Yearly archive for 2023

Question

A friend ignored my advice and fell into the job-offer fallacy. He was so thrilled to get a job offer he wanted that he cancelled two other interviews. I told him to do the interviews anyway. What’s the harm? Well, he never really had a job offer, just a verbal one, nothing in writing. A real offer never came, but they strung him out for almost three weeks. You can guess the rest. The other two opportunities disappeared. He begged for those interviews but the other companies wouldn’t even respond to him. Do your readers a favor and warn them not to put all their eggs in one basket no matter how good it looks!

Nick’s Reply

I think you just gave that excellent warning! But I’ll take this two more steps — and you might be surprised. Your friend had only a verbal offer, nothing in writing. But he should have hedged his bets even if he had the a job offer in writing and even if he started the job.

What is the job-offer fallacy?

Job hunting produces stress more than almost any other experience. That’s why there’s nothing like the immense relief you feel when the job offer has arrived. Finally, you’re done! Or, are you caught in the job-offer fallacy? It goes like this:

I just got the job offer I want, so I’ll cancel my other interviews. I don’t need them.

The fallacy is that you don’t need them. Never, ever cancel an interview or terminate your job search just because:

• You had a great interview and they said they’d make an offer.
• A company made you an offer in writing.
• You started the new job today.

Here’s why:

A great interview isn’t an offer

After a positive, hopeful interview experience, it’s natural to let your enthusiasm get the better of your common sense. It seems logical to put further job search activities on hold until the employer makes that offer. After all, this is the job you really want! And you’re so busy at work — who’s got time to go on other interviews or to continue contacting more employers? Why not just see what happens with this one first?

Any headhunter will tell you that most good interviews fail to produce job offers. Likewise, more job offers are rejected than accepted. That’s why headhunters (who are responsible to the employers who pay them) always keep other candidates on deck. And that’s why you should never assume an offer is on the way, or that it won’t explode, or that your first day on the new job is the end of it. It’s why you should continue full steam ahead on your job search and keep other irons hot in the fire.

A written offer can be rescinded

An offer is a guarantee of a job, right? Well, not necessarily. Companies don’t always worry about what’s proper or what’s legal. If the company suddenly re-organizes, or its finance department runs the numbers and realizes money is tight, or if the company hears something about you that it doesn’t like, the offer could be rescinded. Even if the offer is legally binding, you could be in for a battle. If you don’t have a fall-back position, you’re without a paycheck.

Here’s an example from the Ask The Headhunter case file. A job candidate fudged past salary on the application form. The employer made an offer, then demanded to see a pay stub from the candidate’s last job. When the numbers didn’t match, the offer was withdrawn. The candidate had already resigned the old job and cancelled other pending interviews, having decided to accept the offer. That was a deadly incorrect assumption.

Day #1 can be your last day, too.

I’ve seen it happen more than once. A new employee finds the job doesn’t really match what what was described, or in a quick re-shuffling is reporting to someone other than the manager who made the hire. Or, the new co-workers are a miserable bunch. Whatever the problem, the new hire decides it was a bad mistake and this isn’t the place to be. The new hire is ready to resign before really starting the job.

Here’s another example from the Ask The Headhunter files. After taking a job and closing the door on other opportunities, the new hire went through two weeks of training only to be told the department was being eliminated. There were two choices: leave, or switch to another department and another job for $20,000 less in salary. Our new hire decided to sue. Three months later, the lawsuit was barely off the ground and our litigant was still without a job and saddled with legal bills.

Beware the job-offer fallacy because it ain’t over till it’s over

Is this likely to happen to you? Probably not. But here’s my rule about taking risks. If the potential for disaster is small but the consequences would be huge (like no job, no income), don’t take the risk.

There is no security inherent in a job offer. If you believe there is, you’ve bought into a fallacy. So, what is a smart job hunter to do?

