Simply Hired Blog

Put Your Glasses On

Are you going through your career with blinders on?

Change in your career (and your circumstances) can't take place unless you are aware of what needs to be changed. You won't get a new job unless you understand why you are staying in a job that no longer serves you. If you know that it’s time to change careers, you cannot do so unless you tap into your inner voice that wants to show you the way. If you have wanted to make a shift within your company for a while, you cannot do so unless you understand what is preventing you from moving forward.

It’s not easy to look inward, but without doing so, you cannot make outward changes. In other words, you can’t excel in your career until you can see what needs to be moved out of the way.

So How Can You See What’s In Your Way? Put Your Glasses On By Following These Steps Below.

1. Stop Going Through The Motions

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day of your routine if you are not careful. Do you eat the same thing for breakfast everyday? Work on the same tasks? Take the same route to and from work? How can change take place when what you do everyday is mostly the same? If you want something different, you have to start doing things differently. This means being present to your day, your actions, and yourself.

2. Decide To See

Sometimes we don’t want to know what’s really going on because it’s too painful. No matter what mistakes you have made in your career or upsets that are left over from wrong doings that were done to you, it’s time to face them so you can put whatever happened behind you. Face your past and face yourself. The result is a stronger you and a better future.

3. Make Time For You

When was the last time your thought about what you wanted in your career? Who you are and where you are going in your career requires thought. Without time to think, you will not be able to find out what you are supposed to do with your career and life. Is time hard to come by? At times, it is. But what’s more difficult, working hard everyday without a plan, or setting aside time to create a plan? Trust me when I tell you that it’s harder to stay where you are.

4. Move Forward

Although we want understanding of ourselves to be immediate, unfortunately, the process of inner discovery does not work that way. But, you have to start somewhere. The place to begin is today. Take one action to discover yourself again. For example, speak to one person who is in a job or career you think you’d like to get information and motivation. Go through a report written by a department you don’t work in now to get immersed in what else your company does. Your goal is knowledge. In addition, one action taken today leads to many actions taken tomorrow. That’s when true inner understanding and change in your career takes place, when you work on being the best you can be, a little bit at a time.

So, what do you say? You only have one life to live, so it might as well be a life you love!

Picking a start-up: G2

You’re thinking of joining an intriguing start-up. The role looks like an excellent fit for you, and you had trouble sleeping last night as ideas about the business bounced around in your noggin. Before you make the leap, however, make sure you do some good G2 work, looking closely at both your fellow team members and the business itself. What should you poke at – and how?

Team

As I argued in a recent post, the team is a start-up’s single most important asset. Many elements of a young company’s business plan will change as the company evolves, and the right team can weather plenty of turbulence. How can you make sure that you’re signing up with the right crew? To begin, talk to people who know/have worked with the team’s core members. With which companies have these people worked before? Who do you know who’d know these folks … and would give you the real scoop? If you don’t have “one hop” connections to the team, use tools such as LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Google to root around further. Talk not only to people who worked with your prospective team mates as peers, but also as subordinates. And be sure to gather multiple data points – that’s how you’ll find meaningful patterns.

Core concept

To help you evaluate the start-up’s core business concept, gather a variety of different perspectives. Talk to VCs who know the space. Chat with journalists, analysts or bloggers you may know (be careful here, however, if the business has not yet launched). Talk to people in your network who may work for other businesses with similar models (e.g. “software as a service”). Make sure you get feedback not only on the product/underlying technology, but also on the ability of your prospective employer to make money. Again, gathering multiple data points will help you to ensure you’re not overly swayed by any single person.

Board of Directors

Control rests with the board, so it’s critical you understand who’s on it and how they operate. Do company members still own the majority of the shares, or do outside investors now own a greater percentage of the company? If the firm you’re considering has raised venture money, what is the reputation of the firm(s) involved? And of the partners who represent those firms? A board that works in a unified way can be tremendously valuable to a young company. And a fractious board can cause no end of trouble. While many people don’t dig in to assess the board of prospective employer, make sure you do, as a board has a tremendous influence on everything from operations to staffing to eventual liquidity.

And how can you scope out the outside board members? Talk to other VCs. Speak to friends who work/have worked at other companies in which the VC firms in question have invested. Use the Web to track down articles these people may have written, or presentations they’ve given. Be resourceful – and thorough.

Recruiting in the Creative Age: Kill the Requisition

Creative Age Recruiting Rule #6: A requisition is a non-critical financial document designed to manage risk

Good corporate recruiting organizations and bad. Innovators and laggards. They all have one thing in common: requisitions. We can't stand them. They are a boat anchor around our necks. And yet they continue to survive to this day.

I thought it would be best to reprint a post from Talentism that released almost two years ago around this subject. You can also check out ERE on the same subject.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Requisitions

Requisitions are created for one purpose: risk management.

A requisition is supposed to be an authorization (once approved) to the recruiter that they can now officially start their engines. It is the green flag of recruiting. But good recruiters stuff their pipeline way before the approved req ever comes down from on high. At best it is a green flag to involve internal resource in the further exploration of the opportunity. At worst it is a distraction.

But if you accept that recruiting is a sales function (and if it isn't, then it should be) then you can ask the question: where's the requisition in software sales? Or any other complex sale? Does the CFO take a look at next year's projected P&L and then issue a "sales requisition" to the sales associate once the company needs the sale? Of course they don't. But why not? Any complex sale involves lots of internal company resources. Even in companies that interview a candidate 20 times, the relative cost of the interview process still pales in comparison to the cost of most other complex sales opportunities.

No, the reason that there is no "sales requisition" is because there is a fundamental (though often unstated) belief that when you are closing deals, the customer is in the driver's seat, but when you are closing candidates, the company is in the driver's seat. In other words, candidates need jobs more than prospects need software (or services, or whatever you are selling).

And one would have to agree with that statement if there were only one employer in the universe for any particular sort of opening, and if there were vendors as numerous as the stars available for any prospective sales situation. But of course it is usually exactly the opposite.

In fact, the more talented the candidate, the more opportunity they have to take their services to the highest bidder, whereas software companies will cut their prices all day long to win a deal. Software is increasingly commodity, while talent is increasingly expensive. If this is true, then perhaps sales management should start issuing requisitions with the exact deal properties listed. In that way sales people will stop wasting their times chasing deals that don't help the company achieve the margins and market penetration needed to milk every last cent out of an increasingly commoditized market.

The requisition is an antiquated vehicle that should only be used in organizations where people are the number one liability. These are companies where capital is more expensive than talent (industrial age companies and some information infrastructure companies). But if talent is more expensive than capital than of course a requisition is a waste of time.

This is not to say that there should not be financial controls on decisions which affect the allocation of capital. In sales you have ongoing executive review of deal pipeline to make sure that sales people are not signing the company up for something that won't yield expected returns. The same should hold true for recruiting: executives should view their number one responsibility as the ongoing management of talent resources (not capital resources) and therefore would constantly be reviewing recruiting pipelines for fit to specification (assuming there is such a thing).

In addition, sales associates must have someone higher up the chain than themselves approve contracts before they are delivered to customers. In the recruiting world the contract is the offer letter. And all offer letters (and, by extension, the verbal extension of offer letters) should be reviewed by the finance department to make sure that the original budget assumptions are validated, challenged or changed.

So if you have those controls in place to make sure that you don't spend money you don't have, and if talent is more expensive than capital, then a requisition is just a waste of time.