The 5 most obvious mistakes made in job interviews - Part 2

Mistake #2- Getting the Talking / Listening Balance Wrong

When all is said and done you’ll either win or lose in a job interview. Everyone involved in the process – on both sides of the table - should be attempting to win. If it’s a mutual win, great. If it’s just you who wins, that will do.

In most cases, the winner will be the person who listens most.

How do you ‘win’ at interviewing? Simple. You put yourself in the position where you have the decision making power as to what happens next.

If you’re the candidate, that means that the interviewer wants to hire you and you understand enough about the role to know whether or not you should take it. As an interviewer, that means that the candidate wants the job for sure, and you've learned enough about them to know whether you want to pull the trigger.

There are two mutual wins in interviewing. First, the right candidate is offered the job and they accept. Second, the wrong candidate is not offered the job and moves on to other things. 

To get to one of these mutual wins, you’re going to have to get the balance of talking and listening right. Interviews are a collaborative exercise - you can't drive a successful meeting entirely by yourself. You have to meet each other half way and share the burden of making the meeting flow. A meeting that's awkward and disjointed is highly unlikely to result in a mutual win.

Within this context, you will have a choice of listening and encouraging the other person to talk, or talking yourself. Try to come down on the side of listening.

Most people don’t listen with intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. says Stephen Covey, the late great business writer. Job interviews are especially prone to this behavior. From the candidate’s perspective, this is pretty reasonable. After all you’re there to be judged on your answers, it’s not surprising that you might spend the time when you’re not talking, thinking what to say next. Then you have your internal monologue to contend with – am I presenting myself well? Does she like me? How is this going? Will this help me find a job? With all of this going on, it’s not surprising that you might struggle to listen effectively. And listening is critical to the process you’re engaged in.

I’ve had countless candidates come back from interviews and say that they didn’t really talk much themselves – that the interviewer did most of the talking. He or she gave an extensive history of the company, talked about the team and their objectives. The candidate is usually worried at this point, because they tend to feel like they haven’t been given the chance to adequately impress the interviewer. They seem surprised when I tell them that this is a good thing. They are skeptical, but I know that the vast majority of people who find themselves in this position end up getting through to the next stage in the process.

Human beings are never happier than when someone is listening. Whether we are ego maniacs who want to inflict our opinions on people by making speeches to rooms full of people (or by writing blogs that amount to the same thing) or if we take pleasure in quietly telling our husbands and wives about the day we’ve had. The words you listen to me too much were never spoken by anybody ever. We want to be listened to; it is us being told that we matter, that what we have to say is important.

If we feel like someone is listening to us we tend to like them. We reflect their respect. All the more if we’re talking about something we’re passionate about. I swear I’ve been at dinner parties where some guy is rambling on for an hour about their latest project or interest. Whatever is exciting them. They talk and talk, and out of sheer politeness beyond all reasonable expectation – the curse of the British – I sit there and listen, nodding with interest at the right moments and occasionally intimating surprise or agreement wherever I feel like they need it. Later, the host will say to me –‘Oh Jerry said you and he were getting on very well, he really enjoyed your conversation.’ I chuckle. I barely said a word, but Jerry was so pleased to talk about his kid’s advanced placement program and so bursting with good feeling that he’d projected those feelings on to me. For all he knew I wanted to talk to him about applying Scientology principles to a new interpretation of Mein Kampf. But in his mind – I was someone he liked. And he had no basis for this. He was talking into a mirror. 

So as candidates for jobs if we prove ourselves good listeners, we’re likely to see the interviewer leave with a positive impression. Any sales person worth their salt will tell you that a good sales meeting is one where the prospect does most of the talking.

In a job interview situation, whichever side of the table you’re sat on, you need to make sure that you are listening enough to make it productive. (As always, we’re not talking about basics here – long protracted silences are bad, so are short answers and introverted refusal to let conversation flow – we will take some things as read.)

The point is that in a healthy conversational interview, you should always lean toward listening if you’re allowed to. Asking questions, showing genuine interest – these things will help to keep your interviewer talking, and if they’re enjoying talking to you, the chances are they’re liking you.