Until the dust settles, don’t regard an interview, a job offer, or a job itself as the end of your job search. Hedge your bets. Keep your options open until you can take a look around and decide the ground beneath you really is firm. Don’t cancel other interviews. Don’t discourage other offers. The disasters I described don’t happen often. But if such a disaster befalls you just once and you’re without a safety net, it will seem like the end of the world.

Have you ever cancelled a job interview because you were so sure of a “job in the hand” only to encounter the job-offer fallacy? How bad were the consequences? How do you control the risks when pursuing a new job opportunity?

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Question

When will we be free from the cursed NCA (Non-Compete Agreement)? I got sucked into one years ago. When I left the company, I was barred for a year from taking a job with any of the company’s competitors or working in a similar business. It cost me a lot because I was unable to parlay what were then very hot skills into a great salary. I’ve missed out on other good jobs because I said never again will I sign an NCA. I’m reading that the laws are changing but it’s a little here, a little there. Do you think NCAs will ever be banned?

Nick’s Reply

There has certainly been a lot in the news recently about “cursed NCAs.” And that’s good, because very, very few jobs can justify an NCA. The freedom to have a job of your choosing and to earn a living is fundamental. But employers from fast-food joints to software companies and doctors’ offices routinely require employees to sign these nefarious agreements. That’s changing.

Thumb down on the non-compete agreement

California, which often leads the nation in new trends of all kinds, recently made NCAs illegal. That’s one sign of what’s coming. Earlier this year the Federal Trade Commission proposed a rule that would effectively kill NCAs nationally. Shortly after, the National Labor Relations Board issued a legal opinion that NCAs violate the National Labor Relations Act in most circumstances. Now the FTC has joined with the Department of Labor to further protect workers from employers trying to curtail the freedom to work.

My favorite story about the death knell of NCAs is about two podcasters who were sued by their old employer for competing with the company. The Washington Post reports that this case could end NCAs as we know them.

So to answer your question, I think soon you’ll stop getting job offers that include NCAs designed to interfere with your freedom to work anywhere you want.

Protect yourself

But we’re not out of the woods yet. Because we don’t know when or if this will actually come to pass, I’ll refer you to some advice about how to avoid the pain of an NCA:

• Only 1 reason to sign Non-Compete Agreement
• How can I negotiate an NCA or NDA?

What does your non-compete agreement say?

In the meantime, I’d like to ask everyone:

• Were you forced to sign an NCA in order to get hired?
• Have you had to pass up a good job because you didn’t want to sign an NCA?
• If you have an active NCA, what are the main restrictions and what is the timeline?
• If you’ve ever gotten out of having to sign an NCA, how did you do it?

Let’s compare notes and try to protect your right to work while the FTC, NLRB and Department of Labor finally bury the NCA.

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Question

I have changed my approach to employers. I know I’m taking a risk, but I really believe what you teach, that succumbing to “the HR screen” almost always diminishes someone’s chances of getting in the door. Here’s what I did — a recent e-mail thread is below. If you print this, I’d love to hear from other readers about whether they’ve done something like this or whether they would. And if they’ve done it, what were the results? Whatever happens with getting interviews, I believe the added pay-off is that I’m saving myself from lots of wasted time. Thanks.

E-mail to employer:

Hi, Manager,

Hope this message finds you well. Understand your department is looking for an energetic go-getter to join the team.

You’ll have to pardon my unorthodox approach to job hunting. I also dabbled in the library sciences for a time, which is how I got your contact information.

Good news for you: My career is focused on PR and internal/employee communications, working with high-tech companies like [company 1] and [company 2].

With regards to grabbing audiences by effective storytelling, I can do both in the written word (blogs) and via social media (Twitter). [links to specific posts omitted here]

If it’s not you, who is the hiring manager I should contact?

Best Regards,

[job seeker]

Employer’s response:

Hey [job seeker],

This isn’t a role in my team. The best way to route your resume to the right person is to apply via the careers section on [company].com.

