Procurement & Career Guidance
Job interviews can be intense and difficult.
Worrying about the questions hiring managers and HR teams will ask is stressful. While there are no magic bullets to make every interview perfect, there are some strategies you can deploy to have a better experience.
Preparation is certainly key, but it is important to remember to focus on the lasting impression you are leaving. This video gives some tips on how to do that.
Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash
I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset. I’d worked hard in college, but as an old millennial, the expectations for labor were tempered. We liked to say we worked hard, played hard — and there were clear boundaries around each of those activities. Grad school, then, is where I learned to work like a millennial, which is to say, all the time. My new watchword was “Everything that’s good is bad, everything that’s bad is good”: Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work
“When I’m assessing new talent, I want to see how the individual can create ease in a room, connect quickly with peers, and demonstrate capability,” she says. “All of that is done through soft skills of conversation starting, putting people at ease, creating an environment that leads to productivity. It means waiting for your interviewer to finish their sentences before starting, being introspective about the answer, and connecting with them as a person.”
“Though interviews can be rehearsed, a good conversation is one of the strongest indicators that a candidate has the soft skills needed to excel in a given position,” says Essenfeld.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90463823/how-to-demonstrate-3-important-soft-skills-during-an-interview
Of course, back in the days of clients who overpaid, of overhead that was used to fund more overhead, and of computers that cost $5,000 and can’t be found on eBay for $5, there were a whole lot more people doing the same work that a whole lot fewer people do today. This is where I (and the science) argue that a layer of fat in the workplace, in all its iterations, is a good thing. It acts as insulation from burnout, anxiety, stress, and everything else these poor young people experience every day as they die a slow death while making a living.
From a practical standpoint, this is not about installing a climbing wall in the conference room or setting up a keg near the coffee maker. We’re talking minutes of investment, not mountains of money. And it must come from the top: Fun and productivity are not an oxymoron but a generous paradox. CEOs, especially boomer CEOs, may have forgotten how much fun they used to have at work and how that fun helped develop them as leaders.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90460615/why-every-workday-needs-to-be-fun-and-how-to-have-it
Goal setting is proven to have a positive impact; according to McKinsey, 91 percent of companies that have effective performance management systems say that employee goals are linked to business priorities. Goals have the power to encourage and motivate people, whether they’re employees, investors or the board of directors. Give your team challenging, yet achievable targets to help push them in the right direction and encourage them to continue performing even when they’re dealing with new people and initially unfamiliar technologies or processes.
If your mentor doesn’t challenge you to tackle your weaknesses and overcome your fears, your mentor is satisfied with the status quo — which isn’t good enough for you! Building a company requires doing the stuff we love and the stuff we wish we could hire someone else to do. If your mentor is worth her salt, she will push you to grow into your weaknesses and throttle past the challenges that scare you.
Takeaway: I’ve often heard mentors working with startups in our accelerator respond to questions with questions. Mentors don’t have to have all of the answers — but they do need to know how to ask the right questions. This requires a mentor to slow down, listen and focus on you and your startup.
That afternoon, however, reality set in, in the form of close to ten disappointing phone calls.
Picking up my phone once more, I made my final call — to the most unlikely candidate of the bunch. And, within two minutes, I was floored: This guy was quizzing me on my knowledge of our business space. Not only that, but he was also asking about my personal relationships with competitors. Huh?
Calling around to other founders after the interview, I quickly uncovered a strong consensus based on those founders’ individual experiences: This candidate’s comments weren’t weird or unwelcome, they said. In fact, they considered the best salespeople to be the ones who quizzed them.
