Whether your career transition takes the form of a passive job search or an active job hunt, there are 3 major factors involved in your success.
- Your Skills
- Your Charisma
- Your Connections
Anyone who has a high degree of two of these can take advantage of opportunities. If you have all three, you’ll create opportunities for yourself.
Skills
As technical people, it’s easy for us to think of hiring and taking advantage of career opportunities as a purely technical exercise. The person with the best technical understanding and background should be the most rewarded, right? After all, who better to define the focus and direction of a project (or company) than the one with the deepest understanding of the technology the company sells?
Some companies work this way. They reward highly technical people by moving them up the chain of command. Maybe that’s why some of them have been so successful.
Of course, there are tens of thousands of other companies that have failed using this same philosophy.
How many times have you or someone you know been turned down for a job where the individual met or exceeded the technical qualifications for the position?
If matching technical skills to job descriptions were all that mattered in hiring, wouldn’t the top companies have realized this and employed an automated system to hire people? It wouldn’t be that difficult, right?
- Scan the resume for keywords in the job description
- An algorithm in addition to user input determines winning resumes
- All resumes with salary requirements outside the defined range are rejected
- A tech test is sent to each candidate
- Tech test is received by automated system and graded
- In the event of a tie, repeat 4-6 with more difficult test until winner emerges
- Send offer letter to candidate with deadline
- If deadline is exceeded or candidate attempts to negotiate, repeal offer and send to next best candidate, repeat 7-8 until offer accepted.
- Notify hiring manager
Perfect. Done. We all like this right? Think of how much time and money this will save the company and how qualified our candidates will be! This sounds like a recipe for great products, doesn’t it? Now that I think of it, maybe performance reviews could work this way too.
No? Why not?
There’s something more to the code we produce other than whether it returns the correct output for given inputs? There’s more to the jobs we do than our technical ability?
Isn’t it interesting that great companies like Google have an extensive interviewing process that focuses as much on technical skills as it does on the behavioral aspects of the individual?
Charisma
Why do we recommend certain people for jobs and not others?
A friend of mine once told me that the single greatest compliment he could receive from a coworker is “I’d like to work with him again.”
If you had two individuals, with the following traits, which would you hire?
- Person A: Architect level, outputs awesome code and solves business problems with the wave of a hand. Always meets or exceeds goals. Shows up late for meetings, works 30 hours a week, dismissive of other’s ideas, inappropriate, disrespectful of others, never makes a mistake.
- Person B: Slightly above average developer, accomplishes most goals, works hard, funny, easy to be around, respectful of others, answers your questions, makes mistakes but cops to them.
I’d hire Person B every time. While anyone would like to have great code written quickly, Person A is going to destroy the team dynamic and any harmony it ever had in record time.
There is no machine to figure this out. Any algorithm for determining it still depends on subjective and qualitative input.
Notice how little the technical aspects matter when faced with such a discrepancy in character?
Clearly, charisma or rather, interpersonal behavior and character matters. To what degree it matters in creating a successful company is another exercise.
Connections
I think technical (and creative) people want to believe that “who you know” doesn’t matter if you’re good at what you do.
I have a friend who’s placed at multiple companies in the last two years. None of her searches lasted for more than a few weeks. Each of the companies at which she placed, she knew an influential person and had previous (positive) experience with that person.
Ask people you know how they’ve landed their jobs. Ask if they knew someone there. 80% of the people that placed recently knew someone at the new company or were referred by someone they knew.
Pete Carroll’s coaching staff at Seattle knows this. USC’s former coach is taking several of his assistants with him to the NFL’s Seahawks. In music, look at where guitarists Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck came from (The Yardbirds). In American politics, Taft was virtually tapped by Teddy Roosevelt to be the next President. Connections matter in these fields.
Technology and business is the same. How often does the new CEO bring people he/she doesn’t know in as an executive team? Most of the time leaders of any level want to hire a known commodity. They have to interview other people, but they tend to hire people they know, especially for their initial hires. Once they’ve established they’ll surround themselves with good people and their reputation becomes established they’ll take a few chances.
Most people who place quickly tell me that their job search started at their last position, when they worked diligently to make connections with the people around them.
Connections matter.
At How to Geek On, we can’t learn new skills for you, but we can help you learn how to build your network and identify issues related to your career transition. We can work together through resume consulting, mock interviews, and coaching. Shoot us a note when you’re ready to study the other aspects of your career transition!
