Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Should You Relocate for a Job?

In a job market that still leaves something to be desired, the question on many professionals’ minds is, “should I relocate?”  Whether your current organization offers you a transfer that sounds too good to pass up or you receive an offer from an out-of-state (or out-of-country) firm that comes just as you were starting to get desperate, relocation is an issue that must be taken seriously – especially if you have a family that will be uprooted with you.

Of course, developing a list of pros and cons is a good move when making any major decision, but careful consideration of these five questions will also aid in your thought process.

Would you move there anyway?

If this job didn’t exist, is the area in question a place you’d ever want to go?  Think about what your regular daily routine will be like in the new location.  Do the pace of life and the amenities appeal to you?   How about the people, the culture, the weather, and the traffic?  Remember that a job is only one aspect of your life, and even work that you enjoy won’t be enough to overcome the distress of being stuck in a locale that’s not a good fit.

How will the move impact your family?

Relocations are easiest when you’re at a more flexible stage of life.  Once you have a family, however, you have to think about what your spouse will do in the new city.  Will he or she be able to get a good job too?  Is this area somewhere you can envision raising your children, complete with safe play areas and good schools?  Does the relocation involve moving away from extended family and friends who make life meaningful?

For more suggestions, have a look at the full post at Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Are You Selling Yourself as Well as You Could?

For several years, I’ve been recommending that people focus on being able to succinctly and effectively highlight their accomplishments because others (i.e. recruiters, managers, partners) will judge them mostly based on their past track record of success.

It turns out that’s not exactly the case.

What You Could Do is Better Than What You Have Done

According to Heidi Grant Harvorson at the Harvard Business Review, when we are deciding who to hire, promote, or do business with, it turns out that we don’t like the Big Thing nearly as much as we like the Next Big Thing. We have a bias — one that operates below our conscious awareness — leading us to prefer the potential for greatness over someone who has already achieved it.

In a series of studies conducted by Stanford’s Zakary Tormala and Jayson Jia, and Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton, it is clear that human beings demonstrate an unconscious preference for potential over actual success.

In an experiment related to the workplace, hiring managers evaluated two equally impressive candidates who varied on one factor:  one had two years of relevant experience who scored highly on a test of leadership achievement, and the other had no relevant experience but scored highly on a test of leadership potential.  Interestingly, the evaluators believed the candidate with leadership potential would be more successful at the new company than the candidate with a proven record of leadership ability. The researchers documented this preference in laboratory and field experiments, using targets ranging from athletes to comedians to graduate school applicants and measures ranging from salary allocations to online ad clicks to admission decisions.

For more, check out the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

In the Workplace, Appearance Still Counts for A Lot

In June of 2012, the University of Virginia announced the resignation of its president, Teresa Sullivan.  Faculty members received an e-mail indicating that the dismissal was due to a “philosophical difference of opinion” with the institution’s governing board.  Sullivan had been with the university just two years, and in the opinion of some, had been let go for little or no reason.

College presidents are chief executives too

In the New York Times Magazine, Sullivan’s allies suggested that she didn’t fit the governing board’s image of a chief executive.  Sullivan’s fashion sense, which was typically academic, had apparently offended the higher-ups.  During Sullivan’s performance review, she received comments that her dress was too informal. “I don’t know what the unprofessional dress was,” Sullivan told the Times. “I do live here at the university, so when I’m working out or doing something else here, people will see me.”

Would the same criticism be given to a man? Here what I think over at Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Hire Smart Like Billy Beane

Who could resist a movie with Brad Pitt?

In Moneyball, which is based on the 2003 book of the same name by Michael Lewis, Pitt plays Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics.

Pitt or no Pitt, I normally stay away from sports movies. But Moneyball is no ordinary sports movie. It’s a lesson in hiring to which all small- and large-business owners should pay attention.

Baseball’s Mistake in Identifying Top Talent

The basic premise behind Moneyball is that baseball scouts have recruiting all wrong.  For more than a century, they’ve been relying on statistics like batting average and runs batted in (RBI) to assess players’ future performance on Major League teams. 