Rapt’s designers envisioned a concept in which everyone gets a private space to work when they want it. But there’s a catch: Each private cubicle sits on short legs, enabling small warehouse robots to scuttle around underneath them. Then, the robots can pick up the cubes and move them around the office based on what each person and team needs for the day. For instance, if you have a day of heads-down work, you’d get assigned a private cubicle so you can focus. If you have a day full of meetings, and you don’t need private space, your cube combines with other cubes to create a larger space in which to work with your colleagues. The robots shift the office in real time to make this happen.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90262512/i-want-to-work-in-these-cubicles-of-the-future
Photo by Wade Austin Ellis on Unsplash
We’re done, the whole quadrant craze is starting to smell pretty bad and we know the industry is fed up with it. Increasingly, many of these 2×2 matrices are missing several of the market leaders (who refuse to participate) and having them all stacked in the top right just smacks of pay-for-play (even if the analyst has fair intentions). Let’s be honest, noone trusts these matrices and they are harming the entire credibility of the analyst industry. Sure, there are many honest, quality analysts with integrity, but their craft is being soiled by several quacks who are basing their vendor placements purely on vendor briefings, whether they like a particular vendor, and whether some vendors pony up for their research services. There are many “analysts” out there who do not bother to do sufficient customer research and we all suspect who these characters (and their employers) are…
It’s possible to negotiate a substantial contract in a few minutes by email—if both sides care more about forward motion than they care about the last decimal point. Or, to be more honest about it, if they care more about the benefits of the future than they care about the narrative of treating their partner like an opponent.
In an economy based on connection instead of scarcity, the ease of those connections, the reliability built into them, our confidence that the future will match promises made–all of these benefits dwarf the narcissistic narrative of the deal maker who simply seeks to win today, at all costs.
“If it kind of comes out in part of your interview where maybe you were part of a team and you’re really only talking about the accomplishments of the team and not necessarily your individual contributions and what they did, I think that’s something that can hold people back,” Salzer, who is a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services, told Business Insider.
Instead, make it clear that you were a key contributor to your company. Emphasizing your individual accomplishments in a team is a key way to sway hiring managers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/interview-tips-amazon-jobs-2018-8
We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support. We also know that when people are truly invested in change it is 30 percent more likely to stick. While companies have been obsessing about how to use digital to improve their customer-facing businesses, the application of digital tools to promote and accelerate internal change has received far less scrutiny. However, applying new digital tools can make change more meaningful—and durable—both for the individuals who are experiencing it and for those who are implementing it.
https://diginomica.com/2018/08/16/we-need-to-talk-about-organizational-change-management/
Photo by Josh Blanton on Unsplash
In addition to the information interviews should provide but don’t, there’s also a great deal of information they shouldn’t provide but do. The latter isn’t just “noisy” data in the sense of not improving predictiveness–it’s actually toxic, focusing interviewers’ attention on problematic traits. For example, it’s all but impossible to ignore (and make biased, misguided assumptions about) a candidate’s gender, age, race, appearance, or social class, even when the most conscientious recruiter or hiring manager strives to prevent these factors from influencing her decision making. In fact, the more we try to ignore these qualities, the more present they’ll be in our minds.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40579524/what-if-we-killed-the-job-interview
Ultimately, only you can decide whether you should stay or go when you’re presented with a counteroffer. However, many experts are quick to warn job seekers that accepting a counteroffer can be complex.
First and foremost, you’ve already demonstrated to your existing employer that you’re on the lookout for greener pastures. The fact that you were strongly considering leaving could deem you as a flight risk. And, as terrifying as it sounds, there’s no guaranteeing that your employer didn’t just counteroffer to buy themselves some time to find your replacement.
The EU proposal in question is an attempt to shore up existing problems with EU copyright law. But the poorly crafted nature of the effort could have a profoundly negative impact on everything from your ability to share hot memes to the survival of new startups.
For example, Article 13 of the plan declares that any website that lets users upload text, sounds, images, code, or other copyrighted works for public consumption will need to employ automated systems that filter these submissions against a database of copyrighted works.
Such automated internet filters (whether policing speech, porn, or copyrighted material) not only routinely don’t work very well, they tend to result in rampant collateral damage as legitimate content gets caught in the poorly-crafted automated dragnet.
The survey was conducted by Alfresco, a digital business platform, which received responses from 307 IT professionals who work at U.S. and U.K. companies with over 500 employees. The results are both illuminating and alarming. They say that 98% of companies monitor their employees’ digital activity, while 11% of employees aren’t aware that their company captures digital activity at all.
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