Careerchat II

[Theda Baratheon]

Interviewers said they'd get back to be by the end of the next day (last Friday) and it's currently Monday early evening and nothing. So I guess I didn't get that job then, lol.

[sperry]

2 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

It depends on the role for which you are interviewing.  For a junior, technical role I would emphasize knowledge over "presence" and ask some questions to test specific knowledge to make sure they aren't just bluffing on their resume.  But choosing a couple of questions at the right level can establish in less than five minutes whether the candidate has the right knowledge base.

Behavioral questions are valid for any candidate because you need to decide if they will fit with your culture and team, can they communicate effectively, do they have the expected amount of initiative and judgment, are they likely to commit to the role for a while or just use it as a stepping stone to another firm, and do they have potential to grow beyond the role for which you initially hire them?

Junior people who don't know where they want to be in five years are generally less in demand than someone with some ambition and a realistic plan for how to realize that ambition.  If you're not very career-oriented or still figuring things out, then I may not want you to waste my time.  Some jobs want unambitious people who will stay in a dead-end job for a couple of years or longer for want of any sense of direction.

The bigger problem is that many candidates know exactly what you are seeking and dissemble to give you what you want.  For that reason, I try to avoid any canned questions and instead vary between direct and oblique questioning, between values and situational, between experience and expectations, etc in order to test for consistency.  I often offer a misleading impression at some point to see if the candidate will blindly agree or actually push back.  I also tell people up front that I believe strongly in mutual transparency and I never want to hire someone for a role in which they will be unhappy or unlikely to succeed.  You still get some desperate people who ignore that warning but thankfully they're easy to spot.

 

 

It seems to me the resume is a significantly better way to ascertain things like ambition than asking questions. If a person has been a high achiever in the past, they're likely to achieve highly in your organization as well.

[Iskaral Pust]

59 minutes ago, sperry said:

It seems to me the resume is a significantly better way to ascertain things like ambition than asking questions. If a person has been a high achiever in the past, they're likely to achieve highly in your organization as well.

People can exaggerate on their resume.  Besides, the secret is to find a potentially high achiever who hasn't had the opportunity to progress at their current firm.  They're the ones who are willing to move and are highly motivated to make up for lost time and have a point to prove.  The ones who are attaining all of their ambitions already are not taking a call from your recruiter and you need to pay them well over the odds to take the risk of making a move and leaving behind a situation that was going fine.

Unfortunately, lots of mediocre employees also apply for positions -- and exaggerate their resume -- and lots of delusional employees think they are potentially high achievers just lacking the right opportunity.

Interviewing alone is a terrible way to discern true capability and likelihood of success, but it is a good way to filter second tier dross, assuming third tier dross is filtered already by the recruiters, and it can complement other signals of quality.

I'm actually very happy with the results of my interviewing of the years.  There isn't a single person I hired who under-performed my expectations.  I inherited a few people who fell short, and I could see in advance that they probably would.  But I've been successful at hiring good people because I set the bar very high, which means I spend a lot more time with candidates I ultimately turn down, and I lose out on some great candidates who can make much better money elsewhere.  So I have a cost in additional time invested and slower rate of talented added, but I prefer that to the cost of dealing with under-performing employees.  And my team members know I set a very high bar and they take pride from being part of the team and try really hard to live up to it.

[Kalbear]

Quote

The overwhelming majority of business roles are not client facing, yet the overwhelming majority of interviews include a large (or are entirely) behavioral component.

The overwhelming majority of business roles have something to do with interacting with other human beings, typically those you work with, and so how  someone behaves is one of the most important things for determining whether or not you want to work with that person or if you want to punch them in the face. 

As to resumes, resumes show a basic competence, perhaps. I would far rather see how someone solves a problem and also how they interact with others. Those two things are by far the most important things in my discipline. If it were up to me I would have a 2-3 hour interview where the person has to create something with two other people on my team with them as the primary responsible person, give them internet and computers, and watch them work. 

