Good stuff to share with Talent professionals from Seth Godin (I heard he could use some exposure, thus the link…) – the topic is YOUR career, rather than thinking about the careers of others.
"The single most important marketing decision most people make is also the one we spend
precious little time on: where you work.
Think about this for a second. Your boss and your job determine not only what you do all day, but what you learn and who you interact with. Where you work is what you market. Work in a high stress place and you're likely to become a highly stressed person, and your interactions will display that. Work for a narcissist and you'll develop into someone who's good at shining a light on someone else, not into someone who can lead. Work for someone who plays the fads and you'll discover that instead of building a steadily improving brand, you're jumping from one thing to another, enduring layoffs in-between gold rushes. Work for a bully and be prepared to be bullied.
And yet, there are plenty of books about getting a job, but no books I know of about choosing a job. There are hundreds of sites where job seekers can go to find a new job, and virtually none where you can find reviews of bosses or companies or jobs."
Couple of angles that immediately came to mind:
1. Some sites, like Vault, have attempted to become a marketplace to discover more about the culture of companies. Unfortunately, I think those type of sites have a reputation for being rantfests that rarely include a silent majority of satisfied employees.
2. Choosing the right job is always multi-dimensional and you're always working with imperfect information. For example, finding the right job to accelerate your career includes the following factors – the company's reputation, the boss you'll work for, what you'll be working on and how that experience makes you more valuable for the future.
3. What's the best way to run a reverse reference check on a Company or boss? For my money, it has to be reverse engineering a social network that's professional-based like LinkedIn. Checking out shared contacts or simply the contacts of the person you'd be working for or the people you'd be working with seems like the best way to go. If I got a call from one of my contacts saying a person to whom I had offered a job contacted them to talk about what it's like to work for me, I 'd think that person was pretty sharp.
Then I'd drill my contact for what they asked about and what he/she told them. Just joking…
Still, for the thoughtful candidate among us, the prospect of being picky during an economic downturn is a little unsettling. After all, such a call for the bigger picture involves considering leaving a poor fit now, passing up a paycheck with a poor fit if you're currently out of work, or not working with clients who are bad fits for your culture, if you're self employed or own your own company.
Easy to be picky when things are good, harder when things are bad. But, that's the very time when it's probably most important – if you can afford to act on principle…
