least once. Sometimes at the last minute, your job offer negotiation falls apart and you’re downcast. Two days later it hits you that you would have hated the job if you got it!
It would have been a terrible job. Still, when you’re in the middle of an interviewing pipeline and you’ve got a chance at the job offer, most of us will try as hard as we can to get that offer.
We are getting smarter now. We are realizing that a job title, a salary level and a benefits plan are well and good, but the energy at work is everything. If you pay attention, you’ll pick up a lot of clues about the company culture while you’re in the interview process. Organizations can’t hide their culture. It comes through loud and clear!
Culture is loud. An organization’s culture comes through every time you are in their building or on the phone with them. It comes through in the email messages they send you.
You can tell whether a job will be a great job for you or a prison sentence, if you can stay in your body and remember that only the people who get you, deserve you.
Don’t fail to watch for these five signs that you if you get the job and take it, you’ll be miserable!
1. The interview process is slow and halting, without any explanation or apology. If you didn’t nudge and push your contacts to keep the interviewing process going, they’d completely forget about you.
2. The interviewers you meet are not smart or curious people. The interview questions they ask aren’t smart questions, either.
3. The physical work environment is uninspiring.
4. You can tell that rules and policies are very important to this organization, because they talk about them all the time.
5. The people you meet are businesslike rather than friendly and casual with one another. You can’t see any evidence of community among your prospective colleagues.
In a healthy organization, hiring is a Top Two or Top Three priority. How could it be otherwise? When an organization needs to hire people, the lack of team members is holding them back, so naturally recruiting is a high priority for the organization’s managers.
In a healthy organization, job openings don’t languish for months. If you have seen the same job opening posted for weeks or months, that’s a very bad sign. It means that the company doesn’t know how to hire people or they don’t care enough to make recruiting a top priority. Either way, you will not grow your flame in that organization!
You should not have to push a company to bring you back for a second or third interview after they’ve told you they want to do that.
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