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■ recr uitment outreach/selection ■ recr uitment outreach/selection ■ Finding the Right Job by Avoiding the Wrong One By John Ford omeone I knew very well had dreamed, since childhood, about becoming a teacher. Lynne was influenced by good teachers she knew in public school. Like so many great teachers she had a strong desire to help others learn. She liked a lot of the subject matter, too. S College preparation was an essential part of Lynne’s career path. She took required classes, pursued a special education certificate and developed skills in Spanish so she could reach more students. During her senior year Lynne was assigned to be a student teacher. How she had looked forward to this! For the next semester, her world would be 35 little students and a master teacher eager to help her polish her teaching skills. It was such a disappointment when it turned out to be different than expected. Lynne loved children, but couldn’t deal with so many of them. There wasn’t time for one-on-one teaching and behavior management took much of her time. Much of this could have been overcome with experience, but Lynne just didn’t enjoy teaching large groups. She improved, but was miserable. Teaching just wasn’t what she thought it would be. If only she had known this sooner. Finding the Wrong Job Have you ever had a job that made you unhappy? Many people have. Researchers have found that as many as half of American workers are unhappy in their jobs. (Ben Rooney, “Half of workers unhappy in their jobs,” CNNMoney, June 20, 2011, http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/20/news/economy/workers_disgr untled/index.htm). Mismatch between the employees’ abilities and | 8 | APRIL 2013 the full set needed to perform the job is part of the problem. A report entitled Education to Employment, by the McKinsey Center for Government (www.mckinsey.com/features/education_to_employment), found that 39 percent of employers believe that college students lack important skills needed on the job. These researchers also report that 72 percent of educational institutions felt they were preparing students to be fully successful in the job corresponding to their college major. There are reasons to believe you cannot rely on your college education for a complete picture of the workplace. For the past five years, The U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) has done research on employee engagement. “Employee engagement is a heightened connection between employees and their work, their organization, or the people they work for or with,” according to the September 2008 MSPB study The Power of Federal Employee Engagement. “Engaged employees find personal meaning in their work, take pride in what they do and where they do it, and believe that their organization values them.” The MSPB study highlights the influence of how much employees like their jobs and how well they perform them. “We have found evidence that a heightened connection, or engagement, between federal employees and their organization that surpasses job satisfaction is related to better organizational outcomes,” read the study. Federal employees who are engaged in their work contribute more and their agencies accomplish more of their organizational goals. There are reasons to believe that enjoying your work and your work environment, among other things, helps you to do your job HR NEWS MAGAZINE ■ recr uitment outreach/selection well. Many factors affect how much we like our jobs. Employers and job applicants focus primarily on the abilities required. If we want to improve recruitment and selection we sometimes need to widen this focus. Being Realistic Employers try to reduce unhappiness on the job with better selection tools that assess a wider range of job-relevant abilities and personal characteristics. This always falls short in predicting whether a new employee will like a job. Legal requirements constrain what employers can investigate because such inquiries must be directly related to the job. Few of the “little things” that make a big difference to an employee will be assessed in an employer’s pre-job screening. But applicants can accomplish this for themselves. What do we do before we pay for a suit, buy a car, or commit to a long-term relationship? We try it on, take it for a drive, and give it some time. The hiring version of this is called a realistic job preview. It describes the job and work environment in detail so people understand the advantages and disadvantages before they apply for it. The objective is to decrease applications from those not likely to thrive in the position while increasing applications from those most likely to succeed (MSPB, Realistic Job Previews, Issues of Merit, September 2008). This strategy finds job fit problems related to motivation and engagement that are less easily measured with formal assessment tools. There is a lot of measuring in buying a suit, too, but you still need to try it on. It’s the practical thing to do. ■ recr uitment outreach/selection ■ Three Views of a Job There are three job preview strategies commonly used by employers. They can be just as useful to job seekers. Applicant Self-Screen. Organizations recognize that they and the applicant share the goal to find out whether the applicant will like the job or not. Knowing this, they build on the realistic job preview idea and provide a great deal of information about their jobs and work environment. They help potential applicants learn about the car pools, the commute and the cafeteria—not just the competencies. Applicants need to use such resources and then go beyond them to get the best preview. They can gather information about the employer from other sources using the Web, social media and traditional media sources. Applicants can also check the employer’s references by talking to people who currently work or have worked there. Everyone has opinions about where they work. If possible, applicants should visit the employer and look over the