Tag Archives: hiring

7 Things You Should Never, Ever Do In Your First Week At A New Job

Posted on by
Reply

During your first week at a job, what you do or say can leave a lasting impression on your new colleagues. And you want to make sure it’s a good one.

That’s because, while you may have gotten the job, the evaluation is not over. Your new boss, your new department — there will be many eyes carefully assessing how you fit with the team.

HuffPost asked career experts about the actions and strategic missteps that will make you memorable in a bad way as a new hire and what you should do instead to ensure you’re received positively.

1. You’re late.

It’s normal to get lost in a new building or to underestimate your new commute, but if you’re late to meetings on your first week, you will make a bad first impression about your time management skills.

“You don’t want to be showing up to meetings three or four minutes late … you want to be respectful, be punctual,” said Mary Abbajay, president of the leadership development consultancy Careerstone Group.

To account for time you may spend lost, give yourself at least a half hour more than you need to get to work or a meeting.

2. You are a know-it-all.

When you’re a new hire, people will be evaluating your competence, commitment and compatibility, said Gorick Ng, a Harvard career advisor and creator of the “How To Say It” flashcard series for professional communication.

You may think that pointing out what is wrong or what does not align with how you’ve seen things done before will show your competence. But being overly confident in your own expertise will win you more enemies than allies.

Even if you privately believe that your new employer’s way of getting work done is outdated, be open-minded and curious.

You can show that curiosity by asking polite questions. So, “Rather than say, ‘This isn’t how we did things at _____,’ try saying, ‘This is interesting! Could you help me understand the thought process behind _____? It’s a bit different from what I’m used to, but I’m excited to learn your way of doing things,’” Ng said.

You also want to show that you’re a quick learner who is dedicated to getting up to speed. When in doubt, try saying, “I know you said earlier that _____ is important. Would this be an example?” Ng suggested.

3. You don’t play the ‘new card.’

Patricia Schwartz, an executive coach who works with new hires, said playing the new card is a strategic advantage new hires should leverage.

“You can interact with people that you might feel more intimidated to interact with later,” she said.

But you need to be thoughtful about your first impression. Don’t just send every colleague the same generic message, because that “risks coming across as spammy,” Ng said.

When in doubt, Ng said you should focus on “building relationships with the people that you are already meeting and then introduce yourself to the people that you will soon work with, with a message like, ‘Hi! I’m _____ and I’m the new _____. Just thought I’d introduce myself!’”

4. You don’t follow the dress code.

What is appropriate to wear for a job can vary, so don’t assume your T-shirt and jeans will work.

“Dressing inappropriately is also a mistake that I think people make,” Abbajay said.

Typically, your hiring manager will let you know how buttoned up you need to be for the office. If they say that “we have a very informal culture” during your interview, then “that means they probably are more of a Friday casual look,” Abbajay said.

If they haven’t told you what is and isn’t OK to wear yet, you should be able to look it up. Often, employee handbooks outline dress code policies. You could also ask your new boss or team member, “What is the general dress code here?” Abbajay suggested.

5. You overshare.

There is a clear line between being cordial and assuming an intimacy you don’t actually have with a new co-worker. Don’t cross over into the latter in your first week.

“I was working with this woman once we were new colleagues. And in our first time working together on a task, she told me so many things about her personal life that were just TMI, like how she left her first husband,” Abbajay said. “All of these things really made me want to avoid her … it was just too much too soon.”

6. You gossip.

Are you noticing whispered arguments and muffled laughs when certain colleagues walk in? When you join a company, you are also joining its culture, where there can be warring factions.

Be careful not to engage if you get roped into gossip about other team members.

“Do not align yourself with any group in your first week,” Abbajay said. “Just listening is kind of engaging. So I would either excuse myself, change the topic or turn around and say something nice about the person they’re gossiping about if you have met them.”

7. You don’t touch base with your manager.

Out of all the people you will meet during your first week, the most important relationship you need to establish is the one you have with your boss.

“A very high percentage of people will leave their jobs because of the relationship with the boss,” Schwartz said.

To build that foundation of trust between you and your boss, you need to align your communication style and get on the same page about what’s important.

Ideally, your boss is checking in with you during your first week to have that conversation. But if they are not, you should proactively ask for a one-on-one meeting before the week is over.

“A lot of times bosses don’t reach out because maybe they just got busy, they didn’t hear from you or they’re managing a lot of people,” Abbajay said. “But this is why you should not take that as a sign that they don’t want to talk to you.”

Here are strategic questions career experts previously told HuffPost that you should ask your new boss to understand them better:

  • What’s the best way to approach you with a question?
  • How would you like to communicate day-to-day and week-to-week?
  • What work, project or priority is top-of-mind for you right now?

Observe if you get lukewarm or enthusiastic support for your questions. Managers are evaluating your early performance, and you should be too.

The first week is “so much information. It’s really overwhelming,” Schwartz said. To learn what’s important, she suggested taking notes about how staff talk about their jobs and your experience being there, or debriefing with a friend to get a second opinion.

She also said you should reflect on whether your manager is playing their part or if more of the responsibility to get up to speed keeps falling on you.

“Usually the first few months [are] often a probationary period. So the employee also is determining, ‘Is this a good match for me?’” Schwartz said.

By asking the right questions and paying attention to the culture of your new company, you can figure out if your new job is or isn’t a good fit sooner rather than later.

Share Button

If You Go Through This Many Rounds Of Job Interviews, It’s A Red Flag

Posted on by
Reply

For Tejal Wagadia, some of the job interviews she had after getting laid off a few years ago are her “villain origin story.”

