Passed over for promotion: Move-over-itis

On November 19, 2024
Passed over for promotion: Move-over-itis

Question

The Technical Director quit and my manager was promoted to that position. I was promised that there would be room for promotion when I was hired, however I was just passed over for promotion. Someone else in the department has been promoted to be my manager.

I like my former manager (now the Director) and I would like to continue to work for him, and not work for this other “peer” who is now my new boss. Do you have any suggestions on how to handle this? Should I be direct with the new Director and say that I want to report to him, hint around at it, or keep my mouth shut? Should I read between the lines and start looking for another job?

Nick’s Reply

passed over for promotionAh, you’ve got move-over-itis. That’s when you’re told to move over because someone else is getting what you want. There’s no easy answer to this one. There are too many factors that you might not know about, and even more that I don’t know about. But move over need not mean game over.

Let me try and give you some things to consider; then you’ll have to decide how to proceed.

Passed over for promotion

Either (a) you didn’t get the job because they don’t think you can handle it (one problem), or (b) your new manager is more qualified than you are (a different problem).

Let’s pursue (a) first. Regarding the management position:

  1. Do you understand the management work that needs to be done? Are you sure? Or, do your bosses have reason to suspect you don’t?
  2. Are you able to demonstrate that you can do the work? Think about both the day-to-day functions of the job as well as the more strategic requirements. In what ways have you demonstrated your management skills? (Don’t say they didn’t ask you; they never will. It’s up to you.)
  3. Could you do the work the way the company wants it done? This relates to style, attitude, work ethic, philosophy, and your willingness to “enlist” as a member of a team. Would you be a manager who fits, or one who doesn’t quite?
  4. Could you do the work profitably for the company? That is, what would your efforts as a manager bring to the bottom line? Yep, I’m looking for an actual figure. A good manager understands costs and profitability. Your estimate might be way off, but you’ve got to be able to show that you can come up with a figure you can defend. Have you thought about that job in such detail?
  5. Finally, would the job be good for you? Would it “profit” your career and your wallet? Not all technical people are management material; and not all managers are great staff members.

You might want to talk to your old boss confidentially, and ask why you were passed over. It’s a bit of a risk; but so is keeping your mouth shut, right?

Without being defensive (or upset) try to discuss each of the questions above. Listen to your former boss’s assessment. This could help you get into a better position for the next promotion opportunity.

Try again for a promotion?

Let’s go to (b). If the new manager is better at the work than you would be, the case is closed. But if you really want a management job down the road, a new case opens, and I think you really need to talk to the powers that be.

Don’t go crying sour grapes; it’s too late for that particular job. But it’s time to find out what they’re looking for in a manager. And it’s a good time to make it clear that you want management. You must be ready to justify yourself: use a business plan.

Again, your old boss could be your best ally if you approach him in a candid but professional way. It sounds like you have a good relationship with him. I’d bring it up over a casual lunch off-site. Don’t complain — learn. Let him be a dutch uncle. Ask for advice, not explanations. Then listen.

Move over yourself

Move-over-itis leaves you terribly itchy to do something. I get that. But you should consider your options carefully.

You’ve been passed over for promotion, so maybe you should move over. Your idea of seeking a job with your old manager may be a good solution. It could get you into a new domain with fresh responsibilities and with a new opportunity to demonstrate your value to the company. And, it may get you away from the new manager, whom you don’t seem to like working for. (Is that your competitive nature talking, or your disappointment, or is the manager really not worth working for?)

As you note, the final option is to start looking for another employer. In this case, I suggest you honestly assess what happened at this company. Don’t move on to a repeat experience.

All these questions, eh? I hope one or more of them lead you toward your goal (or toward a new goal).

What’s your experience with promotions? Have you ever been “bumped” by another employee who got the job instead? Is being passed over a good enough reason to move on? Is getting promoted a matter of “who you know” or is it about abilities?

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How do I find the hiring manager who needs me?

On November 12, 2024
How do I find the hiring manager who needs me?

Question

I’ve begun an intense job search, but now I’m keeping in mind your helpful hints, including from your books. I’ve found some online resources that have given me a great start at identifying companies in particular regions and industries that meet my requirements. I’ve also been able to find the names of principals in these companies. Now what? Any hints or suggestions as to methods to find that hiring manager within the organization that has those problems I’ll be able to solve?

