Category: The Serious Stuff

What’s Wrong With Having Career Gaps?

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Looking for a Job

Employers are notorious for having a bias against candidates with breaks in their career history, and I admit I’ve been guilty of that same sin. In fact, whenever I saw a long break on a resume, I jumped straight to one or more of the following assumptions about the candidate.

  • Well, you obviously don’t need money since you can afford such a long break, so you won’t be a motivated employee.
  • You must be an impulsive/irresponsible employee who will quit at the drop of a hat.
  • There must be something wrong with you. If not you should have been able to find another job while still employed. Like everybody else.
  • If you’ve been out of the workforce for so long, your knowledge and experience are likely to be obsolete already.

Then, I would wait to see what “excuses” the candidate made to explain away the breaks. My list of acceptable reasons included retrenchment, end of contract, illness, taking care of family, and relocation. Yep, that was it. Any other reason was, well, “unreasonable”. But after I took a few breaks myself, I now know the error of my ways and want employers to keep an open mind.

So employers, please consider the following.

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Why Does Everything Have To Be Called A Project?

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Project

Companies love labelling anything and everything a “project”. It’s almost as if by slapping on that word, the task gains a certain prestige and therefore suddenly becomes worth spending time on. Otherwise, it’s just stuff that people have to do, but don’t get recognised for.

And this phenomenon is particularly prevalent in companies that hide under the guise of “collaboration”.

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Is Being Market Competitive Good Enough?

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Data Analysis“Where’s the market data to support your proposal? What are other companies doing?”
“Why do we need to give this benefit? What’s the market prevalence?” 

A part of being a HR professional, particularly in the rewards or compensation functions, involves analysing market data to support any updates or changes to policies, with the ultimate aim of ensuring the company remains “market competitive”. What that means is management always wants to be assured that their compensation and benefits are on par, or better than other companies and ergo, they will be able to retain employees and attract talent.

This practice of market benchmarking is a PITA (pain in the ass), and although it keeps people like me gainfully employed,  I do caution companies about overly relying on it for policy-making. Even when all the data points to you being market competitive, you might actually not be. Here’s why. Continue reading →

When Global Doesn’t Work for Local.

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Globe

Having worked for several foreign MNCs, it still astounds me when we are forced to implement “global HR initiatives” that make little sense in the local context. “Think Global, Act Local” or “glocalisation” (I abhor fusion words by the way) is not a new thing for businesses – Mickey D’s McAloo Tikka in its outlets across India comes to mind. But HR seems to have fallen behind when it comes to adapting HR strategies to our local markets.

Take for example, a global HR plan to consolidate and use a single payroll agency for all countries. On paper, it makes perfect sense – economies of scale, right? Instead of working with a vendor in each country, the company appoints one agency which offers a globally negotiated preferential rate. In reality, there are few (if any!) vendors who can fulfill the hiring needs of multiple markets, and most who claim to do so work through 3rd-party agencies on the ground.

End result: Higher cost and longer turnaround time (job assigned to global vendor, who links up with the local agency). The job could have been more efficiently done by the local HR working directly with the local agency in the first place.

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Time Zone Differences In A Global Company.

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Timezones

I’ve worked for a couple of non-Asian companies and the one thing that gets me insanely irritated is having to adapt to the timezone of wherever their headquarters is located. If in Europe, that’s not too bad – Asia still has some overlapping work hours. If in the US, good luck – early morning conference calls at 6am or late night calls at 9pm are the norm. Although annoying, I do accept that these situations are sometimes inevitable for work productivity.

What I can’t accept is when companies take employees having to work in a different timezone for granted, especially in cases when the employees aren’t paid an early morning or night shift allowance, or allowed flexibility to come in later or leave the office earlier (i.e. “deducting” the hours from their normal working day).

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When To Leave A Bad Boss.

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Devil Boss

You don’t leave a job. You leave a boss. That’s a saying that’s been articulated over and over again by experts. So when you can’t stand your boss, how long should you stick it out before calling it quits? When assessing whether it’s time to throw in the towel because of a boss, I like to use a simple 2-factor criteria:

  1. Competency
  2. Niceness (for lack of a better term)

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Stop Telling Employees To Speak Up.

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Speakup

I hate companies that insist employees “speak up” or “be vocal” in order to “raise their profile”. Now I get that if you don’t take the opportunity to interact with the higher ups, it’s a painful reality that they won’t even know that you exist. So come performance review time, you’d more likely than not be passed over for that raise or promotion. But speaking for the sake of taking attendance is just wasting everyone’s time, and good management needs to learn to recognise these airtime thieves who typically fall into three categories.

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Job Postings Don’t Have To Be “Cool”.

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As part of the brand’s visionary evolution in meeting changing customer portfolio, they are seeking an influential change catalyst for this role, who will be empowered to lead the architecture of a refreshing strategy and implementations aligned to the expanding business aspirations.

This was the opening paragraph of a job posting I saw recently. I read it twice, and what went through my mind was this:

blah-blah-blah

I’ve seen a recent trend of “innovative” job descriptions as companies try to make themselves stand out, and it annoys me to no end. A job description should do just that – describe the job. Throwing together a mishmash of big buzzwords does nothing to further that objective. The above ad tells me that (i) the poster wants to hire a psychic who can mysteriously understand what he wants; and (ii) the jobseekers who respond are likely only people who randomly apply to every job under the sun.

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Hating On Behavioural Interviews.

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Interview

Past experience is evidence of future behaviour. Heard that phrase before? It’s the basis of behavioural interviewing, which has been become the default technique for many companies in recent years.

Behavioural interviewing when the interviewer focuses on getting the candidate to describe how he behaved, like “Explain how you took the lead on a project” or “Tell me when you had to deal with a tough stakeholder”. This structured method is to see if the answers align with how he wants the candidate to handle similar situations if you get the job. But there are three issues with them.

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