Back when she was unemployed, Wagadia applied for a staffing agency’s technical recruiter role. It was a “super frustrating” process, she said. The recruiter initially promised that it would be just two rounds of interviews to meet teammates, a hiring manager and the business co-owner. But then the interviews kept coming until it became a total of five rounds at an office, lasting at least two hours each.

“They’re like, ‘The other owner also wants to meet with you.’ OK. ‘You know what? One more hiring manager wants to meet with you.’ OK,” Wagadia recalled.

By the third interview, she realised her time was being wasted. “None of the questions that they asked me were about my skill set or my qualifications. Especially at the owner level, they asked me questions about my employer that had just laid me off,” Wagadia said. Still, she participated in two more rounds due to the “sunk cost fallacy” of investing so much time already and because she was “desperate at that time to find a job,” she said. But she still didn’t get the role.

And Wagadia’s not alone in enduring excessive interviews like these. There are countless stories of job candidates being strung along through an indefinite number of interviews.

So, exactly how many interview rounds is too many? Hiring experts shared their tipping point.

Employers that do more than 5 rounds usually don’t know what they want — and that’s a big red flag.

Eddiana Rosen, a human resources specialist with recruiting experience who coaches job seekers, said that if a company doesn’t know who it wants to hire after five rounds of interviews, it has “a broken system.”

Rosen went through this herself in one memorably indecisive hiring process, where she had eight in-person interviews and one final Zoom interview for a promising startup job in New Jersey.

“I was driving and paying for parking every single time,” she said. She got the job, but she knew her time had been wasted.

“The majority of people who are interviewing have another job, and I think that asking people to come in more than a certain amount of time to interview is just ridiculous,” Rosen said.

Companies that drag out their hiring do not know what they want, experts say.

“They’re afraid of making the bad hire,” Rosen said. “But at the end of the day, the more that they take time, the more they risk losing good candidates, because essentially, the more qualified the candidate, the less they’re willing to put up with these bad hiring practices.”

Rosen said she saw employers hire faster in 2021, when job seekers had more leverage. But in this tight labor market, she has seen the number of interview rounds balloon to around five or more. “Five [rounds] would be like the absolute maximum if I’m really interested in that company, but four is more of where it should be,” Rosen said.

Wagadia, who now works as a technical recruiter, also firmly believes that an organisation’s hiring process should take no more than five rounds of interviews, from the first screener call to the offer or rejection.

She said that after five, “you’re telling them, ‘Hey, a) we don’t have a process, we are not organised enough to have a process,’ or b) ‘You’re not important enough, or good enough for this role. So we’re going try and figure out whether you are good enough.’”

Ebony Joyce, a career coach and diversity consultant, finds that for midlevel non-management roles, “typically any more than four [rounds] is too many.” But for more senior roles with potential employers, that number can increase.

In general, she said candidates should ask themselves: “Did I learn something about them? Did they learn something about me? … You should be going to each interview learning more about what the company’s problems are, and how you can solve that problem.”

If you’re not learning anything new, that may be your sign that the rounds have gone too far, Joyce said.

Employers should be upfront about their expectations.

Although a job candidate can sometimes get the job after many interview rounds, a company’s wishy-washy behavior is not a good sign that you are the preferred candidate.

“If you are a top candidate for an employer, they will make you a priority,” Wagadia said.

Now when she talks to job candidates, Wagadia models what she wishes she had seen in her job interviews. She shares that she may not be able to give an exact date for when the hiring process will end, but she can explain what an average hiring timeline looks like, “such as six to eight weeks,” and what the interview rounds will entail.

Rosen, who previously had a sponsorship with Teal, said that more employers should use the career development platform because its job listings let candidates know upfront about the number of interviews, who they will be interviewing with, the questions that they can anticipate, and how long each interview will take.

For example, a current listing for a senior backend engineer at Teal explicitly states that there will be four interviews and that the first one will be a 30-minute Zoom call with the chief technical officer, where the goal is “high level qualifications & mutual fit.”

In this way, there are no surprises and candidates can decide for themselves if this is a job they want to apply for. “That way you can opt out,” said David Fano, Teal’s CEO. ”[You] know exactly what [you’re] getting into.”

Fano said interviews are typically no more than three rounds for Teal candidates. The first is a “smell test”; it assesses if they are who they say they are. Then the second interview’s goal is to answer “Are they technically capable?” The third is about work culture: “Are they a culture add?” Candidates meet team members and can decide if they want to join.

“At the end of that, we feel like we have enough information to make the decision,” Fano said, adding that hiring “doesn’t benefit from groupthink where more voices and more opinions is necessarily better.”

Here’s how to gently push back when your time is not being respected with job interviews.

If an employer doesn’t set a time boundary and keeps scheduling more interviews, set it for yourself in the beginning of the hiring process.

Joyce said she successfully coached a client to ask what the interview process would look like in the first round and to state, “I have a five-interview max.”

You can also make the call to bow out of consideration when the number of rounds is becoming egregious.

Rosen suggested you do this by saying something like: “It’s been quite a bit of a lengthy process so far, and I’ve had to say no to other commitments. … I would really appreciate if you can let me know how much longer I’ll have to be in the process, because if I have to go much longer, I’ll have to get myself out of the race, just to respect each other’s time.” With this approach, your tone is more politely curious than demanding.

And if you’re not interested in continuing the relationship, Rosen suggested that you simply state: “Hey, I am so appreciative of the time so far. Unfortunately, I’ll have to take myself out of the race, considering this process has been so lengthy for me.”

Ultimately, employers disrespecting a candidate’s time can be a bad omen for how they may one day disrespect your work-life boundaries as an employee.

“At the end of the day, your time is just as valuable as theirs,” Rosen said. “Being respectful of your own time is very commendable.”

Share Button