I like to be prepared before I begin making the calls and “networking.” I don’t want to risk losing potential sources and contacts by saying the wrong things. You have indicated that the key to a successful search is to contact the person who you would work for within the organization, develop a presentation of how you can help and/or resolve particular issues, and of course make yourself available for hire. I’m sure many would like to read your helpful hints in this regard.

Nick’s Reply

hiring managerThe manager that needs to hire you is a manager whose problems you can solve, and whose work you can get done. You can’t accomplish this selection unless, of course, you know what those challenges are. And this is what dooms most “job searches,” because job seekers don’t do enough to really understand what a hiring manager needs. (It’s not in the job description.) Instead, they throw their resume at a job posting and wait for the manager, or, worse, for HR to figure it out. And most managers and most HR folks suck at figuring out whether you can do the job. (They’re too busy stirring the ATS and AI kool-aid.)

The only path to the right hiring manager is via people the manager works with.

That is, the right approach involves starting with people other than the manager. It helps to triangulate. In the course of gathering useful information about the organization, you will also start to learn who the key managers are and what they really need.

Circle around the hiring manager

  • Talk to people who know and work for managers who may be relevant to your job search.

These include employees, vendors, customers, consultants and a raft of others. This helps you establish a kind of network or organization chart. It also helps you develop the work topics you can discuss with the manager you ultimately define as your target. Conversations with people on a manager’s or job’s periphery will help you come up with these topics.

Identify issues and problems

  • Read industry journals to find out what are the key problems the entire industry is grappling with.

Then drill down: study articles in these journals and in the popular business press about the specific company. Every company has aches and pains. You cannot help if you don’t know the issues and problems a company is struggling with, but that’s how you get your foot in the door.

Get help, get names

  • Call the reporters who wrote the articles you read.

Ask them who they interviewed during their research. (For every page of an article, reporters typically have pages of research and interviews.) If you ask gently and politely, they may share their opinions of the industry and company, and about what particular issues and challenges the company faces. You can gather lots of useful info this way, while your competition approaches jobs blindly, grasping at job postings that tell them nothing useful.

Your goal is to get the names of people who work at the company, or who know the company and the hiring manager.

Ask for advice, not for a job

  • Call these people.

Explain that you are interested in their industry and in their company. Ask intelligent questions based on what you’ve read. Do not ask for a job or job lead.

Instead, ask them what advice they’d give someone who was considering working in their industry, and perhaps for their company.

As you follow up with the people whose names you’ve gathered, you will get closer to a particular hiring manager’s inner circle. When you’re talking to people who work for that manager, you’re getting the information you really need (and a possible introduction).

Get ready to talk with the hiring manager

It’s up to you to formulate an idea of what problems a company and a manager a facing. Then you must put together a simple plan that will enable you to show a manager how you can contribute to the bottom line. Please see Stand Out: How to be the profitable hire.

You know you have the right hiring manager when the two of you can discuss in detail and agree on what the manager needs from you, and when you demonstrate you can do it.

I hope this gets you going in the right direction. The point is to offer a company something they need, rather than to get in line and ask for a job. Your research on a company’s problems and challenges will lead you naturally to the right managers. But I think you’ve already got that idea. You’re ready to start trying some of these methods. Don’t worry about making a few mistakes. This takes practice.

Best wishes, and thanks for your kind words.

Are you successful at getting to the right hiring manager? How do you avoid obstacles?

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LinkedIn’s new AI hiring assistant is not a smart as Mark Cuban’s dog

On November 5, 2024
LinkedIn’s new AI hiring assistant is not a smart as Mark Cuban’s dog

Question

I’d love to hear your take on LinkedIn’s new AI (Artificial Intelligence) assistant for recruiting and hiring.

Nick’s Reply

AI HiringThey call it Artificial for a reason.

And I’ll let Mark Cuban back me up. Asked in a Wired interview about how AI is being used in screening job applicants and changing hiring, Cuban responded, “I think smart puppies are smarter than AI is today or in the near future…and I don’t think that’s going to change for a long time.” Pressed about how long, he said, “Ten years. Because wisdom doesn’t come with text.”

It seems Cuban heard the pitch about AI in human resources (HR), steepled his fingers and said, “I’m out.” If you want a blow-by-blow account of why AI in HR is a scandal that corporate America is carefully ignoring, read investigative journalist Hilke Schellmann’s stunning book, The Algorithm: How AI decides who gets hired, monitored, promoted and fired and why we need to fight back now.