Thanks,

[company manager]

Answer to employer:

Hi [manager],

Thanks for the quick response, but there’s no way I’ll apply through the HR portal — I’ll never stand a chance. That’s why I contacted you in the first place! Please see:

Ask the Headhunter – Go around HR to get the job
https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/16719/go-around-hr-get-job

Best Regards,

[job seeker]

Nick’s Reply

Now you’ve done it! You’ve broken the rules and put yourself at risk of angering an employer! What insanity will job seekers reveal next?

I’m happy to put your questions up to the Ask The Headhunter community. We all get frustrated with the job application labyrinth, but most people enter blindfolded anyway. We also know few come back out with a job.

This reader doesn’t say what success they’ve had. I’m hoping we hear more either here in the discussion or via e-mail. If the latter, I promise to report back.

Is this insanity, or a smart job seeker’s last stand?

Dear readers: Have you ever done what this reader did? If not, would you? If you have resisted instructions to “apply through the machine” when you’re trying to deal directly with the hiring manager, how did you try to get in the door? What was the outcome?

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Hello, All!

The Ask The Headhunter website and weekly newsletter have been on hiatus since the end of April because I couldn’t type. Surgery for a torn rotator cuff (shoulder) will do that — and can take months of physical therapy to recover. (Take good care of your shoulders!) I’m happy to report I’m doing well and recovery is proceeding apace, though it has taken longer than I expected. Thanks for the hundreds of e-mails and well-wishes — and thanks for your patience!

To get us back on track, I’d like to share a shortlist of some of the top job search questions I’ve received, along with my advice. I hope you find something helpful here. And I expect you will chime in with comments and with your own advice! Please feel free to once again submit your own questions and challenges about looking for a new job and about being successful at your work. As always, I’ll select the best, most relevant submissions for publication in the coming weeks.

It’s great to be back! Thanks for subscribing and for your participation!

Top 5 job search questions

1. Should I get a job, or start a business?

Many people toy with starting their own business when they lose a job because it’s so natural. Most would rather control their own destiny, were it not for fear of the unknown. Everyone knows it’s an enormous amount of work (and risk) to strike out on your own.

My advice: Stop pretending that it’s easier to get a job. Today, the only way to positively, absolutely convince a company to hire you is to demonstrate that you will add profit dollars to the bottom line. If you truly understand that, then you know there’s little difference between getting a job and creating your own.

Today, the Net makes it easy to apply for any job, or for thousands of jobs. But to apply for a great job that you really want, and to demonstrate that you are the single best candidate — that’s not very different from carefully creating a plan to start a business.

Remember that any great job is a business; a little operation that you run for your employer. So before you dismiss striking out on your own, prepare a business plan for the job you think you want. If it’s good enough to base a new business on, then you may have the pitch you need to get funding. Or, it might make a great script possible for a successful job interview.

2. How can I get the job boards to produce interviews for me?

The job boards continue to hide the facts. None of them report how often their users find or fill jobs. But studies conducted by independent third parties reveal that the results aren’t good. Over the years, the boards have been shown to collectively fill only around 10% of jobs, while some claim to fill over half of all jobs (see Indeed delivers 65% of hires. Yup? and this video). Ah, but there are so many jobs on the boards! Doesn’t that mean even having only tiny odds could yield success?

My advice: Less is better. Spend your time developing good, deep contacts at a small handful of companies you really want to work for. In other words, don’t chase thousands of jobs; select a few companies. Then do what’s required to get insiders to recommend you to management. That’s a lot of work, but so’s that great job you want. Start doing the hard work now.

3. It’s a wasteland out there. Who can help me land a job?

The harder it is to find work, the more e-mail you’ll receive from sophisticated-sounding scammers offering to help you. It used to be that these “job search consultants” charged thousands. (See Recruitment Ripoff from CBC-TV.) Now that it’s even harder to land a job, you can sign up with a “job-search club” for $49, because the scammers are desperate for your attention. The legitimate ones are very few and very far between. Don’t waste $49 thinking you’re saving thousands.