Good listeners win friends easily, they attract people to them and they take part in successful job interviews.

Nobody ever listened their way out of a job. 

Next Week - Part Three  – More Interview Mistakes

Look for live engineering and construction 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

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

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. 

Lessons from Wimbledon, for Andy Murray (and the rest of us.)

So Wimbledon draws to a close again. The All England Tennis championship is down to the last two ladies and the last two chaps.  

Unfortunately for the US audience, there was no chance of an American winner this year but never fear, the British have had their share of hopeless years. The last person to lose to a Briton in a Wimbledon semi final died in the battle of Stalingrad in 1942.

Wimbledon: home to more than the odd 
philosophical soundbite. 

Until about an hour ago that is.

As Andy Murray overcomes a tough draw, huge amounts of pressure and the super-high expectations of the British public and media, to reach a Wimbledon final (the first man since 1938) he will have to dig deep.

Fortunately, the world of tennis has produced more than the odd philosopher, with pearls of wisdom to help him through it. And you know what? I think there’s a lot we can learn in business terms from these white-shorted philosophers, especially those of us who work for Talascend as we continue to fulfill our corporate values of accountability, expertise, enthusiasm and integrity. I'm shamelessly plugging these values, partly because I can, and partly because we actually take them very seriously. 

Accountability

“It's one-on-one out there, man. There ain't no hiding. I can't pass the ball.” Pete Sampras

He didn’t get to be the greatest player who ever lived for very long. I’ve often thought it unfair on Pete Sampras that Roger Federer arrived so soon after him. Jack Nicklaus saw over twenty years pass before Tiger arrived. Michael Jordan’s still enjoying his status as the greatest ever. Pete Sampras retires in 2003 with 14 singles titles and is almost immediately surpassed in most people’s eyes by his successor. One of the reasons he achieved so much, according to those who know him, is that he never needed anyone’s approval but his own. He held himself accountable for every single performance and remained completely internally driven. Great sportspeople, like great business people I would say,  accept praise, reward and notoriety gladly, but they don’t rely on them to drive performance.

“As soon as I step on the court I just try to play tennis and don't find excuses. You know, I just lost because I lost, not because my arm was sore.” Goran Ivanisavich

Goran killed Wimbledon in 2001 when he won as a qualifier, beating half the major seeds on his way through. So exciting was his final with Pat Rafter, that it more or less rendered everything after dull and mediocre. What I’ve always loved about this guy is that whenever he was interviewed he never looked for excuses. He lost a lot in Grand Slam finals, under a variety of circumstances. But if he played badly – he said so. Sometimes you have to accept that your own performance was lacking and just put your hands up. The people you work with will accept that more readily than a hundred excuses.

Enthusiasm

“For the first couple of years I played really bad tennis. It was so bad that they booed me off the court.” Richard Krajcek

Success was a long time in coming for the big Dutchman. Enthusiasm’s easy when you’re doing well. The real test of enthusiasm is when you suck and you know it. We all have bad runs in our business;  it’s particularly hard at the start, but our ability to persevere and to stay optimistic is what will eventually set us apart. Breaking a dry spell with a good win is hard for us all, but it’s not as hard as winning Wimbledon, which Krajcek did in 1996.

"What is the single most important quality in a tennis champion? I would have to say desire, staying in there and winning matches when you are not playing that well.” John McEnroe

The Mac goes even further. With the right amount of desire and perseverance you can win even if you’re not on your game. Pete Alleyne’s talked about this already – attitude versus ability. You can overcome obstacles with a desire to succeed.

 Expertise

“Find something that you're really interested in doing in your life. Pursue it, set goals, and commit yourself to excellence. Do the best you can.” Chris Evert

Work out what you want to do, understand your specific goals and then commit yourself to achieving them. I have literally nothing to add to that.

“I've been playing against older and stronger competition my whole life. It has made me a better tennis player and able to play against this kind of level despite their strength and experience.”

Maria Sharapova

I like Maria Sharapova’s quote on a number of levels. Firstly the humility of believing yourself to be surrounded by better players even when obviously, you’re not. But realizing that your expertise increases by being weaker and less experienced than those around you is vital. If I ever found myself to be the most experienced and capable person in a room, I would start looking for the door. (But it hasn’t happened yet, so we’re good.)