GitHub eats LinkedIn’s breakfast

AI in the service of HR is so pitifully impotent that multi-million-dollar systems to automate recruiting and hiring are easily neutered by free code any job seeker can find on Microsoft’s Github.

Jason Koebler, cofounder of 404 Media, reports that, using Auto_Jobs_Applier_AIHawk he “applied for 17 jobs in an hour on LinkedIn.” Chewing automatically through one job posting after another while Koebler eats his breakfast, AIHawk enters his biographical information and creates custom resumes and cover letters for 2,843 jobs and submits them.

LinkedIn’s AI Hiring Assistant: It’s all in the family

There’s no need to agonize over how to engage the uber-automation of recruiting that drives job seekers to depression and despair. Koebler reports that AIHawk “is actively being used by thousands of people to use AI to automatically apply for jobs on LinkedIn at scale.”

This by itself is all you should need to know to avoid any kind of AI-based recruiting campaign on LinkedIn (or anywhere else) no matter what the company or job is. Code jockeys smarter than you have already exploited the AI’s pathetically fatal weaknesses.

Microsoft, which owns both LinkedIn and GitHub, just announced it has entered the AI agent race with LinkedIn Hiring Assistant — thereby pitting two of its businesses against one another. It’s “all in the family.”

My take is, Microsoft is promoting mutually assured destruction by triggering a ludicrous and very costly escalation of “HR technology” that, as Mark Cuban puts it, isn’t the equal of a smart puppy. For a few years, HR had the upper hand. It deployed the equivalent of an AI dog with a note in its mouth to “recruit.”

But once the code jockeys that live on GitHub figured it out, they sent their own dog with a note in its mouth to meet HR.

“A growing AI battle”: One HR consultant’s fantasy

Josh Bersin, a long-time apologist for HR’s shameless misapplications of technology to “people management,” gleefully eggs on the AI robo-dogs while they tear each other into millions of little digital pieces:

“There is now a growing AI battle between recruiter and candidates. As AI helps recruiters source and screen candidates, the candidates are using AI to ‘power-up’ their resumes. One of our clients told me that almost all their job applicants now submit resumes that look eerily similar to job descriptions. Why? Job candidates are using AI also!

“This means is that tools like LinkedIn Hiring Assistant are more essential than ever. As job seekers tweak their identity and even use AI interview assessments to game interviews, HR has to beef up its tools to better differentiate candidates.”

Translation:

Guys like Bersin make more money when HR and job seekers are encouraged to throw bigger and bigger digital dogs into a fray that no one wins except HR tech firms and HR consultants. (See New Recruiting: Let’s just hire ChatGPT)

Do we really need Mark Cuban to explain that his puppy is smarter than HR’s AI — and will be for at least another 10 years? Does HR really need pundits like Bersin to egg them on to keep spending billions on AI that is, well, Artificial?

Mark Cuban’s puppy

So, what do I think of LinkedIn’s AI Hiring Assistant? I think it’s just more BLAH BLAH BLAH. You’re better off being interviewed by Cuban’s dog.

Corporate boards of directors would do well to take a look at what HR is blowing their company’s money on. If that billion-dollar HR technology worked, code jockeys on GitHub wouldn’t be nuking it in their spare time. It doesn’t help to tell HR and job seekers that they each need to “beef up” their “AI tools” so they can really fake each other out.

Some advice to job seekers: While it may seem cool to “beat the AI” with more AI, consider that this AI war does nothing to get you the insider’s edge on getting hired for the right job at the right company. The notes in those robo-dogs’ mouths are…blank. Go around the barking dogs and learn to talk shop with people who do the work you want to do at the companies where you want to do it. That’s where jobs come from.

Advice to employers: Learn to recruit. That means get off your duff and go out to meet the people that make your industry go ‘round. That’s where talent comes from.

The Intelligence in LinkedIn’s AI Hiring Assistant is Artificial, so can we just make things simple and call it what it is — LinkedIn’s Stupid Hiring Assistant? The only real intelligence I see in this cockup is Mark Cuban’s puppy.

What’s your experience been with AI in your job search? Have you tried AI tools for job seekers? Is your puppy smarter than LinkedIn?

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