How I learned to stop worrying and embrace being wrong.

There are times in life when you have to put your hands up to being in the minority, especially when you’re in the business of putting your opinions out there in the market for all to see. As a lifelong holder of minority opinions, this is not new to me.

So effusive was the disagreement with my first blog in this series, that arrived from all corners of our growing community here, that I feel compelled to present the opposite view. I will wipe the spit and fumes from my face and in all probability convince myself that I was actually wrong in the first place. The source of our disagreement all comes down to this question:

How long should you take making decisions about people?

Last time round, I advocated taking an approach to interviewing that actively sought to avoid a hasty judgment. Bide your time I said. Make sure your first impression doesn’t reinforce itself in an unhelpful way, asking easy questions of the person you like, or tough questions of the person you’re not so sure about, I said. Give them the whole time you’ve allotted to present an overall impression, I said.

Balls. You said.

Almost all the feedback I received, including one rather irate phone call, told me I was talking out of my hat. (And they didn’t say hat either.)

Prevailing wisdom it seems tends massively toward the opposite view, which in the spirit of seasonal democracy, I present to you now. Had this been one of my original blogs on interviewing mistakes I should probably have called it: ‘Trust your primary response, you will make the same decision eventually anyway.’

Some of my many dissenters on the subject refer to rapid cognition, often in reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s hugely successful book ‘Blink’, which explores what happens in our brains in the first two seconds that we encounter a given situation – a job interview being a perfectly good example.

Most of the feedback was less scientific, it just argued the case for calling it early and not wasting time over analyzing something if you know you’re going to do it anyway. The point that stuck in my mind was the Managing Director of a well known oil field services company who told me that while you can change decisions, or walk back mistakes, you can never have back the time it took you to make the decision in the first place. His point was simply that mistakes are so common place in all areas of life, human interaction being based almost exclusively on the actual experience that comes after the fact, that you are as well to make a very quick decision and then be prepared to be equally quick to reverse or adapt it if it turns out to be the wrong one.

To use the example he used, you can navel-gaze over what vacation destination is right for you, you can research it all day long, but you simply aren’t going to know if it’s right for you until you get there. Rather than endlessly debating whether or not you’re making the right decision, you’d be better served ensuring you’re in a position to act quickly if you find you’ve made the wrong decision and correct it. Over time, he argued, you’ll find that you enjoyed 95% of your vacations and not 5%, and that the time you spent second guessing your original thought ‘I feel like skiing, let’s go to Colorado’, was entirely wasted. If Colorado turns out to be too ‘this’ or too ‘that’, it was always going to be anyway. Have an escape plan to the place you’ve always liked in Napa Valley, and don’t ever go back.

A surprising number of people wanted to talk about intuition. This honestly alarms me; sufficed to say that I believe that what people describe as their ability to intrinsically know things with no basis is simply a combination of subconscious sound judgment based on experience, combined with mathematical probabilities and our wonderful human ability to ignore all the facts that don’t suit our narrative. I always trust my intuition. I’ve always been able to know what’s right for me. Really? You’ve been divorced twice, so you might want to put your skills to better use.

Overall, I might even be convinced. There is so much to be said for being decisive, but accepting fallibility. We have a huge amount of experience that we can call upon, whether we realize it or not. Our brains do this for us at speeds we cannot comprehend.

I have heard it suggested that the phenomenon of our lives flashing before our lives as we drown is nothing more than our brains scanning for anything useful it can find from previous experience that might help it escape the danger it is in.

Ultimately, the world is faster than the mind and we will see ourselves pushed and pulled by the decisions we make no matter how smart we are and how convinced we are that we are right. Perhaps it’s time to realize that we may need to jump quickly, and then be ready to jump again.

So in the spirit of quick resolutions, here’s the final Top 5 mistakes made in the interview process from all sides – you can believe me or not, argue or not (I hope you do) and offer, as always – any other ideas:

1.       The first impression trap

2.       Getting the talking / listening balance wrong

3.       Not trusting your first response

4.       Allowing decisions to slide

5.       Accepting uninformed outside advice

Next week, a new topic, new arguments to start and yet more opportunities for you to tell me how wrong I am.



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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.

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.

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.