“should I create an Instagram for my dog to make me stand out to interviewers, and more” plus 3 more Ask a Manager

should I create an Instagram for my dog to make me stand out to interviewers, and more
company offered me a job, then yanked the offer, then re-listed the position
my employee is snarky and rude
bitterly fought office coffee wars: share your stories

should I create an Instagram for my dog to make me stand out to interviewers, and more

Posted: 19 Apr 2018 09:03 PM PDT

It's four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. Should I create an Instagram for my dog to make me stand out?

I was recently informed that I didn’t get a job that I really wanted. I ended up asking the hiring manager for feedback and one thing she told me was that one candidate wrote a book outside of work hours about how they dissolved their student loan debt (they also hand-wrote a thank you note, which apparently they appreciated more than my emailed thank you note).

I’m now trying to think of ways to set myself apart from competition. I'm still in my first job out of college so I don't have too much experience I'd be able to refer to. Some applications I've come across request websites you'd make for yourself outside of work, like a blog. Would creating an Instagram for my dog be a good idea, as a way to demonstrate that I can market something well and use social media in a more professional way than a personal account? I was thinking of trying to gain a following so I can refer to it in an interview, as something different they'd remember me by. For reference, I am in the marketing field.

There's a danger in putting too much weight on a single hiring manager's feedback, because some hiring managers have unusual preferences or opinions. (For example, there are a lot of hiring managers, including me, who will tell you they don't want handwritten thank-yous, because this is business correspondence, and because so little of importance arrives by postal mail these days that they may not even check their mail inbox for weeks, long after the hiring decision has already been made!) I understand the impulse to put a lot of weight on what she told you because it can be hard to get any feedback — but I don't think hers was very useful advice to follow.

It's true that having work samples to point to is helpful, and it's not a terrible idea to have a website that shows your ability to write, create, etc. And sure, if you created an Instagram for your dog that became incredibly popular and had a huge following, that could be something you could mention in an interview, as evidence of your ability to gain eyeballs online. But the odds of it paying off like that are pretty slim, so it's not something you should do as a job hunting strategy; you should only do it if your primary motivation is that you genuinely want to build and maintain an Instagram for your dog.

Unless you have some big idea that you're dying to do because you want to do it (not just to mention it in interviews), you're likely to have better luck with the more traditional ways of strengthening your candidacy: taking on more responsibility in your current job, volunteering, writing an awesome cover letter, etc.

2. How can I get a colleague to coach his team instead of getting angry with them?

I have a question about how to help a colleague better manage his team. He doesn’t report to me, but we both report to the CEO and I’m tasked with improving team management and workflow in general. If his team turns in low quality work or misses deadlines, he’s vocal in his “displeasure” and makes a point of noting to our boss and to me that he’s mad/frustrated/disappointed/etc. and that he’s made those feelings clear to his team. He never takes ownership of any mistakes/failures of his team. (I should add that he’s also quick to pass on praise to them, so that’s consistent.) How can I help coach him that being “annoyed” about errors isn’t really managing his team, that they need more than “this was a mistake/I didn’t like this” to figure out how to improve, and he needs to feel/take ownership of their work?

If you're explicitly charged with helping him manage better and he knows that, you absolutely can and should address this. Point out to him that generally managers shouldn't be taking staff members' work personally and that getting angry or disappointed is injecting emotion into his management in ways that won't be effective for him or for his staff. Explain that if he's not happy with someone's work, that's a flag for him to dig in on his own management and figure out what he needs to do differently: Does he need to lay out clearer expectations at the start, check in more frequently, coach someone on their skills, address a performance issue, etc.? Tell him that that's where his energy should go in those situations, and talk him through what that could look like in a few recent situations where this has come up. (And probably offer to work with him on it the next time it happens so that he has closer guidance in doing this.)

If you don't fully have the authority to give him that kind of direction, you'll need to loop in your CEO — but this is the basic message he should be getting from one of you.

3. Can I revise my response to a timed assessment test?

I got to do a technical assessment yesterday for a data analysis job I really want. The hiring manager set up the assessment well in advance and gave me 24 hours to respond to four out of six questions, which included some basic stuff like finding typos in data entry and calculating totals, and some more advanced stuff interpreting what’s going on and writing a mock memo describing the findings. I sort of also accidentally did a fifth question by including data visualizations in my response to the fourth question. Anyway, the hours passed by surprisingly quickly, and to save time I found myself doing it all in the software I’ve been using since before the last ice age (Excel and the SPSS license on my laptop) rather than in SQL and R, which I’m newer to and slower at. I also wish I could go back and tackle the analysis question from a different angle, which would vastly improve the interpretations drawn in the memo. The third thing I’m mad at myself about was realizing that I’d typed in the wrong numbers with a significance test after the fact. I emailed the corrections, which at least demonstrates honesty and got a “thanks for the corrections” response rather than radio silence, so that was probably the right move. Maybe this is just perfectionism from spending most of my career to date in academia, but I really wish I could create a better version of it all.

Should I refrain from mentioning any extra work unless I make it to the next round, since it wouldn’t be fair to count work done beyond the 24 hour limit? Or do I put it in a Google Drive folder and write her saying “I know you can’t really look at this until after Monday because it’s done beyond the 24 hour time limit, but FYI here’s a link to extra work in SQL and R plus an improved memo"?

