Turning Naivety into Knowledge
Too frequently, college graduates looking for a position, uneducated in the larger job market, communicate to me a startling amount of naivety. They tell me, starry-eyed and self-assured, “I want to work for Google!” or Apple or Facebook, one of the big-name companies with huge market share, famous work environments, and much prestige. But when I counter back by asking why these applicants seek employment at such companies, they are often unsure. They are attracted by the largesse of what they’ve heard, but they rarely have specific, or even realistic, reasons why these companies are good fits for their personalities and skill-sets.
Finding the right position is a matter of identifying one’s own wants and matching them with a company. What many entry-level candidates don’t realize is that there are a wide bevy of companies with similar work environments, similar levels of creativity, and similar perks to these giants with giant names. Although most candidates believe they are setting a reach goal by targeting these larger firms, they are often just proving their naivety.
In my time talking with candidates and clients, I’ve learned that this kind of inexperienced wishful thinking is commonplace. Hiring managers sometimes possess outrageous ideas of what kinds of candidates they expect to receive applications from. Applicants have unrealistic ideas of their average prospective salary (many base their assumptions of such things on the anecdotes of friends). Misinformation runs rampant throughout the hiring world. As applicants, it’s our job to dispel as much of the market propaganda as possible. We don’t want to be naive. And we don’t want to get what we wished for only to find ourselves deeply unhappy with the results.
Rather than identifying these large, prestigious companies as targets, we should be stopping to break down the elements which attract us to them. Is it the legendary stories of creativity and innovation? So then we crave a creative environment and might detest a stifling corporate structure. Do we really want to work somewhere with so many employees? Will our day-to-day work still focus on small teams? If so, maybe we’d actually prefer a smaller total environment with similarly intimate team-based work. When we hear stories about Facebook offering Vending Machines full of Electronics, are we prioritizing these perks over the daily conditions of a workplace? To be a bit glib: are we putting the ping-pong table in the break room over the kind of work we want to be doing?
Of course, the labor market is sprawling, and it’s hard to know fully. But for every enormous company offering flashy benefits, there are hundreds more with similar offerings but less notoriety. It’s incumbent upon applicants to sort through the noise so as to find employers which will more accurately nurture their skills, personality traits, and relationships. I certainly don’t want to give the impression of denigrating these larger companies; they have huge recruiting arms and often provide incredible employee experiences. But to look at a market and see only the companies at its apex is like looking at an iceberg and paying no attention to the great glut of it which floats below the surface.
If you’re finding it difficult to find the kinds of positions you’re interested in, you could use my help! Contact me, Nancy, at www.idealinterviewco.com/contact or find me on LinkedIn.