Slightly Off KIlter

Common wisdom holds that the best time to shop for groceries is when you’re not hungry. The same can be said about shopping for a job. The best time to look for a job is when you already have one. If you don’t have one and you really need one, you’re too hungry.

One of the worst jobs I’ve ever accepted, I took because I needed a job. I was hungry; I was worried; the market was poor. I hated it. I wanted to quit every day. The job was badly spec’d and ill-considered. The best thing about it was that it only lasted 10 weeks.

I recently had a very poor interview. In retrospect, I realized it wasn’t going well early on, but I kept slogging forward. In retrospect, I should have stood up, smiled politely at the interviewer and said “This isn’t going anywhere. I don’t want to waste our time any longer.” But, the interviewer was The Man With A Job To Give and I was The Groveling Unemployed Candidate. The entire situation was ill-fated from the beginning.

Before you go grocery shopping, it’s not too difficult to eat something to reduce the hunger. Before you go looking for a job, however… what?

A friend of mine (and respected former colleague) recommends planning well ahead and being picky. He says

“The times I was looking for work, I did too much interviewing. You have to conserve your own time and not bother with companies that aren’t likely to extend offers or aren’t ones you want to talk to anyway. Make a list of what you want from your next job, in priority order, and don’t waste your time on companies that don’t offer it.
Mine starts out,

I want to work…

• at a company that…
  
• with people who …
  
• for management who …
  
• on a project that …
  

and so on, with three or four bullets under each heading. When I consider a new job I test it against the list. Sometimes I revise the list in the light of reality. After a couple of startups I have added “• is not venture capital funded” to the “company that” heading.

“The idea is not that I’ll get everything on my list. It helps me to have thought about my priorities though. Once I was offered a contract-to-perm job, and I was able to decide right away that it wouldn’t work for me.”

That sounds like good advice.