Worse, more often than not they “go with their gut” when making hiring decisions, letting personal feelings about a player, how he looks in a uniform, and the role they picture him having on the team, influence their selections. 

Billy Beane’s Lean and Mean Hiring Machine

Once Billy Beane realized that neither the objective nor subjective measures being used correlated with team wins, he turned the whole system on its head. Beane worked with Athletics’ data analysts to reveal the key factor in predicting future player success: the on-base percentage. The more effectively a player can control the strike zone, the better he’ll perform overall.

Fortunately for the Athletics, this quality was cheaper to obtain than traditionally valued attributes, and despite being outspent by $80 million by teams like the New York Yankees, Billy Beane’s Athletics were competitive and strong.

For advice on how you can hire like Billy Beane (and save a bundle), read the full article at the AMEX Open Forum.

The Right Questions to Ask in an Interview

Obviously, an interview is a chance for an employer to ask questions of a candidate that will determine if she is a good fit for the company and the position.  However, candidates often forget that interview questions are a two-way street.

Smart candidates absolutely use the interview as the opportunity to better assess if they will be able to do their best work at a particular organization.  They know that one spends more time at work than anywhere else, and they aren’t doing themselves or the employer any favors by taking a job in which they’ll be a square peg in a round hole.

Jot Down Ideas the Night Before

It is generally a good idea to prepare a list of 2-4 questions gleaned from your online research about the company after looking at its website and recent news.  This shows that you’ve done your homework on the organization and understand its business proposition and industry.  It also demonstrates that you are serious about the opportunity and savvy enough to take advantage of this additional opportunity to sell yourself.  When you ask these questions, listen carefully.  You’ll gain critical information not just from the direct answers, but also from what isn’t said.

For more advice on how to ask good interview questions, have a look at this post on the Fast Track blog.

Senior Job Seekers are Least Prepared to Fill Open Positions

According to the second annual Job Preparedness Indicator research study, released today by the Career Advisory Board established by DeVry University, senior-level job seekers are the least prepared to fill available positions in today's market.  One-in-five hiring managers say that few senior candidates have the right mix of skills and traits to serve their needs, and in particular are lacking in higher-order abilities such as strategic perspective, general business acumen, and global competence.

Developing these skills is a must, but tenured candidates can also modify their approach so that hiring managers see them as more markeable and capable of filling open jobs.  Suggestions to this effect include:

• Look carefully at senior-level job descriptions and brainstorm specific examples of how you’ve performed at least 75 percent of the responsibilities in the past.  Play up any experience you have liaising or working directly with international colleagues.

• Use LinkedIn actively.  Don’t just slap up your profile and forget about it.  Join groups for senior-level professionals in your field, and ask and answer member questions.  Set a goal of meeting at least 5 new senior-level contacts a week, and engage them in high-level industry conversation.

• Take the spec approach.  New consultants are sometimes asked to take on a project on spec, meaning they do the work gratis so the company can evaluate their worth as a paid asset.  Even if you aren’t asked, proactively identify and solve a problem facing executive management and present your solution in interviews and other conversations.

• Raise your pay expectations:  If you are satisfied with making a salary well below your true earning potential, you are literally underselling yourself.   Use payscale.com and salary.com to research the incomes of people who do what you do with your amount of tenure, and when asked, confidently cite a number in the middle.

One final piece of advice: As a senior-level candidate, you cannot rest on your laurels simply because you've been in the workforce a while.  Earn hiring managers' confidence and buy-in by demonstrating that you are invested in keeping your skills fresh and in learning and growing in a new position.

How Not to Get Fired Like the Yahoo! CEO

Last week, Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson was called to step down from his position following a scandal involving his credentials.  An investor recently discovered that on Thompson’s resume, the ex-CEO claims he graduated with a computer science degree from Stonehill College, when in fact he finished with an accounting degree.  A computer science degree did not even exist at the school at the time.