[Datepalm]

I've had 'practical' job interviews where they set you to do something that closely resembles the actual work...I always leave doubting how much the interview really resembles anything and picking apart all the ways in which the 'experiment' was different from a real thing and thus all its flaws as a method. As well as distinctly feeling that my time had been wasted or taken advantage of. (Most egregious was the civil rights NGO that had me go through an involved legal case-file alone in a dark office - for about three hours - and come back with an A-4 sheet scribbled with 'my conclusions', without any background or instructions. This was also the place that had me run through a list of random numbers and mark out which ones were others backward while three people watched. That had to be testing my willingness to say 'this is nonsense' and put it down, right?)

[Iskaral Pust]

For an (successful) internship interview at a hedge fund, I was given two days in advance a technical white paper and had to prepare a 30 minute presentation on my understanding of the topic and the implications for a trading strategy.  It was a pretty effective technique to see if people with academic credentials could actually understand and infer. 

For my first job out of university, the final round interviews were spread over a full weekend and included more than a dozen candidates who knew they were competing for a four job openings.  There was testing, team exercises, interview panels and one-on-one sessions with industrial psychologists.  It seemed at bit overwrought for entry-level positions but that company did have an excellent track record of hiring very talented people.  And the competitiveness of the situation made successful candidates more inclined to accept their offer.  

Personally, I'm concerned about the limits of traditional interviews.  I'd like to have better options so that I could take more chances on candidates for whom I don't have strong alternate sources of verification.  Fishing in the same talent pool of relatively near contacts is limiting.  And it means I have to keep expanding my network all the time.

[MercenaryChef]

ok, persons.

i am undergoing a bit of an internal crisis as of late. as i make abundantly clear i am a chef. hell, i am even a pretty decent one. but as of late i have been offered not one, not two, but three different positions in other parts of the country. currently relocating isn't even in the cards for me and kair. however, it is the types of positions offered. each one of them are operations of larger companies. one even would have me heading up four properties between canada and the states. the issue is they are all just operations and systems. 

20 years into my career i expected to have my own restaurant right now. though in hindsight it is clear why i do not. i have no less than five chef friends, younger than me and some even better than me who have cast aside the life of a chef for a similar path. some of them are even the ones recruiting me. 

i am dearly in love with what i do. having a knife in my hand is so much more enjoyable than a clipboard. i know my way around a stove better than a spreadsheet. but, despite my passion for cooking and abilities i have never really made it. i am just one more guy making nice food in a sea of them. i have a nice job. my food is good. but, i am getting older. there are clearly offers around me to 'sell out.' not a single one doesn't best my current salary by 50%. 

my fear is these opportunities will not be around when i am that 50 year old chef who never really made his mark. at 40 i am still working for someone else but doing the food i want and having a blast. i get this for what three or four more years? i can never afford my own place and nobody is writing me a check. 

forgive my ramblings.

[S John]

Do you think that the physical demands of being a chef may be something that in 10 years you would be willing to set aside in favor of managing operations?  In my mind, if these opportunities being offered to you are in a management role, then 10 more years experience doing what you love in the kitchen will probably not do anything to make you less qualified for that same type of role when you are 50 - and at that point you may be more ready to embrace it.  If you love what you do, like where you live, and have enough money to suit your lifestyle, then I see nothing wrong with keepin' on keepin' on for a while longer yet.  

[Iskaral Pust]

Welcome to midlife crisis MC.  When do you settle for something you enjoy and forgo other ambition?  How long can you wait to take a big risk before life has passed you by?   How high do you need to rise to be safe from obsolescence/commodification as you get older, but not so high that you'll be too expensive later and then discarded? 

I know I haven't stopped striving yet, although I do spend more time reassuring myself that I'm pretty happy already and being impatient/antsy for the next step all the time would just be depleting my mental well-being.

The bad news is that we get to live life once.  If I could do this a thousand times, I wouldn't worry so much about choices, I'd try every experience and variation and see how they all played out.  But with just one shot at it, I need to balance my unknowable future happiness against my present happiness and make the best choice I can. 

I'd suggest chatting to your five friends who tried this path already and see how you viscerally feel as they describe the pros and cons from their POV.  You may not be able to relate to their POV at all, which would tell you a lot.

It's nice to have options though.  Best of luck.

[sperry]

On 2/15/2017 at 5:28 PM, MercurialCannibal said:

ok, persons.

i am undergoing a bit of an internal crisis as of late. as i make abundantly clear i am a chef. hell, i am even a pretty decent one. but as of late i have been offered not one, not two, but three different positions in other parts of the country. currently relocating isn't even in the cards for me and kair. however, it is the types of positions offered. each one of them are operations of larger companies. one even would have me heading up four properties between canada and the states. the issue is they are all just operations and systems. 

