Category Archives: Job Search

Posts particularly helpful to those seeking or changing employment

3 Truths and 6 Power Skills to Master Organization Politics

Organization politics make a lot of people uncomfortable. The untrained hope is that if politics are ignored, and if a job is done well, then well-earned rewards will come. Things rarely play out that way.

Organization politics is defined as anything done at work to increase the odds of success that has nothing at all to do with the work itself. Master executive coach and workplace psychologist, Dr. Dory Hollander, presents three unassailable truths about how things work in organizations and Six Power Skills for mastering the art of career enhancement. Continue reading 3 Truths and 6 Power Skills to Master Organization Politics

Transition Plan for CEOs

What To Do Between Your Exit and Next Position

We wrote a post about how to make a graceful exit (especially when it’s involuntary) that explored what steps to take when leaving your position. This post is the follow-up that dives into how to identify, assess, and consolidate lessons learned to find the right next job. We’ll explore three key steps to a successful transition plan for CEOs.

Continue reading Transition Plan for CEOs

Quitting Benefits

Most people have no idea to what they are entitled when and if they quit their job. AboutUnemployment.org demystifies the rules relating to benefit entitlement upon employee-initiated termination in their article: Can You Collect Unemployment If You Quit?.  

Good cause

If you are laid off or made redundant, you are eligible for unemployment benefits. In the majority of cases, you are also entitled to benefits if you were fired, as long as it was not for gross misconduct. But when you quit your job, eligibility hinges on whether or not there was good cause. Continue reading Quitting Benefits

Do we ask a potential hire what their parents told them when they spilled milk?

It wasn’t Sigmund Freud, but the 19th century poet William Wordsworth who said, The child is the father of man. But Freud, of course, would have agreed in that he argued that most, if not all, of the foundation for who we are as adults is cast in the first five years.

So, what are we to make of this? Are we stuck with our pre-verbal responses to authority, to failure, to success, formed long before we have conscious memory or control? After all, most of us neither remember nor had any say-so over what happened to us when we spilled our milk, refused to be potty trained, tried to please our parents, or told an untruth.

Still, one tenet of psychology is that to understand who we are today, we must understand who we have been. What shaped us to respond so viscerally to criticism and praise, to be driven to achieve or content to do little, to be fiercely independent or reliant on others?

This is where cognitive behavioral psychology makes it debut.

The idea is simple. We tune-in to what we are saying to ourselves in the moment, when we feel unfairly criticized, unappreciated, inadequate, excluded, reviled. When we do, chances are we will actually hear those old messages programmed into our operating systems, long before we had choice. Continue reading Do we ask a potential hire what their parents told them when they spilled milk?

What to do when the hiring manager says: “Name your terms!”

“What will it take to hire you?” These words may be music to your ears, but how you respond makes a big difference. Take your time, collect your thoughts, and follow these seven tips to make the most of the opportunity:

  • Decide you want the job. Make sure you like what the organization does and that the people you would work with give you energy and get energy from you. If you do not like and want the work, or if you do not look forward to spending time with the people every day, a job at any pay will turn into a grind. If not, politely let them know and move on…it is a waste of their time and yours to do otherwise. If you want the job ask for a day or two to discuss it with advisers before getting back to them.
  • Know your worth. Research the web and ask around to learn the current market value for your basket of skills. If you think you might undersell yourself, do some digging to arm yourself with up-to-date information and boost your confidence. On the other hand, be honest with yourself to avoid an inflated sense of worth. Make sure your expectations are reasonable given your compensation history and relative to those with comparable scope and scale of responsibility, experience, and results in your location. Do not go just by job title. For example, a first-time manager of a six-person team is not worth the same compensation as a 15-year veteran who has successfully led a 30-person team over multiple years, even though both are called Project Managers.

Continue reading What to do when the hiring manager says: “Name your terms!”