When the truth came out, Thompson blamed a headhunting firm for misrepresenting his education when he was in the process of being hired by eBay in the mid-2000s.  It didn’t work.  The firm fought back by providing Yahoo! with a copy of Thompson’s original resume – fake degree and all.

A while back, I talked about how to cope productively in the wake of scandal.  And cope productively Thompson did not.  For all of the details about what he did wrong and how you can avoid it, check out my recent post on the Quickbase blog.

How to Be an Effective Spy

Increasingly, managers and recruiters are being encouraged to assess cultural fit during the hiring process in order to ensure that candidates will assimilate well.

If you’re a job seeker, though, there are things you can do to determine whether you are a good match and help the company out. After all, it's just as important for you as it is for them; you will not be satisfied or productive in an environment that doesn’t support your values and vice versa.

The best way to do this is to spy...but how?  Check out my post at the AMEX OPEN Forum for the particulars.

Why Hiring a Superstar Won't Improve Your Business

I don’t follow baseball.

So I was surprised when I got sucked into a recent Harvard Business School article by Carmen Noble detailing Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein’s two-year campaign to acquire star performers with extraordinary multimillion-dollar, multiyear contracts.

The piece describes one of the most expensive talent hunts in baseball history, starting with the signing of veteran pitcher John Lackey from the Anaheim Angels. Other high-profile hires followed, and baseball aficionados hailed the 2011 Red Sox as one of the greatest teams of all time.

To say the team didn’t live up to expectations would be an understatement. In September 2011, the Red Sox lost 18 of its last 24 games and lost a shot at the playoffs. The glittering, star-studded team was a failure.

The fall of superstars is common in business too. Just look at the number of CEO departures last year, like Leo Apotheker at HP, Carol Bartz at Yahoo!, Ernest Lieb at Mercedes-Benz and Tom Williams at Reader’s Digest, to name a few.

This year is not looking much better. According to placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, CEO departures are up 17 percent from a year ago, with a total of 227 departures tracked through the first two months of 2012 compared to 187 at the same point in 2011.

The most common reason cited is disappointing performance, which, in most cases, came as a surprise. The star, after all, was hired because he had a track record of extraordinary contributions at previous organizations. Why wasn’t he able to replicate that success here?

Find out in my recent AMEX OPEN Forum Culture Beat column, in which I discuss why hiring a superstar might not improve your business.

Hire with Less Risk

In-person conversational interviews are notoriously ineffective for determining whether a new hire will be a good fit.  In many instances, a second interview is needed to more completely assess whether a particular candidate is well suited to an open position.  Work simulations, sometimes also known as case interviews, provide candidates with a real-life business problem similar to one that might be faced on the job.

Make it Real

Many experts suggest using real rather than fictional problems for work simulations, since real problems are always more complicated and difficult than anything you could make up.  For instance, if you are evaluating a marketing manager’s strategic thinking ability, perhaps you could have a candidate develop a potential launch plan for a product you rolled out last year.  On the other hand, if you need to test whether a bank administrator knows how to use your accounting software, you could ask him to complete an assignment using that tool.  If the position you’re hiring for isn’t your own, it’s smart to enlist the help of people currently doing the job in question in order to put together the most appropriate simulation.

Look at Process

While you should certainly be interested in the solution the candidate derives for your simulated problem, you should also pay attention to the process by which he arrived there.  Did he ask for a suitable amount of background information?  Were his questions pertinent and thoughtful?  Did he proceed through the right channels and call on the appropriate resources?  If relevant, did he develop a realistic timeline and budget?  Figure out how you will evaluate success on the simulation in advance (e.g. a rating scale from 1-5 on certain attributes, a checklist of completed steps).

Make Sure It’s Worth It

Work simulations are advantageous in that they showcase a variety of the competencies you’re looking for, and help candidates to understand exactly what the job entails.  However, they do take much more time and effort on behalf of the team leader, so you’ll want to make sure you reserve this type of interview for candidates who are under serious consideration.

This post was originally published on Intuit's Quickbase blog.