The 5 most obvious mistakes made in job interviews

Last month we focused on resumes and the importance of building effective written introductions to your experience and skill set.

This month, across our various channels, we’re going to be talking about the importance of interviews, the most regularly made mistakes and the potential that a well structured interview offers for both sides of the table.

During my years in recruiting, HR and marketing in the staffing industry, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. I’ve always considered it to be the most important hour of the hiring process; while resumes can misrepresent things and offers can be accepted or declined – It is the first meeting, between the two people who could end up working together that will get to the heart of the real potential and pave the way for future employment.  

As a starting point for this month’s discussions, I’m offering the first of the five biggest mistakes made by interviewers and candidates, with advice from all three perspectives.

Mistake #1 - The First Impression Trap

The evidence suggests that human beings give far too much credence to the immediate emotional responses triggered in meeting someone. The legendary ‘first impression.’ We make a basic decision about whether we like someone or not almost immediately; while this reaction can be reversed, we often begin to act upon it in a way that makes a reversal less likely. If you want the science, read about the amygdala hijack and the role of the neo cortex. For our purposes it’s best to accept the brain's physical and chemical reactions and focus on what happens next.

For Interviewers:

Here’s the crux – studies suggest that if you like someone you ask them easier questions and their easier answers reinforce your positive perception. If you take an instant dislike to someone, you tend to ask tougher questions and use their relative difficulty in answering them to solidify your negative impression.

Awareness of the problem will help. You should make a conscious effort not to allow your emotional response to guide you, at least in question setting.  A consistent set of questions fixed in advance will help you stay on track. You should also keep a clear thought in your head throughout the process. ‘I owe this person the whole of the time I have allotted to create an impression on me.’ They might come back strong – you must give them the chance to do that if you want to get the most from the process. It’s your time, don’t waste it going through the motions after a rushed decision, when you could be constantly resetting your impression and allowing for something to surprise you and change the game.

For Candidates:

You should assume that the vast majority of interviewers will be oblivious to the dangers of their immediate conclusions. You should put every effort into making a strong first impression.

When I was a young recruiter in London, we used a system called magic wand – a set of instructions for candidates that we believed would statistically increase their chances of getting hired. This is nothing to do with dressing appropriately, or shaking hands with eye contact or anything else any applicant for any job should take for granted. These are slightly less obvious tips.

Don’t settle down in reception.

If you do your immediate first impression will be of someone trying to clamber out of a sofa and reach for your bag. If you’re on your feet, bag in hand, you look prepared and ready for action, you will meet your interviewer face to face.

Have small talk prepared.

A lot of key time can be spent between the elevator and the interview room. The days of secretaries doing all the work are long behind us. If you come to interview with me, it’s going to be me who meets you in reception; this is true of hiring managers and executives all over the US., particularly on engineering jobs, where an all hands on deck mentality prevails.

Compliment something

Positive remarks about the building / area or anything else are a good, simple way to make a first impression. Keep it realistic, if the building is shabby and in a terrible area, you’re unlikely to get away with – ‘Wow, this is such a nice building.’ But if you can, you should. Any kind of positive comment on their working environment will contribute to first impressions. “How’s that little Italian restaurant on the corner? It looks great.”

Say Yes.

Just say yes to things. If you’re offered water, say yes – even if you don’t want it. Saying yes to things creates a positive atmosphere. A glass of water also provides that vital extra three seconds of thinking time before you answer a question. You can’t just sit there staring into space for a moment while you gather your thoughts, but you can take a nice slow sip on a glass of water without anybody noticing the break.

There are more of these, but these are the ones that affect first impressions. The more of these things you do, the more likely you are to get that good start, and if you do, you could find the questions getting easier as your interviewer starts to work with you.

For Recruiters, who are sending candidates for Interviews, you would do well to acquaint yourself with these tools so you can pass them on. Preparing your candidate properly for their interview is a vital part of the agent’s role. A good agent gives both their customers the best chance of success. It’s in everyone’s interests that the interview be productive and that the right candidate doesn’t lose out on an opportunity they were a god match for because of poor interview technique.

