Simply Hired Blog

How To Leave Your Job In A Powerful Way

Have you accepted a job offer that you are excited about, but feel a bit guilty over the fact that you are leaving?

Feeling conflicted about leaving a job is normal. Even though it may not have been the right job for you anymore, you still spent time there every day. You met people you liked. You had a routine you were used to. You were in familiar surroundings.

But, familiar was not enough to keep you. Maybe you were bored. Maybe you were unhappy with new policies or procedures. Maybe they gave you a boss you did not want to work for. Regardless, it didn’t feel right for you to stay there, so you searched for another job. And, you found one. Congratulations to you.

Although you are ready to leave, the people you work with are probably not ready for your departure. They will be worried about how your exit will affect them. They will wonder if they will have to do more work and if they can they handle it. In addition, they don’t know what it takes to do your job. They don’t have your knowledge or expertise. Ease their transition. That’s how you will leave a job in a powerful way.

Do The Following:

1. Make A List Of Everything You Do

When you “really” look at the work you do on a regular basis, you will be surprised by how much you are responsible for and how many people rely on you. When you are in the midst of the day to day of a job, you don’t always recognize the difference you are making. List the work you were asked to do, as well as the additional contributions that no one noticed. This list will be what the person after you will use to ramp up quickly.

2. Train Your Replacement

If possible, train someone you already work with. Give him/her the in’s and out’s of your job, as well as what they should expect and watch out for. Do your best to train your replacement right away. You’ll need as much time as possible to teach someone your work. If your company decides to advertise your position, create the job description. Help sort through resumes. Interview candidates. No one has time to look for someone to do your work. Help in any way that you can. In addition, be available for questions for a specific and agreed upon time period in case the new person needs your advice.

3. Say Good Bye To Everyone

Friendships are an important part of a job. When your work is no longer enjoyable, some of the people you work with can be the reason you come into the office every day. You will miss them. In addition, there will be some people you will be happy to not see anymore. Say good bye to them too. Be the bigger person. Completion is important for both sides. You don’t want
to be bad mouthed after you leave. The saying, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” has stood the test of time for a reason. It’s true. You never know who you will meet again in the future.

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

Job Descriptions are Part of What is Killing Recruiting

As I said in my last article, I got some loud and passionate responses to my article Recruiting BS and How to Get Rid of It. Last post I talked about the response to my call to get rid of requisitions. Now we turn to my statement about job descriptions:

(They) don’t have anything to do with the job

...and my advice about how to fix that problem:

Job Descriptions should be about the job that needs to be done next year, not the job that was needed last week. By the time you have spent 90 days hiring the right person for yesterday’s job, tomorrow’s job still needs filling.

Most of the comments I got were simple and to the point:

We are recruiters, not HR people. We fill the position that is given to us. Job Descriptions are the hiring manager’s responsibility, not ours!

And my response is always the same:

Get ready to move to India / China / etc.

Please allow me to digress into a little business theory as a way of explaining my point of view.

All business is about selling products. The product can be tangible (i.e. a car) or intangible (i.e. recruiting), but they are products all the same. Even Broadway producers talk about their shows as “product” as do artists and producers and spiritualists. Sometimes the product is bought with money, sometime with time, sometime with attention and devotion, but it matters little, the point remaining the same: recruiting is a product.

All products sell in one of three domains: commodity (price), quality (value) or experience (connection). These three domains are not about the product itself, but about what is wrapped around the product.

For instance, coffee can be sold in bulk and ground, put in a can and stuck on a shelf where you evaluate whether you want to buy it by the price; it can be specially roasted, sold in smaller units, shipped more frequently, and guaranteed fresh, so that people who really like coffee get a better coffee flavor (value); or those same beans can be roasted specially, shipped specially, served in a great atmosphere that delivers cool music and great taste and good conversation. That’s an experience sale. The same exact coffee bean ends up commanding radically different price points based on the delivery mechanism, the positioning and the services that are wrapped around it.

Now let’s take that structure and look at recruiting:

If all you do is collect resumes, sort them and forward them to the hiring manager, occasionally booking the interview, then you are a commodity. If you do these services cheaply and with relatively little pain, you will be seen to be effective, but it is tough to be as cost effective as a company that can pay it's employees $60 a day. Eventually you won't be able to compete with call center recruiting operations in other countries that can use VoIP infrastructure and cheap internet connections to reduce their cost structures to 30% of what you could possibly afford.