I think it’s worth doing polished up versions just as coding practice anyway. So, maybe demonstrating my enthusiasm is good, but on the other hand there’s the issue of whether I’d be creating extra work for her or not demonstrating an ability to stick to the time constraints of the test or sending too many emails. What do you suggest?

It would be too many emails, and yes, you'd be creating extra work for her. It's true that there's some benefit to her being able to see what you can do with more time — but that's not what this exercise was. This exercise was "show what you can do in X amount of time."

Sometimes you can get away with "whoops, please use this version instead" or "here are corrections to the exercise," but you've already done that. You can't do it a second time without looking flighty/disorganized.

You don't really get multiple bites at the apple with this. You've submitted it, and now you really just need to wait and see what happens from here.

4. My interviewers sounded like they had a problem with the job I was interviewing for

I recently interviewed for a position that seemed like a complete dream job. As one of three final candidates, I was invited to do a series of eight back-to-back interviews over the course of an entire day. The first seven interviews were invigorating, positive, and overall a great experience — but the last one was incredibly odd and I didn’t know how to navigate it. The interviewers seemed to have some sort of problem with the position I was interviewing for (possibly a bad experience with the person in the role in the past, or a dissatisfaction with how the job description was finalized, or who knows!) and their questions all seemed like strange back-handed ways of expressing their dissatisfaction. Questions like, “What do you see MISSING from this job description? What do you see as problematic about this role?”

Neither of these interviewers is on the search committee for this position, but I’m worried about how this strange interview (and my attempts to navigate their questions) may have impacted my candidacy (I’m still waiting to hear back). In the end, I wrote an email to the chair of the search committee to tell her that this particular interview had a very different tenor than the rest of the day and that I had found it difficult to navigate, but that I remained very excited and positive about the position. I would love to know how you would recommend responding to this kind of situation, were it ever to happen again.

When something in an interview is confusing you or feels out of sync with what you've previously heard, it's okay to ask about it! In this situation, it would have been okay to say something like, "I'm curious about the questions you're asking. It sounds like you might have some concerns about how the role is structured — am I reading that correctly?" Or, "I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that question too — do you think there's something problematic about the role?" You want to be pleasant about it, of course; your tone should sound genuinely curious, not annoyed. But you're there to collect information just as much as they are, and it's okay to ask directly about what you're hearing.

However, one week before I was scheduled to start my new position, I received an email telling me that the company was restructuring and they didn’t have a job for me after all and they were sorry if this caused an inconvenience and they would keep me in mind if future positions opened up. Of course I was shocked and upset. I was able to talk to my manager and keep my current job so I didn’t end up unemployed, but it was extremely embarrassing telling my manager and all of my colleagues and friends and family the devastating news.

I allowed myself to wallow in self-pity for a bit, then picked myself up and started my search over from scratch. Today I was browsing a job posting board and saw that the company that rescinded the job offer has reposted the exact same job. Same title, same description, same everything.

So now I’m confused. Is there a job now? Was there ever a job? Did they suddenly change their mind about me a month ago and chicken out of owning the choice or did the job actually disappear? Why wouldn’t they contact me to let me know they were going to fill that position after all? Should I reapply with the same resume and cover letter as if this were the first time I sent them? Should I reach out to them and reference the situation? Should I even want to work for a company so disorganized (at best) or deceitful (at worst)? Should I contact the job board and let them know the company has a history of jerking applicants around?

That's awful. And it's particularly awful that they didn't bother to pick up the phone and give you the news that way when they needed to rescind the offer. That's a phone call message, not a cop-out-and-email-it message.

Rescinding a job offer is a really big deal. You were particularly lucky that you were able to keep your existing job. In a different set of circumstances, your employer might not have let you do that. Or you might have already turned down other job offers. So they needed to call you and actually talk to you.

It's not that no responsible company would ever do this. Sometimes the timing of a job offer ends up being really bad, and the job does get restructured away before the person starts. But they should have handled it differently. For example, in addition to calling you, if you were in fact now without an income due to their actions, they should have offered you at least a small amount of severance.

Anyway, as for the job posting you saw:

It's possible that it's an error. Sometimes jobs get reposted when they shouldn't. And some job boards post jobs that they scrape from other sites, so they end up posting jobs that are no longer open.

But yes, it's also possible that the company lied to you, and they're not really restructuring and they just decided to rescind your offer for some reason and thought "restructuring" was an easy excuse. Or it's possible that they told you the truth, but then their plans changed and they're poorly enough managed that no one thought to reach back out to you. Or who knows, maybe they figured they couldn't offer it to you again after yanking it away.

You definitely shouldn't just reapply. If they want to hire you for it, this shouldn't be a situation where you have to go through their process all over again. But you can contact the hiring manager for the position and say something like, "I wanted to check in with you because I saw the X position advertised again. I realize this might have been an error, but if the job is opening back up, I'd still be very interested in it."

Then see what they say. If they tell you that yes, indeed it is open again, it's fair for you to ask what happened — and to proceed with a lot of caution and some healthy skepticism until/unless the answers you hear make sense to you.

Rapitful Shqip

Search This Blog