When we talk about best fit talent, this is what we mean. The engineering recruiter’s job isn’t to find the world’s greatest professional, it’s to find the best person to fit the job that’s on offer. Part of this endeavour includes getting them through the physical process of hiring and helping them to shine. If you’re just sending your candidates to interviews with a date and time, you’re not doing enough for them or your client. You should focus most of your attention during the recruiting process on the interview.

Interviews are where jobs are won and lost, roles are filled or left unfilled and recruiter targets are hit or missed. Whatever your role in the process, you’re not alone. Everyone wants this interview to end in a successful hire, make sure you’re doing your part to make that happen. Don’t lose a perfectly good hire in the First Impression trap.

Next Week - Part Two  – More Interview Mistakes

Look for live engineering jobs on Talascend.com 

Some questions for comments: What are the most common mistakes you’ve seen? How do you think people can make interviews easier on themselves and others?

Richard Spragg writes about engineering and construction jobs, and business advice in staffing and recruitment

Your career is an accident. Don't make a plan, get a helmet.

We are driving our careers. That’s what we are told. We are sitting behind the wheel, looking at the road ahead, changing gear when we want to, making decisions about how fast we want to go and ultimately which direction we take. Mirror. Signal. Maneuver.

It’s a comforting metaphor. It’s a pity it’s bull.

So often, the mistake we make as professionals is to look back on our career path and see a logical progression. It’s easy to do this when you look back on things in retrospect. It’s easy to believe that this led to that, which led to the other and so on.

But this is all post hoc ergo procter hoc. Seeing a thing as the result of something else, simply because one followed the other.

Let’s call me John Q. I was working as an assistant manager at Circuit City from 2005-2007. I was made the manager in 2007 and held the position for two years before moving to join Best Buy as the regional sales manager. Obviously I’ve done well for myself; my career shows a clear progression. A consistent, linear progression from junior to senior, from low wage to middle management.

Well done me.

I’m leaving some things out of the story though, things that have been edited out of my career history. These were random catalytic events that shaped the whole thing. Because they’re not on my resume, they’re not part of the accepted narrative of my career – but they change everything.

Firstly, I became assistant manager at Circuit City almost against my will. I was young and ideological. I’d only taken the gig so I could get the rent paid while I was trying to get a job in music. I reluctantly accepted the extra responsibility for an extra five bucks an hour. It wasn’t a career decision. Nor was it a career decision a couple of years later, when the manager I worked for suffered a heart attack and retired early, effectively disappearing in a puff of smoke on a Tuesday morning leaving me to take over. I took the job and I did it well, I expected to retain the management job for a few more years. But then, as we all know only too well, Circuit City went to the wall. Suddenly facing the prospect of redundancy, I was forced to put myself out there again, talk to a recruitment company and put my resume online. The result was a great offer from rival Best Buy, to effectively take the level above the one I was working in. I wound up with 20% more money and some stock. It turned out to be a great thing for me. ‘Turned out.’

Now my sensible linear career progression looks like what it really was – a series of random and uncontrollable events that bounced me around with no care for my plans.

Because the truth is that there is no such thing as career management. There is no such thing as ‘planning your career.’ From the time you first walked into the career councilor’s office at school and were told you should be a chef because you admitted to being slightly hungry, through to this morning when you surfed the internet for jobs for ten minutes because one of your colleagues annoyed you. Your vague intent to push your career in the right direction combined with your occasional decision to act when you were unhappy or undervalued, do not constitute a career plan.

Your list of companies you would most like to work for and your sense of what job title you probably ought to have, and in what time frame, are worth nothing to you.

We spend too much time trying to shape our careers and not enough time trying to create the rounded professional identity that will increase our chances of making progress when the inevitable random catalyst presents itself.

Instead of sucking up to your boss, make an effort to be respected by everyone around you. When her kayaking vacation down the Nile ends in tragedy, it will be your peers and reports who are asked what they think of you as a manager, not her.

Instead of surfing for jobs and blasting out your resume, build a strong relationship with a good recruiter. They can be your eyes and ears while you focus on your job.

Instead of chasing the money, chase responsibility. The more you take on, the more qualified you become for more advanced jobs and ultimately more money. Especially if nobody sees the vacancy coming.

You can’t know what will happen, and you can’t control when or where fate will strike. But you can create a solid foundation that will see you right no matter what happens.