If you sit down with the hiring manager, ask them about their business, take a look at the resumes of employees who were previously successful in the hiring manager’s organization, and then use specialized services to deliver passive candidates that can’t be found through posting on a job board, then you are selling value. You can charge a little more and be a little less efficient, because you offer something better than the administrative paper-pushers who are selling on price (commodity). But your value has to be superior to what the hiring manager can do themselves with the right tools. As the tools (online posting, social networks, referral tools, etc.) become more advanced, the value bar for recruiting goes up.

But offering the recruiting service as an “experience” is something totally different. The administrative services of recruiting are offered as a gimme, and done with such a level of precision and delivery perfection that the customer never realizes they are getting the service in the first place. Each hiring manager has a “Talent Specialist” serving as a business consultant that works with them to be a trusted advisor to their business. The approach is built around the concept that talent is everything to the client’s business, and so the trusted talent advisor must be versed in every aspect of that client’s business.

The trusted talent advisor introduces the hiring manager into circles of talent that they could have never entered without the advisor, and by virtue of the introduction sheds instant credibility on the client. The trusted talent advisor is able to review business activities from the perspective of how that activity will impact the talent brand and the future availability of talent. “Recruiting” is part of an ongoing talent process, where every part of the talent experience is controlled to make the product being sold (the job) be as perfectly fit to the best available talent as possible. This is the recruiting experience, and you could charge a whole lot for it if you customers only knew they needed it. Demographic and business challenges will bring this about in the next five years.

What does all this have to do with job descriptions? Simple: people telling me that job descriptions are the job of the hiring manager is exactly the same thing as saying “I’m a commodity: I provide candidates based on a loose specification.” It’s not that there is anything wrong with being a commodity, but the tides of business are working against you. If you are in a corporate recruiting department, you are likely going to be outsourced, and if you are a TPR, you are likely to get dumped.

To put this into context:

Commodity Recruiting: Takes the specification (the job description) posts it on a job board, gets candidate flow, evaluates candidate flow against the spec and then forwards the favorably rated resumes to the hiring manager. Everything in this transaction can either be done by the hiring manager or by an administrative assistant making minimum wage, or be automated (the holy grail of electronic recruiting is matching, which is the final step in recruiting commoditization).

Value Recruiting: Takes the specification, asks probing questions about what is really meant by the description and changes language to fit what is currently acceptable in the market, asks for resumes of previous “stars” and compares those resumes to the specification, changing the specification as appropriate to more closely match those success profiles, brings specific candidates in against the spec to examine how clear and committed the hiring manager is to the spec, and changes the spec as the process continues to bring the true requirements of the hiring manager and the availability in the market together.

Experience Recruiting: Refuses the specification because it will unduly prejudice the truth about what the business needs to succeed, interviews “stars” as well as “laggards” to try to identify key cultural, competency and chemistry dynamics that will help describe the perfect candidate, puts together detailed behavioral profile of the target candidate, uses detailed marketing profile techniques to source against a pre-developed grouping of talent (since the experience recruiter will have predicted the broader needs of the client and been actively developing value-for-value relationships in those domains well in advance of the client’s need - perhaps Sumser's farm system), will bring in specific candidates with specific behavioral profiles and detailed work portfolios to gauge the upper and lower bounds of variation in the specification, marks the specification variances for forward looking business projections, tailors specific work and compensation packages in order to get the most value from the talent, introduces the hiring manager into key talent arenas in order to build the credibility of the client with potential future hires, and periodically report on larger talent trends that the experience recruiter feels will impact the business (the “what business can we be in?” question).

Today’s job description is largely the domain of the commodity recruiter. As stated the commodity recruiter doesn’t validate, change or otherwise amend the job description: they just post it. This wouldn’t be a big deal if the hiring manager knew what they were doing when they wrote the job description. But few, if any, do. Most hiring managers have a very specific pain they are feeling, here and now. They put that pain into language that they think describes a solution to that pain. That is over 90% of all job descriptions. The problem is that:

1 - Average fill rate for companies that don’t source ahead of demand is 45 to 60 days. Given the dynamic nature of most businesses, the needs will change in this time.

2 - Even if they don’t change, most hiring managers are overly general about the pain that they are feeling. For instance, an engineering manager may know that they are behind on a project that requires C# programmers and so they create a job description for a C# programmer (the logic being that more programmers = less time). Only after the job is filled will the hiring manager realize that they didn’t need another programmer, they needed a better QA specialist to design test procedures that don’t bottleneck the development process. So the specification may be correct on its face, but end in eventual disaster.

3 - Even if the hiring manager can adequately predict their business needs in the future, and the causes of their present pain, they often can’t describe the variables that make for a successful hire. In the previous example the hiring manager says that they want a C# programmer and hires the first person that comes in that has the MSCE certification and good credentials. But the person they hire is a data structures guru, and what they really needed was someone who was strong in algorithms.