20 years into my career i expected to have my own restaurant right now. though in hindsight it is clear why i do not. i have no less than five chef friends, younger than me and some even better than me who have cast aside the life of a chef for a similar path. some of them are even the ones recruiting me. 

i am dearly in love with what i do. having a knife in my hand is so much more enjoyable than a clipboard. i know my way around a stove better than a spreadsheet. but, despite my passion for cooking and abilities i have never really made it. i am just one more guy making nice food in a sea of them. i have a nice job. my food is good. but, i am getting older. there are clearly offers around me to 'sell out.' not a single one doesn't best my current salary by 50%. 

my fear is these opportunities will not be around when i am that 50 year old chef who never really made his mark. at 40 i am still working for someone else but doing the food i want and having a blast. i get this for what three or four more years? i can never afford my own place and nobody is writing me a check. 

forgive my ramblings.

 

With the higher salary plus operational control, wouldn't this make you much more qualified to get backers for your own restaurant? I would be much more inclined to invest in a venture with somebody who has experience in both of those things, rather than someone who is just a talented chef.

[Datepalm]

Minor etiquette query at the intersection of academia and actual jobs...I applied for a position on a new research project that is right in my ballpark in terms of interests, and goes through a centralized hiring system with an umbrella organization. On a whim I checked out the professor running it, or at least one of them, (maybe should have done that before) to find they're at an institution where I had considered making a PhD application but ultimately hadn't been able to find anyone working on what I was interested in, at place where you're expected to have some contact with a potential supervisor before you apply. Also, their PhD applications for this year are still open.

So it occurs to me I might as well contact them as a would-be PhD candidate, but I feel like its bad form to circumvent the big-org HR system and go stalk someone directly? I checked with a couple professors who had worked at said institution and said its probably ok to contact directly and (briefly) explain this, but still...I feel like it might be best to let it go for the year.

[Iskaral Pust]

On 1/7/2017 at 2:04 PM, Iskaral Pust said:

Unrelated: I have interviews soon within my current firm for one of the alternate roles I mentioned a couple of months back.  If I don't get or take that role, there's another alternate role for me just for the asking.  I've been warming people up to the idea that I may be changing role soon.  Nothing too dramatic but the timing is good to shift focus and work style a bit. 

I have an update on the opportunity I described earlier.  The interviews extended from mid January to mid February, and a decision was made near the end of February.  There were several serious external candidates too. 

I had played it down a bit in my prior description, not wanting to raise expectations, but the role I went for was a pretty big deal.  Anyway, the conclusion is that when I returned to the office on Tuesday after my travel, I was offered the role of Chief Investment Officer (CIO) for North America.  I've accepted and started working on a transition plan.  I'm energized about the change in focus and a new challenge but a little stressed about the magnitude of the task ahead.  

It's a pretty awesome career progression for me.  It's nice to know that our senior leadership believes in me to make this step up, and nice to know I got the nod ahead of external candidates who've been a CIO elsewhere before.  Now I just need to deliver.  I think it'll be fun. 

I've already been analyzing the situation like a case study at my MBA to help me organize all the steps I should take early on.  I need to set my vision for our investment approach and I want to first canvass for input and make sure I'll have organizational support for the new direction I think we need to take. 

And I know my current team will be disappointed to see me switch role.  I have thought about a replacement leadership structure for them, which we'll work on in the coming weeks. 

[Mexal]

1 hour ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I have an update on the opportunity I described earlier.  The interviews extended from mid January to mid February, and a decision was made near the end of February.  There were several serious external candidates too. 

I had played it down a bit in my prior description, not wanting to raise expectations, but the role I went for was a pretty big deal.  Anyway, the conclusion is that when I returned to the office on Tuesday after my travel, I was offered the role of Chief Investment Officer (CIO) for North America.  I've accepted and started working on a transition plan.  I'm energized about the change in focus and a new challenge but a little stressed about the magnitude of the task ahead.  