Strategy is not about predicting the future, it’s about having a sensible framework around you so that you can respond to anything. Experiences, references, training, qualifications – there’s a reason these things tend to be headings on the resume – it’s because they’re things you actually need. Take these things off the resume, and think of them as real things that you arm yourself with to create a promotable, hirable human being, it won’t be long before you’re adding another level of advancement – whatever it is you want.

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.

A very tough question for the future of 'work'.

Picture the scene. It’s Monday morning, about 8.20am and I’m sitting having a latte in Starbucks.  iPad in hand, I’m surfing for news that might make a good blog topic. I’ve got LinkedIn open as usual, and I’m looking to see what messages I have back about last week’s blog;  I reply to a couple of people with suggestions.

An old friend contacts me with a LinkedIn e-mail to ask if I’ve got any work for him at the moment. I tell him maybe, and  I’ll keep in touch. We swap another message asking about wives, children and football season. I start thinking about how I might be able to use him – good guy and we’re very busy. I make a note to fire an e-mail to the COO later.

10.00pm at the hotel desk. Working? Relaxing? Who knows any more?

I answer an incoming Outlook invitation for a meeting tomorrow lunchtime, and I approve an expense claim for one of my staff.

Then I’m back to reading the news on Google. Opportunities for Automotive jobs in Michigan are on the rise; salaries are also rising. We have significant interests in the Detroit engineering jobs market, so I’m thinking we might see some growth out there soon. Could be a blog topic, but maybe a bit dry. Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) is calling people who work at home ‘skivers’, the British slang for slacking off. That’s interesting, but reading the whole article I’m amused to find that my friend Dave who runs a part time recruiting firm in London has beaten me to it. He’s quoted in the article. Good for him I think, and I open up Facebook to send him a message saying well done. While I’m there I look at some wall posts and like a picture of my friend at the Zoo.

That’s when I decide what this week’s blog topic will be. It’s 8.45am now and I usually head into the office about this time. I drain my coffee, exchange pleasantries for a couple of minutes with Chris behind the counter (he has a new daughter and looks exhausted), I tell him he should try coffee, and I head out the door.

My question to you is simply this… from 8.20am to 8.50am this morning… was I working?

The traditional view prevalent in everyone from the baby boomers to the upper end of Generation X would be absolutely not. I’m not in the office; I’m not focusing; I’ve chatted to two of my friends online and one more in person about wholly unrelated things. I’m in a coffee shop for heaven’s sake. I simply am not at my desk, at my computer ‘working’. No deadlines have been met. No money has been made.

Not so, cry Generation Y. Many of them would argue the opposite. An important part of my job is to coordinate our social media activities, to engage the tens of thousands of people who read our blogs and to have interesting things to say. I have that covered now.  It’s also my job to staff the department here and I’ve uncovered an opportunity to maybe bring someone on board who can help. I’ve networked with a friend in the industry – and that has certainly yielded a return on investment before. I’ve been immediately accessible to my colleagues in accepting the Outlook invitation and I’ve actioned the expense approval with no delays. How could you possibly describe this as anything other than working. When I was at the bar yesterday afternoon watching the ballgame with a cold beer and my phone off – then I wasn’t working. This morning I was working. Clear as day.

Was I working but allowing myself to be distracted? Maybe, but even the social distractions had professional aspects.

Even now, in describing it, I’m personally not sure. I don’t usually start work until about 9.00am, so I could argue that all of this was done while I technically wasn’t being paid. But I have the standard working hours of a senior level person in any business, i.e. comfortably over the 40 hour week I get paid for, with weekends and late sessions a weekly occurrence, but without the daily oversight that cares where I am hour to hour. 

I may not be working when I ‘like’ my friend’s holiday snaps. But I wasn’t ‘not working’ on Sunday when I left dinner, under icy glares from my wife, to reply to a colleague’s urgent e-mail.

The modern workplace has no edges. Technology, social conventions, international time zones and professional diligence have taken the idea of a quantifiable working week and thrown it out the window. Generation Y are highly aware of this. How will anybody manage expectation in this environment?

With no means to measure (or even really understand) ‘input’ any more (working hours, time in the office etc..) we have to shift to judging performance on the achievement of measurable goals.