My advice: Hook up with a professional association that’s related to your work and that has online discussion groups. Look for managers and successful members who will take time to get to know you. Establish your credibility. These are the insiders who will make the credible personal referrals that will help you. (Needless to say, establishing such work-oriented relationships in person is even better.) The key to productive networking is shared experiences.

4. How can I get an offer at least as good as my last salary?

The economy is in upheaval. One reason that you got laid off was because your old company couldn’t afford your salary. Many companies are not willing or able to spend much on new hires. You may have to reconcile yourself to that. So there’s no easy answer to this question. But there are two things you can do to protect yourself.

My advice: First, never reveal your salary history, even if the HR manager tries to beat it out of you. (Your best, most honest tactic may be to explain that your old compensation is company-confidential and you cannot divulge it.) Once you reveal your history, they know where to peg any offer they make to you. In most cases, you’re better off if they have to figure out what you’re worth by talking to you. Then you at least have an opportunity to influence the offer. (Better than disclosing your salary: Check this Wired article about insider salary information.)

Second, you must be ready to discuss what you want in terms that will benefit the employer. This isn’t easy, but then again, companies don’t hand out money just because job candidates ask for it. It’s up to you to understand two or three things that are broken at this company; things they’re hiring you to fix. Prepare a brief but clear plan to show how you’ll do it, and include estimates of how you’ll do it profitably. Hang your desired salary on that, and you will have a defensible basis for negotiations.

Now let’s look at this last of our five job search questions.

5. They haven’t called back since the interview. What should I do?

Just send the employer a check — for $1,000, or whatever you think will get their attention. And now maybe I’ve got yours. (I was kidding. Don’t send employers money!)

Once you’ve made your presentation and demonstrated your ability to help the employer, the rest is up to them. In your wildest dreams you’d never learn what’s taking them so long because most companies are, to be blunt, inept at hiring. Contrary to what many career books suggest, there is next to nothing you can do to get a company off the dime.

My advice: Don’t let someone else control your agenda. Stop telling yourself, “But I really want that job and I need them to know it!” The single best way to deal with “the wait” is to develop other opportunities at other companies. I know you don’t want to hear that, because you really, really know you have a great shot at this one… but trust me: Most interviews end without job offers, and yours may be one of them.

Get working on two or three other targets (jobs, or maybe your own business ideas), and you will be more in control of your life.

What are your top job search questions? We spend all our time here tackling such challenges. How have you handled the five issues we’ve discussed here?

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Nick is broken and getting fixed!

After long avoiding it, I’m finally getting surgery for a torn rotator cuff in my shoulder. (If you’ve ever had this, you know it hurts like the Dickens!)

This means my writing arm will be in a sling for about 6 weeks. Writing will be extremely difficult — more likely impossible, according to my surgeon — for part or all of that time.

There are no little elves producing the Ask The Headhunter website and weekly newsletter. I write and produce all the content, and participate in the online discussions — always have, because I like to mix it up with my readers.

While Ask The Headhunter goes on hiatus a few times a year for holidays and vacation, it’s never been for more than a couple of weeks. The April 25, 2023 column will likely be the last you — dear reader — will see until my arm can pitch fastballs again.

I’ll be back…

So you likely will not see a new Q&A column until the end of May or beginning of June. Your subscription to the newsletter will of course remain active, and as soon as my shoulder is fixed, it will appear again like magic in your e-mail!

In the meantime…

Please explore these popular Ask The Headhunter Resources:

The Basics

Ask The Headhunter In A Nutshell

Should I keep interviewing after I accepted a job offer?

What’s Better: Quit or get fired?

Protect Your Job: Don’t give notice when accepting a new job

Say NO to tests prior to an interview

Reductionist Recruiting: A short history of why you can’t get hired

The Bogus-ness of Indeed.com

Ask The Headhunter Bookstore (and long-forgotten photo of Nick with a soul patch – urgh!)

The Q&A Archive

See ya soon!

I will have a little elf pulling up my e-mails for me periodically, so feel free to drop me a short note if you like — but please be aware that I probably won’t be able to reply. I still love ya!