Integrity

“Family's first, and that's what matters most. We realize that our love goes deeper than the tennis game.” Serena Williams

Integrity is about commitment. It’s about doing the best you can because it’s the right thing to do and behaving in a way that genuinely acknowledges that there are more important things in life than business, reward and profit. My family’s far more important to me than Talascend’s ever going to be and that’s as it should be. Integrity is about throwing yourself into your work even though we all have something we’d rather be doing. We look forward to the weekends when we don’t have to work. There’s nothing wrong with that. Nobody ever died wishing they spent more time in the office. That’s why we rely on our integrity to care about what we do and to push ourselves forward. It’s what makes us professionals. Because you can be involved in something or you can be committed to it. Both take the same amount of time.

“The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.” Martina Navratilova

So there you have it. The Talascend values, brought to you by some of the world’s best Tennis players. I recommend you tune in Sunday to see if history is made, and don’t forget to look out for the moments of post-match interview genius.




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

The death of Facebook. It's not beyond imagination...

Paid social media advertising doesn’t impact sales enough to warrant significant expense. That’s the conclusion reached today by GM, who pulled $10m of advertising spend from Facebook.

The move is mildly embarrassing for Facebook on the eve of their long anticipated IPO, but I don’t think anyone there will be leaping from the window ledge anytime soon. Other than making the Winklevoss twins’ morning cornflakes taste slightly better, it is unlikely to affect the company’s valuation.

GM is pulling out of paid advertising

But it should.

It is another straw placed gently on the back of the distraction advertising camel. Facebook, much like Google, is essentially an advertising company. The social functionality exists only to collect data and drive advertising revenue, just like Google’s search engine. The fact that it’s free to the user is the source of its popularity. But make no mistake, you are not the customer, you are the product. The staff, managers, executives and share holders are in the game to sell you to advertisers for a lot of money.

I’m not objecting to that in principal, I’m objecting to it as a long term strategy for these companies.

Sophisticated consumers, empowered with technology are simply tuning out the messages that companies like GM have been paying so much money for. It’s not just the simple mechanics of it all – skipping through ads on your DVR, ignoring phone numbers you don’t recognize. It’s also a function of automatic behavior driven by ad-saturation. Who opens e-mails that are clearly unsolicited now? Who isn’t throwing the junk mail straight in the trash? Do you even notice the ad banners on the news site you’re reading anymore? Did you click on any today?

There are better ways to engage with potential customers than waving something bright and shiny at them and luring them to your tent with clever catchphrases and good looking people.  

Marketing is different now. If you want to engage people, you have to make a contribution. You have to be able to show them some evidence that you’re worth their time.

‘Content marketing’ is a phrase still best known to those of us inside the marketing discipline. Some of us call it ‘Inbound Marketing’. At Talascend we call it ‘giving stuff to your customers for free to encourage a conversation.’

Cash is not necessarily the currency of customer engagement any more.

The problem for Facebook and Google is that they depend entirely on old fashioned distraction advertising revenue for their income. While this remains the case they are driving their unstoppable juggernauts toward a cliff face.

They would argue that nobody has made a bigger contribution to our lives than Facebook or Google and I’d agree with them. These two fabulous and innovative companies have made my life easier and more fun and I don’t have enough backslaps and thanks to dish out to Mark and Larry and Sergei et al. Here’s to you all and well done. I’m glad you’re billionaires. You deserve it.

But how will the businesses you’ve built sustain their growth and profitability when they depend so entirely on yesterday’s advertising practices?

GM aren’t pulling out of Facebook, only the paid ads. They will, says the usual Marketing execu-mouthpiece, remain committed to distributing content through Facebook, they just won’t be paying for it thank you very much. They have found it to be ineffective.

What GM has discovered will surely not differ substantially from what others will discover. GM afterall is one of the largest advertisers in the US and you can bet on the fact that they have a lot of very smart people using a lot of very clever technology to be sure they’re right about this. Even without the statistics they have access to, all logic tells me that GM are absolutely right. Others will follow.