What we deliver matters far more than the manner in which we choose to deliver it. That’s why entrepreneurs don’t have working hours. Nobody asks a spin doctor how many hours they put into their candidate’s campaign. Nobody asks the head coach of the Houston Texans how many hours he works every week. Did the candidate win? Did the team make the playoffs?

It’s time to finally usher in the output era. It will be tough for a lot of business leaders to let go of the old fashioned management devices. But let go they must. The world belongs increasingly to Generation Y. Those of us who are longer of tooth need to have the humility to realize what this will mean to the way we work and the wisdom to see what the benefits for us could be.


Views expressed are those of the individual and not Talascend LLC. 

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

Are you killing Linkedin?

For me, LinkedIn is becoming less effective as a networking tool every day.

I've loved LinkedIn for years. I was a ground floor user and a big exponent of the idea. But now I have a major issue. Stop me if you’ve experienced this hypothetical situation before.  I see a contact to whom I’d really like an introduction, and I notice that one of my connections – someone I used to work with – is connected to them. Great I think. I can get an introduction, I think. So I contact my friend and I say ‘Hey, can you introduce me to Jane Smith at ABC Ltd? I’d really like to pitch something to her.’

My friend sounds blank at the end of the phone and says ‘Who’s that?’

LinkedIn is a networking tool. That’s the central idea. So I’m forced to ask – what use is a network where nobody knows anyone?

The race to 500+ connections, seen by some people as important to their LinkedIn status has created a culture of accepting people we barely know, met briefly or don’t know at all.

If you’re not able to sustain a functional acquaintance with someone – and acquaintance is fine, they don’t need to have walked you down the aisle, or sold a start-up with you – then you should expunge them from your network.

It’s time to see LinkedIn the same way that most of us see Facebook. Who really wants the latest update from that person you met at that party two years ago who you never spoke to afterwards? Remove Friend; because only a fool would sacrifice the functionality of Facebook because they wanted to be seen to have more friends. So why do we not take the same approach on LinkedIn? Are we really so desperate to seem well connected in theory that we’re prepared to compromise the usefulness of a tool that could lead to us being well connected in practice?

There’s a guy called Adrian Dunbar who’s a professor of Anthropology at Oxford University - which probably makes him smarter than me - who says that the human brain can only constructively sustain 150 relationships, whether it’s online or offline. Just 150. Personally I don’t know how anyone can handle even that many, but when I think about it, I guess it’s feasible. If I add up all my family and the people I still talk to and keep up with, even if infrequently, I can get to that number.

I cannot get to 965.

Nor can you. If you have 965 LinkedIn connections you are surely wasting your time. And if I contact you to try to network with you, you’ll be wasting my time too, because there’s now a one in eight chance that you’re going to know the person I’m calling you about. How does that make us all look? Smart? Well connected? Or, as my friends working engineering jobs in Houston say, dumber than a bag of wet mice?

Clear out your LinkedIn profile. Get down below that 500 number to something you can realistically use. Imagine a LinkedIn timeline that wasn’t full to the brim of trash you didn’t care about. Imagine if it was only updates from people whose business interests interested you. Think of the interesting calls you could make. Think of the networking you could do and the introductions you could affect. That’s not social networking, that’s networking and the more of that you do, the better you'll be at your job and the more money you’ll make.



Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and skilled labor jobs. For more details about Talascend and engineering staffing, visit our website. 

Skilled labor jobs, and the other greatest myths of Olympic economics

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong it seems. In fact, as far as long term economic benefits go, the Olympics are a game not worth playing. Here are the five myths that most need debunking when it comes to lighting that eternal flame. 

1.      You’ll make the money back in tourism during the games

No you won’t. Mostly the tourists are coming anyway. They will simply change the timing of their visit to coincide with the games. Mable and Homer Tourbender from Rhode Island are going to go to London to see Buckingham Palace and meet Mary Poppins anyway. Now they’re going to do it while the games are on. They’re not going to make two visits. They were always going to make one visit. The net result – zero. What's more, the vast majority of attendees are your own locals, taking advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime. 