It's a pretty awesome career progression for me.  It's nice to know that our senior leadership believes in me to make this step up, and nice to know I got the nod ahead of external candidates who've been a CIO elsewhere before.  Now I just need to deliver.  I think it'll be fun. 

I've already been analyzing the situation like a case study at my MBA to help me organize all the steps I should take early on.  I need to set my vision for our investment approach and I want to first canvass for input and make sure I'll have organizational support for the new direction I think we need to take. 

And I know my current team will be disappointed to see me switch role.  I have thought about a replacement leadership structure for them, which we'll work on in the coming weeks. 

That's awesome Isk! Big time congrats! Huge opportunity and wonderful experience.

[Inigima]

Congrats Isk! That's huge.

[baxus]

Great job, Isk! Congrats! 

I've passed several interviews for a Silicon Valley startup offices in Belgrade, I'll be going to see them tomorrow to discuss finances, when I can start etc.

The project seems great, as do guys I've talked to. It should be an interesting experience.

[Datepalm]

Congrats Iskaral!! Glad you got something you wanted! May you continue to triumphantly stride through the decays of late-stage consumer capitalism, and inevitably betray it when the revolution comes! I really mean that!

 

Since a friend just called me with a dillemma I had no idea what to say about, what do you guys think? How does this play out, for people who have ever hired someone for something? Is working with a big, famous name in whatever your field is, for an internship or entry level position, automatically better than doing something basically similar in terms of work done and experience gained, in an unknown organization? Strongly so?

(the exact case is that she was offered an unpaid internship (but will likely get some funding from the university, albeit probably not enough to cover it all) with a prestigious body oh scratch that, UN-Habitat, which given that she's an architect with planning and development interests, is pretty much the place to be. Their internships run the gamut from, as far as I can tell, coffee making and paper filing, to possibly really interesting and significant work. Hers sounds like its probably on the latter end, but still, who knows. On the other hand, she has a great internship lined up here (she needs to do something for her degree) doing very hands-on work with a local community. She has strong personal reasons for wanting to stay close, including health and relationship stuff, but, well, its the UN.)

 

[BigFatCoward]

I am currently going through a promotion process at work which is pretty intense, i couldn't have picked a worse time to do it.  I'm currently buying a house, trying to rent out my flat, starting a new job (which will continue if i get promoted, but will probably not if i don't).  I've also got a 2 week holiday booked in the middle of all this which is going to impact on my ability to manage the timescales around all of these things.  i'm not sleeping that much i can tell you.  

anyway our promotion process at work is written application, if you get through that there are 4 more stages, interview, senior stakeholder briefing, written excercise, and situational judgement test.  

i really need to get it this year as there are going to be fewer and fewer opportunities each year with government cuts. 

MC. i see this being a pretty good position to be in, you get to either stay doing what you love, or do something close to what you love but for more cash.  

[Iskaral Pust]

Thanks everyone.  I have an eventful period ahead.  I'm already losing some sleep as my brain keeps churning on this but hopefully that will settle soon. 

I notice that we suddenly got an influx of updates once this thread returned to the front page. 

@Mexal did you make a final decision on an MBA at INSEAD?

@baxus Congrats to you too.  I hope the offer matches your expectations.  Hopefully Snapchat's IPO has a coattail effect for comp in start-ups. 

@Datepalm   It seems like the UN role would help more in the long run but she can't really lose with either.  The UN role could be a miserable experience with exploitation, politicking and the personal reasons you mentioned, but it might still be valuable to know that's what's involved in an organization like that. 

@BigFatCoward best of luck with the promotion process.  I've no advice for juggling all the other stuff but life is like that.  Whenever you relocate for a new job, you have all the stress of interviews and house selling and hunting, followed by an actual move and then months of acclimating your home and family situation while you try to make an impression at your new job.  The best I can offer is don't do it more frequently than every three years. 

[Mexal]

I'm holding pat for now. The debt is off putting at this point, especially with me getting married in a few months. If I can get my employer to pay for it, I will re-visit, but in my current position, that's mostly a no go as I'm not really bringing any extra value back to the firm by doing it. So I'm shelving it for now with the thought of re-visiting it when I move on from my current job as part of my negotiation.

[Iskaral Pust]

Not a bad outcome.  You still have the option when it looks more valuable to you.  And I highly recommend getting your employer to foot the bill.