Friday 30 March 2007

"Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get". G B Shaw

I'm on an outplacement scheme for four months. Think of it as a sort of boot camp for unemployed, or soon to be unemployed, management. What they do is take you, shake you upside down and inside out and put you in a fit state to find a new job. They employ people that the SAS won't take because they are too rough.

It's both great and scary at the same time. Look, you've been in your last job for how long? 10 years? You know how to get things done, how to write reports and look your colleagues in the eye and stare them down. "Hah, Finance thought they could get away with that little trick did they, but they didn't know about form CD16 that needed authorisation from HQ. Won't try that again." And so on. You know how the internal recruitment process works and have followed it and know it well.

Now in the big, wide, uncaring world here's the thing. They neither know or care about form CD16. They want to know one thing and one thing only. What can you do for my company? What the outplacement team do in Room 101 is take you apart and make you fit for purpose which is simply to enable you to answer those questions in a CV and interview without mumbling, breaking into an embarrassing sweat or shouting for your mummy.

Take CVs. Well they took my CV and shredded it and said let's start again shall we? They can't put an earring in a pig's ear and make it look pretty but they can make your CV stand out from the other 600 that will have been sent in. You have to be reduced to tears and murderous thoughts during the process but we'll let that pass for the time being. They make you really concentrate on what you did, not your job description, and use the acronym of CAR. Challenge, Action, Result and not the usual CRUD which stands for Challenge, Retreat, Underperform, Delegate. They reduce your novella to a two-page, finely honed version of the F1-11 able to fly off a recruiter's desk shouting "Look at me" - like a Howler in Harry Potter books. Make no mistake this is serious. There is only one point to a CV and that is getting an interview. I'm now on version 238 and counting - but I've had two interviews in the last two weeks.

Once they have done this, then it's interview techniques but before that - the big one. What do you want to do, what do you like doing? Well, needless to say, the psychometric tests show that I've been in the wrong type of job most of my career (though I did point out timidly that I had done quite well really) and that what I should have been is...
a lumberjack, sleep all night and work all day.

Then you have to decide what to do with this information. Apply for every job in sight taking a shotgun approach hoping that someone, anyone, will employ you, or a more tactical approach and only apply for those that suit your values and that you reasonably believe you will enjoy.
At this point I have to apply the Tesco dilemma for debate - at the checkout with a cart full of shopping do you say "I hate my job but can pay for all of this" or 'I'm truly fulfilled in my career but can only pay 50% of the cost, why are you calling security?" Tricky isn't it?

I had a job a long time ago that I loathed but I needed the money. I'd rather work for an organisation that fits my values closely even if it means a compromise elsewhere (within reason of course, I don't want a job in the Antarctic.)

But it's like buying a house: there's what you want, what you will accept and what you buy. There really is no point in the short term, I think, in jumping for the first offer unless it's wonderful. Yes money is tight, holidays are cancelled this year and the future is very ambiguous at the moment. However you can do wonderful things with nettles and have you seen what Bear Grylls eats? I am sure we can reduce our weekly food bills by 75% by eating his recommended food stuffs. Raw scorpion anyone?

However I'm going off at a tangent. The outplacement is great, the team are very supportive and my CV can now jump buildings in a single bound. I feel confident that I can submit a well nuanced, grammatically correct, balanced two page document where the recruiter can go, at the interview stage "er, it's Ms Smith isn't it, and I see you have, er, a degree in fruit management and chicken basting, from (flicks over to second page), Orlando High?". Sigh.

But the interview itself. Now there's the rub.

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