2.      OK, you’ll make the money back over the next few years in tourists

Been to a lot of professional synchronized swimming?
Photo: Tatiana Morozova / Shutterstock.com

Sounds logical. Trouble is it turns out there’s a huge amount of empirical evidence that points to the contrary. Studies of twin cities (cities nearby that are comparable to the host city in every respect other than hosting the games) suggest that the host city enjoys no greater increase in any trend afterwards.  Melbourne faired no worse than Sydney; Charlotte faired no worse than Atlanta. The only difference was the enormous bill that the twin city never had to pay.

3.      Local expenditure means local economic benefits

Yes OK, but beware the assumption that all the money spent locally is actually local. So you bought a product made in China and owned by a company head quartered in New York. How much is that really benefitting Atlanta? It’s not the $40 value of the sweatshirt, it’s the relatively small margin the shopkeeper is making. This applies to everything.

4.      You get all the new infrastructure to use in the future – that’s good right?

It is if you use it, yes. But exactly how valuable are the additional sporting facilities that you’re building?  Given that – rather obviously in all fairness – you didn’t need any of them enough to build them before you became an Olympic city, why will you need them afterward? Please see the Birds Nest in China (the birds have flown) or the many venues in Athens (that will soon resemble the Parthenon.)

There are sporting arguments that these facilities foster the future of non-central sports. For example, there are those who attribute the success of Britain’s gold medal (and Tour de France) winning cycling team to the development of major cycling facilities in Manchester ahead of the hosting of the Commonwealth games there in 2002. A case of ‘build it, they will come’? Maybe so, but just because there’s a sporting benefit, doesn’t mean there’s an economic one. All those sporting clubs and hopeful kids that spring up around your new velodrome aren’t paying you for it, and the cluster of people who come to watch aren’t filling the stadium for £100 a time once a week, which is what you need if you’re going to pay for it.   

5.      It creates a lot of skilled labor jobs during the infrastructure process

This, as you might expect, is my favorite one. You create  skilled labor jobs during the infrastructure process. And skilled labor jobs – mostly engineering jobs – don’t create jobs for the unemployed. They create new job options for those already employed. If you’re going to build a velodrome you need experienced welders, mechanics and design engineers. All of these guys are already working. What you’re actually doing is affecting local projects that were employing these people by encouraging them to leave those engineering jobs to join the higher profile Olympic jobs. As for the temporary Olympic jobs – security or administration at the games – they’ll all be gone as soon as the athletes are.

So here’s the bottom line. If you’re going to bid for the games, make sure you lose. There’s reasonable evidence to suggest that those who put out convincing $100m bids for the games actually get much better value for their money. They get the exposure of being associated with the Olympic brand, but they don’t actually have to build a planet sized swimming facility, which turns out to have all the long term value of… well, of a velodrome. 

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and skilled labor jobs

The 5 worst pieces of advice given by resume ‘experts’.

Every week I’m reading more and more dubious advice from various sources about what you should and shouldn’t put in a resume. Most of it is well meaning, and there’s a point to be taken at the heart of it, but it’s still fundamentally bad advice. I’ve pulled out the five most common examples and explained exactly why I beg to differ.

1. Don’t exceed one page

Keep your resume concise and to the point. Never mind the length. If you need three well laid out pages to properly account for your achievements, take three pages. All each page has to do is make a prospective employer want to read the next page. Hiring companies, recruiters and HR people are usually very busy and often have a lot of resumes to read, but this doesn’t mean they will throw out a four page resume. They are perfectly capable of scanning it and putting it in the ‘interesting’ pile if they see what they’re looking for. The phrase ‘Two pages? I can’t read two pages’ has never been uttered by anybody responsible for recruiting. The phrase ‘Is that it?’ is used frequently.

2. Don’t include hobbies

This is terrible advice. Once again the baby goes out with the bathwater. Hobbies say something about you personally, they are excellent conversation starters and they give your interviewer an opportunity to immediately put you at ease and to make a basic connection. During that ten seconds of elevator silence (the death knoll for a good interview), how easy is it for the person you’re meeting to say ‘So I see you’re a horse rider?’ Give them that opportunity. Hobbies are also a way to say something without boasting. Imagine reading the phrase ‘Ran two marathons last year for the local children’s’ hospital.’ This is saying a lot about the person who wrote it (well they’re not going to be lazy and uncaring are they?) No, hobbies do not belong at the top of your front page. No, you should not go into detail. No, you should not put anything on there that isn’t making a clear, positive statement. Focus on the productive and impressive things you do in your spare time. If you don’t have anything like this to put on your resume – maybe you have bigger problems than finding a job.