This is why I claimed that “the job description is not about the job.” It’s not. Asking hiring managers to understand the nuance of job descriptions is like asking drivers to understand the vagaries of the manual shift throd bearing. Not likely, even by people who understand cars and are reasonable mechanics.

Couple the general ignorance (and dare I say apathy?) of the hiring manager with the general apathy (dare I say ignorance?) of the commodity recruiter and you have a recipe for future commoditization of the recruiting profession. So if you want to keep recruiting strategic, think of focusing on the recruiting experience. And the best way to start is to forget today’s job descriptions and start thinking about tomorrow's specification.

Happy Birthday to Us

Today is the second birthday of www.simplyhired.com. We've come a long way since then, but there are still many challenges ahead as we continue to make finding your next job a simple yet effective & enjoyable process.

If you haven't yet, read our about page, where we talk more about this goal. "We can't always promise you'll discover your dream job, but we'll give you the best chance possible to get a bigger paycheck, a more considerate boss, or a shorter commute."

As always, we love hearing from you.

Reqs are a Reality, but we Should Still Seek a Cure

My article Recruiting BS and How to Get Rid of It inspired some controversy. Many people thought that I intended it to be nothing more that incendiary. Honestly, I meant every word, and I still do. But let’s look at some of the complaints I heard and address them. Today I’ll start with the first part of the response, and then move to others in the days ahead.

Reqs are a Reality – There were some people who were frustrated by my comments about reqs being a waste of time and shareholder value. They insisted that because I no longer lived in the world of recruiting that I was suffering from the same malady that many other pundits exhibit: they don’t have to live with changing the problem, so they make broad claims that sound good in theory but that are almost always impossible to implement successfully. While I understood their point of view, they seemed to miss the fact that I am just three weeks out of the job, and that in my old job reqs were a constant and ongoing problem that I had to deal with (and solve for) on a daily basis. So when I say reqs are bogus, I am not talking theory. I am talking about the pain that I, and thousands like me, suffer through needlessly because of this largely unexamined organizational habit called “staffing requisitions.”

Yes, reqs are a daily reality in most corporate recruiting organizations. Yes, getting rid of them would be very difficult. And yes, now that I am not sitting strictly in the Talent Department it seems more than a little convenient that I should be on the outside throwing stones in. I can’t deny any of that. But you still have to ask the question: “Why?”

Let’s say that reqs are part of your daily life because you need to prevent hiring managers from wasting your time and think that having a req (and its approval process) in place reduces the likelihood you will have to deal with those kinds of problems. Why? Do you have any data to support this? Have you ever had a req cancelled because the hiring manager changed their mind? Have you ever fulfilled an “opportunity hire”? My guess the answer to both is “yes.” So reqs don’t prevent stupid requests and they don’t ensure that you limit your work to planned activities. You may be making a case that reqs decrease the probability of spinning your wheels, but I still have yet to meet anybody who has actually taken the risk of performing a statistically valid test to prove this assertion.

Reqs are a reality because reqs are a reality. That is the certain statement you can make about reqs. Everything else is just defending the status quo or making generalizations based on limited data. So, if you can’t prove that reqs increase the value you create for shareholders, and if there is plenty of data to show that they don’t create value for shareholders (lost time negotiating approvals, wasted time with candidates who applied against a job description that really doesn’t meet the hiring manager’s needs, etc.) then why do we keep sticking up for them?

Habit? Fear? You name it. Do we use reqs where I work? You bet. Have we made attempts to get rid of them? Yes. Have those attempts worked. Not yet. But we have recently put into place what I call an “opportunity” based strategy. I believe this strategy will effectively do away with reqs in one year, and provide all the reporting, control and analysis elements that reqs are purported to have, without any of the downside. So the efforts haven’t taken hold yet, but I am confident they will.

Regardless of any of that, reqs are guilty of all the sins I have enumerated so many times before: the are a risk control document that means more to the CFO than the talent, they lead you to measure yourselves by speed instead of value, and they drive clients to see you as a cost / risk problem in the organization instead of a critical business value add. None of that is in dispute. I still haven’t had anyone give me a rejoinder that would make me believe that I had any of my facts wrong.

I understand that people think I was throwing theory bombs into a glass house, but the reality is that reqs are an organizational impediment that, as long as they exist, will continually undue your success to move from being a tactical cost center to a strategic business value. We have to get beyond the argument about the reality of reqs and move to a better way (I’ll let you know how the opportunity structure works out for us). Think of it this way: getting diagnosed with a life threatening disease means that the disease is a reality, that it will be hard to get rid of and that your life will be consumed by it as long as it exists. That doesn’t mean you don’t look for a cure.