How To Geek On

One of the trends I’ve noticed in my clients’ job searches is the clustering of opportunities. It seems that when a client gets one interview, many times he gets a second shortly thereafter. He may have gone for months without a single interview and then he gets hit with several.

The same thing tends to happen with job offers. A client gets one offer and then within no time gets a second one. Job searches, it seems, follow a certain “streakiness”.

Decision-making during the job search is tough enough when faced with one offer. When a candidate has more than one offer in hand or one offer and the potential of another, what does he do? The situation is more complicated and it’s easy to get confused and paralyzed by the analysis of opportunities.

While working for a local technology company, I interviewed a candidate with several teammates. We’d just finished the interview and met to discuss the candidate and whether this person was going to be working with us. Several of my peers agreed, that they’d like to keep him in mind, but see what the next candidates were like.

This is pretty typical in interviewing, but in my opinion, is a flawed approach.

The candidate a company hires shouldn’t be in reference to the pool of candidates available. Period. A company that wants the best recruits should set a “high water” mark for what characteristics and skills a candidate should have and then seek to find and hire those candidates. If you find 5 candidates that meet that mark, then you try to take all five or take a few and develop a relationship with the others while waiting for more positions to open. If you have zero that meet that mark, you should take zero.

Certain companies clearly function this way. Bob Young and his company Lulu may be a good example.

I’ve heard several readers voice concerns (and displeasure) over what appears to be the same position available at Lulu for over a year. It’s a software engineering position. The description for it hasn’t changed in some time.

Maybe these critics are right. Maybe Lulu isn’t serious about hiring and that’s why they can’t find a candidate to fill the position.

Or maybe they’re very serious.

Maybe, they set a high-water mark. Maybe they know exactly the type of software engineer they’re looking to hire and will not settle for less. It could be that the job description that’s been posted and advertised over the last year has been filled and because they have a standard for software engineers, they’ve decided to use a uniform job description for all software engineering openings. Just because we see the same generic description, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s for the same opening.

I wouldn’t put something like this past a guy who figured out how to build a profitable business by selling free software (see Red Hat founder).

But I digress.

My team had interviewed a candidate and was deciding what to do next. They wanted to wait until they saw more candidates before deciding on this one. So, I asked the team, “if there were no other candidates, and we couldn’t find more to bring in, would you hire this person?”

The answer was a unanimous “no”.

Then why did we want to keep this one in mind while looking at others?

The same is true for professionals in transition. Why should you act any differently than a company that wants to hire the best person?

You have a high-water mark. Hopefully, you’ve written it down as a vision for your next great position. If you intend to be successful, you’ve written down the non-negotiable conditions under which you will take a position.

Suddenly decisions get easier.

It no longer matters how many offers you have on the table. You no longer have to compare them to each other. You compare them to the criteria you’ve set. If more than one qualify, consider your “nice to haves” and choose the one that fits.

If you have one offer and are expecting another, what difference does that make? There is only one offer on the table. Does it meet your criteria or not?

Judging each opportunity based on predefined criteria will help you in your decision-making process. If you’ve been honest with yourself in setting your criteria, there shouldn’t been any problem accepting or declining a position based on that criteria. You have to be satisfied with the position you choose. By writing down your criteria and matching one opportunity against it at a time, you have a much better chance of being satisfied with your choice. Otherwise, you’ll always be wondering about “greener pastures” and thinking in terms of the pool of opportunities available rather than whether the one you took met your predefined criteria.

As always, let me know if I can help! Keep your head up and keep working hard!