3. Don’t include References

Really? Once again they are encouraging you to miss an opportunity here. Including the name and number of the person you worked for in your last three jobs makes a very clear statement: I am confident in the fact that the people I’ve worked for will give me a positive reference. You’re asking the reader to be the next person on this list, don’t you think it would be encouraging for them to see that their predecessors were happy with you? If you have to skip a bad boss, or name their more helpful colleague – that’s fine. You’re offering something up before it’s asked for. It’s a bold statement about transparency. At the end of the day, restrictive HR policies at work inside most companies mean that nobody is going to call the contacts you supply for references, and nobody is going to provide one if they do. Dates of work will be passed from one HR department to another. The days of ‘So, what was she like?’ are long gone.

4. Everybody lies on a resume; it’s fine.

No it isn’t.

If you get caught in a small lie, the assumption will be that nothing on your resume can be trusted, and it will become scrap paper. The only thing a dishonest resume will get you is a job you’re not qualified for. You weren’t the top sales person. You don’t speak French. Your golf handicap is 27, not 7. It doesn’t matter? Tell that to the CEO when he needs you to play golf with him and a prospective French client. Getting a job is not the end, it’s the beginning. Your sins can find you out at any time. You should always put a positive spin on things, go ahead and polish up your Kia Sorento so it looks good – but don’t call it a Ferrari. At the end of the day, a resume is designed to get you job interviews, but it doesn’t disappear once the job is yours.  

5. Don’t do anything too original. Keep it simple.

People hate originality right? Boring is good. When you’re reading 100 resumes a day, heavens forbid anyone should put something in the inbox that stands out.

It’s 2012. There are fantastic tools out there; there is no shame in showing that you understand how to use a couple of them. No, you don’t want your resume looking like the menu from a suburban TexMex restaurant, but as with so many of these pieces of advice, there is a great deal of distance between the advice you’re being given and the mistake it’s trying to steer you away from. In this case, there’s a lot of room between an over designed, unprofessional mess and a dull black and white resume. Strike a balance; show some kind of creativity. Research has shown that recruiters spend more time on resumes that are more than flat text.

So if you’re looking for work, pull out your resume and run it through a few quick checks. This is your chance to stand out, so don’t blow it based on antiquated advice that’s been rumbling around since the dark ages. You are a fully rounded, three dimensional human being. If one page of flat text 12pt Times New Roman, with no personal elements and no creativity can communicate the real you, it might be more than career advice you need, and you’ll have to go somewhere else for that, I’m just a recruiter.




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

The silent career killer - are you affected?

It’s not easy. For most of us, work is where we spend the majority of our waking hours. The people we share our cubicles and offices with begin, over time, to blur our understanding of the lines between colleagues and friends. In this environment, a silent killer has emerged.

Most of the lines we know not to cross are clear. Everyone with a brain in their head knows that there is no role in the workplace for sex, violence, religious proselytizing or racial language. These we simply recognize as universally accepted conventions of modern life.

In one of life’s minor ironies, what ‘political correctness’ fails to address is the only thing we could really use some clarity on – to what extent is it correct to be political?

Is bringing political views into the workplace, including visible support for causes of all kinds, acceptable? Or is it no better than bringing in pornography or handing out copies of the Book of Mormon? Both of these can be defended with first amendment arguments.

LeBron James and the Miami Heat in hoodies last Thursday

Emotive issues can arise overnight and garner widespread public support. Trayvon Martin’s shooting in Florida a month ago has drawn substantial attention across the United States . The symbol of the growing awareness movement is a hoodie, worn with the hood up. In Atlanta on Sunday, Pastor Raphael Warncock preached in a hoodie to a congregation clad in hoodies. LeBron James and the Miami Heat appeared in a team photo on Thursday, all hooded. But does this mean you can or should wear a hoodie to work? 

Where does politics sit on the spectrum of acceptable workplace behavior? Should you support or highlight any political cause in a professional environment? What are the benefits of supporting a cause at work?

The answers are: Nowhere, No and None.