workspace—maybe even watch employees work for a while. If this is not possible, a useful alternative may be to visit another organization that does the same kind of work. Simulations. “A job simulation is an assessment that presents applicants with realistic, job-related situations and documents their behaviors or responses to help determine their qualifications for the job. Job simulations include, but are not limited to, work samples, situational judgment tests, assessment centers, and job tryout procedures.” (MSPB, Job Simulations: Trying CONTINUED ON PAGE 11 WWW.IPMA-HR.ORG APRIL 2013 | 9 | ■ recr uitment outreach/selection Right Job CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 Out for a Federal Job, September 2009) Employers like this type of assessment because it predicts job performance accurately. A good simulation does not contain just scored tasks to be done, but numerous aspects of the job included to make it seem “real.” While obvious to those on the job, much of this may be new to applicants. Simulations are helpful to applicants as well. “By exposing applicants to the types of events, scenarios, and challenges confronted on the job, job simulations help applicants determine if the job is well suited to their knowledge, skills, abilities, and interests.” (MSPB) An extension of this strategy is to volunteer at a nonprofit or other open organization that does the same kind of work. It is one way to try out the job and get some feedback on how you do it. Applicants also might investigate a professional organization for that type of work. It is possible to identify such an association using one of the directories or guides such as the Encyclopedia of Associations (http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/ html/bl0114.html), and they might earn certification in that area—not just with the goal of passing a test but of expanding their knowledge of the kinds of problems faced by these professionals—and whether they enjoy doing them under the stress of performance evaluation. Practice materials for these certifications sometimes include simulations and other information about the work their members do. Professional organizations are also a good medium through which to identify recently retired employees who have done work in this area, maybe even with the same organization. They are often happy to tell applicants as much or more than they want to know about the retiree’s work experiences. Probationary Period. Many employers observe new hires closely during their first months on the job. At the end of this time a poorly performing employee can often be let go with less formal justification than is required later. This lets employers “try out” an employee before making a longer-term commitment. MSPB studied this practice in the federal workforce (MSPB, The Probationary Period, August 2005) and found that employee performance during this period accurately predicts later job performance. ■ recr uitment outreach/selection ■ part-time jobs. Each of them puts employees in a position to understand the future workplace well enough to know if they want to be there long term. It also looks better on a resume to complete one of these inherently short-term jobs than to leave a supposedly long-term job after only a few weeks or months. Although the specifics vary, these three strategies can work as well for applicants as they do for employers. It is in the interest of both parties to take extra trouble to avoid employee unhappiness on the job. And employers should help applicants with these tryouts. They are helping themselves, too, after all. Lynne, who we met earlier, didn’t have this experience. She didn’t think of it and her college didn’t offer it early enough. I have heard that some teacher training programs give would-be teachers earlier classroom exposure—a good thing. Informed students can also seek out these experiences for themselves. Not surprisingly, Lynne was quite unhappy with her work for a time after she graduated. The realities of life did not allow her to go back and get a degree in a new major. She worked a series of jobs that helped support her family but weren’t much fun and it eventually worked out. She discovered one-on-one tutoring, working outside the school system to help individual children who were struggling, and even developed a specialty helping children whose parents did not speak English. Lynne felt lucky to finally feel the joy of helping children learn. When I last saw her, she was pursuing a master’s degree in reading instruction and expanding her tutoring business—a direction that used her abilities, education and preferred work style. We should all be this happy in our work, and perhaps we can be, without an initial period of unhappiness by understanding what the wrong fit looks like so we can slip around it on our way to what’s right for us. John Ford, Ph.D., is a senior research psychologist in the Office of Policy and Evaluation at the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. Before joining the Board in 2003, he worked for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and as a research and development scientist for a small private-sector consulting firm. Ford earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from Brigham Young University in 1993. His professional interests include test development, survey research, content analysis, and text mining. He found the right job. —N Although designed to help employers, a probationary period can also help job-seekers if they are willing to take short-term work while looking for longer-term employment. They let employees look over the employer, too. Does being in a cubicle matter to an employee who is accustomed to a single-occupant office? The noise might be no big deal—or it might drive the employee to distraction. It can be hard to predict outside of the new work environment. Jobs with a probationary period are just one form of tryout employment. Others include internships, contract work and WWW.IPMA-HR.ORG APRIL 2013 | 11 |