Facebook’s ad revenue is not keeping pace with its growth. Facebook’s profit fell off in the first quarter of this year and its revenue growth rate is now slowing down. The numbers aren’t impressive anyway. Facebook generates just $3.50 per user in advertising revenue. If it has to increase the presence of ads to increase engagement from advertisers it risks losing product (us).

Everyone’s always looking for the potential death of Facebook. This is it. Content marketing is the future, distraction advertising is the past. Facebook, for all its youth and modern identity is operating a fundamentally old fashioned model and if GM’s decision turns out to be the first of many, then we’re seeing the first major crack appear in the Facebook machine.

I'm asking you... do those companies who spend millions on advertising banners on Facebook get your business?




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

Urgency vs Importance - the key to business sanity

I want my lunch. It’s 12.30pm, and I want my lunch.

Two distractions in the last hour have stopped me  from completing this blog (which was the job I gave myself the last hour before lunch to complete.) The blog is important, the interruptions were urgent (although neither turned out to be important). But what could I have done differently? They were urgent. It’s not always easy to make the distinction between urgency and importance. Stephen Covey, a clinical psychologist and expert in organizational psychology, uses a simple diagram that was something of a revelation to me when I was first shown it by an old boss. It is a set of four boxes. The diagram divides all of the tasks and responsibilities we have into four categories, called ‘Quadrants’. Covey calls them I, II, III & IV. (Pictured.) As a basic definition, an urgent task is one where speed is the most pressing factor. An important task is one that has a significant impact on the business and your role in it.                                                             

 

Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly prioritizing things in this way. For example, calling a client to confirm a start date for your candidate may be the most important thing on your to-do list, but it is not as urgent as finding the contact lens that has just fallen on the floor. The contact lens has no significant impact on your job in the long term, but it must still be done first.

For a sales person, writing the Meeting Report from yesterday’s visit is very important. Everyone appreciates the need to fully document our interactions with key customers. The knowledge accumulated from these visits contributes significantly to our understanding of our customers and potential customers. It is more important to develop this long term understanding than it is to place one single person. But you still make the call to your customer to confirm that start date first, because it is more urgent.

 

At first glance the answer to all this might seem simple. Spend as much time as you can in Quadrant I, avoid  everything in Quadrant IV and spend what time you need to Q II and QIII as necessary. But the reality is much more complex than that. You might think that a CEO would spend all of his time in Quadrant I and a clerical worker would spend all their time in Quadrant IV. But it’s not the case. Whatever your role, you have urgent and important tasks. The receptionist who greets the big client visiting the office is performing a function of significant importance and urgency. The first impression could make all the difference and this interaction will be their first encounter with anyone at Talascend – it’s very important. As to urgency – imagine your client left standing there for 5 minutes while your receptionist finishes some new hire paperwork.

Balancing importance and urgency in your day to day tasks is the road to sanity in time management,  falling into the common pitfalls, will send you hurtling in the other direction. Basics first. Spending all your time in Quadrant IV will get you fired – and quite rightly. Activities like surfing the net, making personal calls or going to get coffee are not the things careers are made of. But QIV has its place, and more of that later. Quadrant III is the deception Quadrant. This is where time is sucked away. A lot of things in this quadrant are masquerading as urgent when they are actually not. Badly planned meetings, phone calls that are twice as long as they should be, some types of paperwork etc. Interruptions are the most common sources of distraction in QIII like the two I ran into in the last hour. 

It’s difficult. 

If a member of your team says ‘Can you come and help me with this?’ you need to go and help. If it turns out not to be important or urgent – that’s going to cost you. Good time management will ensure you don’t spend too much time in this quadrant, as will clear communication. A friend who works at Google insists that you can control distractions to some extent. If he speaks to an external vendor who might have something he is interested in, He will ask them to call back between 2pm and 3pm. This is also his open office hour for his staff’s minor issues. It allows him to schedule distractions.’ I know I’ve got to have these  conversations,’ he says, ‘At least this way I know when they’re coming.’