The best advice anyone who works in the field of employment can give you is that you leave your politics at home. At the end of the day, the philosophical arguments around your right to express your views are far less relevant than the practical considerations that make these expressions extremely unwise. Here are six reasons to keep your job and career politics free.

It’s not what you’re there for

Above all other things, there is an overriding principal that cannot be ignored. Our behavior at work must be governed by the fact that someone is paying us to be here, and probably not to have political conversations, or inspire others to have them.

Even if we’re not ethically required to keep our personal opinions away from the work place, we are obliged to limit our activities to those for which we take the pay check.

It is far more likely to do you harm than good

People are offended far more easily than they are impressed. For example, on your way in to work tomorrow morning when you pass the front desk security person, at whom you normally smile politely, wave boisterously and call out ‘Hi John! How are you doing?’ Then tomorrow morning, at exactly the same moment, shout an expletive at him. A year from now, ask him which one he remembers.  When you offend someone, knowingly or unknowingly, it lingers. One positive interaction with you does not cancel out one negative one. It’s called politics for a reason: it divides people. However safe your issue, someone somewhere will be offended. How will that affect their professional interactions with you?

You don’t know what you don’t know.

Politics has filled more cardboard boxes
than many people realize. 

A colleague of mine who often wore an NRA baseball cap on dress down Fridays couldn’t understand why I thought it was a bad idea for him to wear it to work. ‘When people ask about it, I tell them it’s a civil liberties issue,’ he said. He went on to explain that this instantly put them at ease that he wasn’t some nutcase stock piling weapons in his garage to unload at the ethnic minority of his choice. Problem solved as far as he was concerned. ‘What about the people who don’t ask?’ I said. Blank stare. What he had failed to take into account was that not everyone who raised an eyebrow, or more, gave him the opportunity to express his view. All around the workplace were people who had made their judgments already, without any thought of giving him the opportunity to put his views in context. You may well start some interesting conversations, but it’s the conversations you won’t get to have that could hurt you most.   

It’s not scalable.

Plugging your cause, whether it’s political or charitable simply isn’t realistic if everyone does it. Seven hundred people with one cause a year means two causes every day. You’ve just destroyed the business you work for.

Who died and made you emperor?

What matters to us almost certainly doesn’t matter nearly as much to others and we should have the humility to realize this. Who made you the office’s moral guardian? You can’t choose your colleagues and they didn’t choose you, they certainly didn’t elect you to tell them what they should care about. You have no mandate.

What if the story changes?

Attaching yourself to an uninvestigated cause could lead you to look foolish later when a different narrative emerges. Your ‘John Smith is innocent’ t-shirt will get you the most attention when John Smith pleads guilty to ten murders. If you jump on the bandwagon, you may fall off. Your fortunes in the perception of your colleagues will rise and fall with whoever you’re supporting. (How’s that John Edwards for President poster in your office looking now?)

Stay focused on what you’re at work to accomplish. It’s not a question of ethics, or your rights – it’s a simple practical thing.

Whatever your professional aspirations – career progression, promotion, more contracts, more money, freedom and flexibility – espousing your political views will not help you achieve them.




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.

Planning a spectacular resignation? Be prepared to live with it.

The internet has a very, very long memory. We would all do well to remember that.

This last week has been shark week for the disgruntled employee. On Wednesday, mild mannered mid-level executive Greg Smith dropped a bomb on Goldman Sachs, when his resignation letter was printed as an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.

Just a day earlier, senior engineer James Whittaker posted a blog to Google’s intranet explaining the reasons behind his decision to quit the internet giant.

Greg Smith's resignation letter 
appeared in the New York Times

Both employees came off as genuinely concerned, likeable and – most importantly – never surrendered the moral high ground. Goldman Sachs, said Smith's letter, lacked integrity in its dealings with customers. Google, said Whitaker, had sold the company’s soul to advertisers and destroyed the culture of innovation. There were no insults, no personal finger pointing and no sarcastic tone. Both men will be criticized for going public, but both can defend their actions as necessary and ultimately dignified. 

Of course, not everyone takes this approach when it comes to resignation.