Thank you for being part of the Ask The Headhunter community, and for your patience!

– Nick Corcodilos
Ask The Headhunter

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Question

First we had to learn to cough up the key words some Applicant Tracking System (ATS) wants to see when we submit a job application. Now we have to use ChatGPT to write our resumes and applications because employers are using ChatGPT to write job descriptions and postings. Where does it end? Why don’t they just hire the ChatGPT?

Nick’s Reply

(In this column, I will use ChatGPT as a catch-all term for all generations and competing products of the underlying technology, because this is not an analysis of the technology itself.)

An L.A. Times story tells how to write a cover letter and resume using the artificial intelligence of ChatGPT. The technology is credited by users with the skills of a professional coach or editor:

“The aspects of using AI to assist — it’s a tool,” job seeker Jesse said. “Imagine you had an expert next to you telling you how to get better… It wrote [a cover letter and resume] better than I ever could.”

Seriously? An expert?

Is ChatGPT an expert?

Human experts like Noam Chomsky describe these A.I. systems in The New York Times like this (emphasis added):

“Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought….ChatGPT and its ilk [are] a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question.”

“…machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round. They trade merely in probabilities that change over time.”

What game are we playing?

Employers and the Employment Industry at large are creating an increasingly complex game of recruitment advertising and hiring. Of course, now job seekers are learning to play the game by deploying ChatGPT against ChatGPT. (We warned you 7 years ago: Send a robo-dog to interviews.)

But how does this approach of gaming a system that is itself a game play out? Who gets hurt? Who benefits? Will Jesse get the right job? Will you?

What’s the outcome?

The proliferation of job boards and ATSes doesn’t seem to have fixed the talent shortage for employers, and it hasn’t fixed unemployment for workers. But we still use them, perhaps because we keep avoiding an outcomes analysis. Maybe it’s because automating it makes job hunting less painful, even if that doesn’t really work.

So let’s automate some more! But let’s check the outcomes, eh?

Does reliance on ChatGPT improve:

• the quality of applicants or candidates,
• the quality of hires,
• the quality of a job match for the job seeker?

Or are we just getting better and quicker at pushing a square peg into a round hole before anyone realizes the damage that may be caused?

ChatGPT: Everybody can do it

Then there’s the problem of needing to use a cheat-checker to avoid getting caught cheating. Though Jesse lauded ChatGPT for cranking out good cover letters, saving him work, “there was one additional step involved: running the letter through online A.I. scanners that have popped up to detect A.I.-generated writing to make sure it passed the test in case companies checked.”

The L.A. Times story cites other job seekers who report that “tapping ChatGPT to write their cover letters was a no-brainer…. ‘A bot reads them,’ they said, referring to cover letter and resume-scanning software that many employers use to filter out candidates. ‘I’ll get a bot to write them.’”

Everybody’s doing it.

Interview the glove!

Kind of sounds like a nuclear proliferation treaty will be needed before real information about workers and jobs disappears in a mind-numbing hall of machine-learning mirrors.

Players on all sides of the Employment System have adopted a virtual process that creates avatars or surrogates to conduct the business of matching workers and jobs. Maybe another analogy is more apt: the old complaint about “washing your hands with rubber gloves on.”

Just hire the ChatGPT

Of course, what’s wrong with hiring someone who used ChatGPT to produce their cover letter, if this new employee will use ChatGPT to do their job, too?

Play this out, though: Who needs this new employee? The hiring technology could also be used to do the job.

Well, at least a lot of people other than Noam Chomsky seem to think so.

(Does anyone see what I see? ChatGPT is just the next level of keyword matching that drives sincere job seekers mad as they lard their resumes and job applications with strings of letters they know the algorithm is searching for. While the new tool is certainly more powerful — it will lard your resume for you — is it actually any different?)

What does the use of ChatGPT tell us about how the employment system works? If employers are going to hire based on auto-written cover letters and resumes, what does that tell us about how they assess job applicants? And of course, what does it tell us about job seekers who use ChatGPT?

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