Spending all your time in Quadrant I will send you to some kind of institution. Nobody can do it. Quadrant I tasks carry inherent elements of stress (deadlines and pressure mostly) and to be done well need to be balanced with other tasks – even, surprisingly, a little bit of Q IV. QIV is closely linked to QI. In between two urgent, important tasks like finishing a board report and doing a press interview, a friend of mine at Amazon.com always takes a break, he says he will wonder out of his office, get a diet coke and spend five minutes talking to a colleague about football. Even if it means being a little late. He will do a better interview that way. What he’s doing is visiting QIV to help him do a better job in QI. If we don’t plan to spend a little appropriate time in Q IV, we will end up there anyway. Because that’s where we run when we burn out. Spend six or seven hours on any given day focused entirely on something demanding, and you will not be productive for the last two hours. It’s too late to take a sensible break then – you’re done. You’ll end up in QIV – walking round the parking lot, leaning back in your chair with your fingers pressed to your temples trying to re-motivate yourself. If you’d only planned to spend twenty minutes that lunchtime sitting in the kitchen with your iPod on reading a newspaper, and walked outside for a Starbucks for 15 minutes late afternoon – you’d have been fine. You might even have got a couple of extra hours out of your day.

This brings us to QII. QII is your source of sanity and control. Here lies  strategy and planning. Not spending enough time in this quadrant is the reason productivity falls apart. This is where you manage your time in all the other quadrants. Obviously, it’s easy to sacrifice the important in favor of the urgent. Nobody is going to lean over your shoulder and tell you to stop making sales calls so that you can sit quietly for an hour and make a list of things you want to accomplish over the next 12 months. That’s not how a business works.  But every successful business person from Donald Trump to Sir Alan Sugar is on the record saying that it is vital that you make time to do this. Stopping to check that you’re doing the right things is essential – even though it means stopping. 

Most sales and recruitment people are bad at this. It’s because we believe there is nothing more important than picking up the phone and selling. There are metrics to be hit, targets to achieve and money to be made. Surely the best way is to just get on with it? No. It isn’t. What we’re really doing when we do this, is driving our car around aimlessly hoping to stumble back onto the right road, rather than stopping and getting the map out. Chances are the fastest way to get there is to stop. As Yogi Bera said, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you may not get there.’ A sensible amount of time planning your week will make that week more productive, even if it means productivity time is spent on it. If you just throw yourself headlong into unstructured and unplanned activity – it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how talented you are, you’re going to spin your wheels without progress – costing you much more time than the  planning would have taken.

At the end of the day, all of this is about forming positive habits. Warren Buffet says that the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken. A sobering thought, but it’s equally true that good habits are self perpetuating and that the smallest positive impact of good time management on your day to day working life will make your life easier, and motivate you to do even better. Ultimately, nobody can manage your time for you. The right answer could be different for everyone. Understanding the difference between urgency and importance and planning time to carry out tasks accordingly is a starting point.

Now it's lunchtime.





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.

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.

9/11 Museum construction takes a $440m backward step

by Richard Spragg

Regular readers of the blog will remember my post last September on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks praising everyone involved in the design and delivery of the remarkable memorial at Ground Zero.

Three months is a long time in construction and the entente cordial is back in the rubble. The New York and New Jersey Port Authority is embroiled in a financial dispute with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum foundation over millions of dollars and Mayor Bloomberg is stating categorically that the museum will not open on time later this year.  

Artists's rendering of the Museum (New York Post)

The Port Authority claims it is owed $300m in infrastructure costs, the Foundation claims it is actually owed $140m due to delays in the project. They are $440m dollars apart. Work has stopped. 

There’s very little comment coming from anywhere on the situation. Only the Mayor has made comments about it during unrelated press conferences and journalists from the Wall Street Journal and other major outlets have been largely unable to secure comments on the record since the story broke.

1 million people have visited the 9/11 memorial since September, putting it on a par with the Statue of Liberty and Empire State building as a pull for visitors. As with Ground Zero itself, some will be gawkers and some mourners but the majority are sure to be genuinely interested visitors unsure of what they will take from the experience.

The sooner those visitors have access to the museum exhibits, to add facts and back story to the open reflection of the monument, the more valuable an experience they will have.

Whatever the bureaucrats need to do to make this happen, they need to do it now.




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