A personal favorite of mine will always be Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater who, after being pushed too far one too many times by an obnoxious passenger, grabbed a beer from the trolley, popped the lever of the emergency exit shoot and slid to freedom like a child in a play park – his resignation, called over his shoulder, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’

Joey DeFrancesco of Providence, Rhode Island can be found on YouTube resigning with the enthusiastic support of a brass band. Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Micro bowed out with a haiku via twitter (Financial crisis / Stalled too many customers / CEO no more.)

There are a lot of ways to quit a job. And the original approaches, while cathartic and enormous fun for your colleagues at the water cooler, will surely do the quitters little good in the long term. In the social media age, the things we do will stay with us, and recruiters are more and more thorough when it comes to web-vetting job applicants. Steven Slater’s CNN piece on YouTube has a quarter of a million hits. (As an employer would you really take the risk on it happening to you?)

Social Media has changed the culture 

of Spring Break

A report in the Times on the same day as Greg Smith's letter suggests that college students on spring break are becoming less wild and carefree. With cellphone cameras, Twitter and Facebook just a click away, party-goers are aware of what the consequences of their drunken antics might be.  They have simply changed their behavior. The same thinking should influence our workplaces. Anything you do could go viral at any minute, and there is no putting the toothpaste back in the YouTube. 

The end of employment is a natural part of the employment cycle, whether you quit or you’re let go. Hopefully most of the time it will be your decision, so when your time comes, remember that you’ll have to live with your actions for the rest of your career.

Even if your big statement doesn't attract national attention, you could easily develop a very unwelcome fifteen minutes of fame at an industry level. That will be enough to seriously affect your career prospects later on. 

A shared vision of the future, no matter how general, should drive hiring decisions

A year ago this month, Forbes identified the only three questions that are really being asked and answered during a job interview. (Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions – George Bradt.)

They were:

1.  Can you do the job?

2.  Will you love the job?

3.  Can we tolerate working with you?

The article was among their most popular over the last 12 months and frequently appears on the most read articles list even now.

But there’s a major piece missing from this picture and I was given reason to revisit it this week during a career conversation with an old friend.

My friend has run into some issues working for a large retail employer in the US. He is quite miserable and looking to get out. But the fact is that he fulfils each of the three criteria set out by the Forbes article. John (we’ll call him that) can do the job and do it well; he’s neither over nor under qualified, he is challenged by the work but is never out of his depth. He loves the work and is extremely committed to the company itself. All these things, combined with his easy going personality and good humor have made him extremely popular within the organization with his colleagues and managers. Frankly they don’t tolerate him – they love him.

Yet despite all this he is actively looking to get out and soon. This will, in due course, horrify his employer who will be scrambling to keep him in various closed door meetings, looking at salary sructures and trying to make an attractive counter offer, oblivious to the fact that they are wasting their time. It’s over.

The problem is simply this: John’s vision of his career at the company differed considerably from the employer’s vision. He saw himself progressing to a different role quite quickly. He saw himself taking on management responsibilities and assuming control of a growing portfolio. (I reserve any judgement on whether he was capable or not of doing the things he wanted to do.) Sufficed to say, there was nothing obviously unrealistic or overreaching – the objectives he had seem  relatively modest. All that mattered in the end was that this simply wasn’t the way his employer saw him.

They had hired a steady performer, well liked and hard working who they believed would become more and more valuable to the department. They did not think he was ambitious; they did not see him as a manager and as a result they hired people from outside into jobs that they had no idea he aspired to.

So here’s the rub. Before you hire someone, or before you get yourself hired, you have to know that both employer and employee have a broadly shared vision of the future - beyond the current team, the current role and the new hire’s current skill set.


Ask the three year question. This is a vital part of every interview I've conducted in the last five years. In 1-2 years - everyone will tell you they want to be performing well in the same role. In 5-10 years - everyone wants to be in a senior management role. In 15-20 years they want to be retired on a vineyard. It is the three year time frame that holds the answers. 

Nobody can see the future and nobody can predict it. But too often this means that the hiring process ignores the future entirely. The Forbes article certainly does. So I suggest you add the missing element to your list:

1.  Can you do the job?

2.  Will you love the job?

3.  Can we tolerate working with you?

4.  Do we have a shared vision of your future?

Otherwise, like John, you’ll be a capable, committed, likeable former employee. And all they needed to ask him was where he wanted to be in three years. 










Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.