Fire Your Boss (13 page)

Back in chapter 1 I introduced you to Jared Edwards, a client of mine who has been a successful salesman for his entire working life. Beginning by selling photocopiers, then moving on to woodworking and finally music-room fixtures for schools, Jared had always managed to land sales jobs. When he lost one job, for whatever reason, he soon was able to land another. But when the music-fixture firm was purchased and its entire sales force was let go, Jared’s luck ran out. While he spent hours a day on the telephone, contacting all his old sales networks, and day after day trolling the Internet for leads, it took him eighteen months to land a job. It turned out that the merger of his former employer was caused by an industry-wide downturn. By the time Jared and the other laid-off workers hit the job market, all the most likely employers were also downsizing, not hiring.

By waiting to be fired, or until you pick up the hints you’re about to be fired, you’ve handed control of the timing of your job search to someone who thinks so little of you as a worker that he has, or is about to, let you go. Believe me, your boss won’t be choosing the time of your termination based on when
you’ll
have the best chance to get another job. He will terminate you when it fits
his
needs. He may go to church every Sunday, but he’ll fire you on Christmas Eve if he needs you there for the last-minute rush of shoppers, but not after. Whenever he fires you, or starts preparing for it, you can be sure business in your industry or profession will be down, just as it was when Jared was laid off. (See the box on page 102: Can You Negotiate Severance?)

Most bosses hate to terminate people for performance reasons. It’s a sign they made a mistake in hiring the person in the first place. There are times when layoffs are a legitimate response to economic trouble. But lots of times bosses use a downturn in business as a rationalization for termination so they feel better — “I hate to let you go, Steve, but business is bad.” Whether your being canned was a legitimate response to economic doldrums or a rationalization doesn’t matter; either way, you’ll be left with little chance of finding anything else soon, since all your prime candidates will also be experiencing slow business. (See the box on page 104: Are You Eligible for Unemployment Compensation?)

The average terminated employee then launches a desperate short-term campaign to land a job. My clients would send out hundreds of résumés, make dozens of telephone calls, and send out countless e-mails. Their goal was to land a job as soon as possible. Rather than carefully picking their targets, they flooded the market, contacting anyone and everyone with whom there was a remote possibility of getting a lead or a job. As soon as they got a response, they fixated on that position. They often stopped sending out résumés, making calls, or sending out e-mails, and instead boned up on the company and person with whom they were interviewing. Desperate at not having any money coming in, they usually grabbed the first job they were offered without negotiating.

That’s what Jared did. After eight months of not even a glimmer of a new job, Jared had run through all his savings, and then took part-time work as a cabinetmaker to help make ends meet. His wife’s civil service job provided health benefits for the family, but things got tight quickly. With his daughter about to start college, his son needing braces, and his wife growing increasingly nervous, Jared felt desperate. When he got a lead on a job selling a computerized reading-education system to school districts, he borrowed money to fly to the company’s headquarters for an interview. His willingness to take on a very underperforming sales region cinched the deal, and he grabbed the job when it was offered. As he himself told me, all he cared about was that “the first paycheck didn’t bounce when I rushed to cash it.”

The metaphor that has been used for the job-search process is a hunt, and it’s an apt one. The typical job seeker is like a desperate hunter who decides to set out for game when his family is starving. He heads off into the forest looking for something to shoot and bring back for the family table. It doesn’t matter what he finds, as long as it’s edible. Reacting in this fashion isn’t a very good way to go through your working life today.

Approaching the search for work as a hunt makes sense if you’re going to go through the process only a handful of times in your life: when you leave school and get a first full-time job, and then maybe the one or two times you’re either fired or have to move to a new location. The job hunt used to be a rare thing, like buying a home. That was the typical pattern for workers decades ago, back when there was corporate loyalty and when you could count on keeping your job if you kept your nose clean and did your work. But that pattern doesn’t fit today’s world. We know there’s no corporate loyalty anymore and that doing your job, even excelling at your job, isn’t enough to ensure that you’ll even have a job. Looking for a job is no longer something you’ll have to do just a couple of times in your life. Today you’ll have to do it frequently.

According to the
Economist,
the average thirty-two-year-old American has already worked for nine different firms. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that job tenure — the length of time someone stays at a particular job — is dropping, particularly for men aged thirty-five and over, the very individuals who we used to assume were at the most stable period in their work lives. (See the box on page 107: Get Used to Job Hopping.)

The rule of thumb used to be that traditional job hunts took one month for every $10,000 you earned. I’ve found that today it’s taking twice that long. It’s taking a person who was earning, say, $90,000 a year about eighteen months to find a new job, using the traditional techniques. And that new job invariably pays less than she was earning before — sometimes a lot less. The market is no better for those earning less, or more.

I have some new techniques that can help cut that time down, which I’ll go over later in this book. But the best first response to the new job environment is to abandon job hunting altogether and take a different approach, one I call job fishing.

Rather than waiting to look for a new job until you’ve been fired, or you’ve spotted the signs you’re about to be fired, you need to be looking constantly for a new job. And when I write constantly I do mean constantly. The job search isn’t something you start when desperate and finish when reemployed. It’s something that should be a part of your daily work life. Businesses don’t stop advertising when they land a customer, and start again when they have no customers — at least smart businesses don’t. They advertise constantly, looking to create a steady flow of customers so there’s never a time when they’re without business. Your goal should be the same: a steady flow of employment offers so you’re never without a job.

I used the word “offers” intentionally. That’s another part of the job-fishing program. Rather than looking for “a job” per se, you should instead focus on getting job offers. Then, after having been offered a position, you can decide whether or not you want to accept it.

The metaphor I like to use is job fishing, not job hunting. Rather than waiting until there’s no food on the table and then setting out to kill anything you can to feed your family, you go out every day, cast very big nets into the ocean, see what you catch, and then sort through the haul, choosing which to keep and which to throw back.

Think about what a difference this kind of approach makes.

If you’re always looking for a new job while you’re already employed, you’ll be under little if any pressure to take a position that doesn’t meet your needs and wants. You’ll be able to shift jobs at a time when the economy is in your favor: say, when there’s a high demand for people with your skills. Rather than the potential employers having the leverage in the situation, you’ll be the one with the power. The burden will be on the potential employer to convince you her company is worthy. You will no longer have to go on job interviews with your hat in hand, begging for a position.

Everyone knows that it’s easier to find a job while you’re still employed. Partly it’s because the potential employer sees hiring you as a double positive. Not only does she get your services, but she also gets to deprive a competitor of your services. I think a less appreciated advantage of searching for a job while you’re employed is the impact it has on your attitude, and as a result, your presentation. It’s human nature to want what you can’t have. When you go into a job interview not yet convinced you even want the job under discussion, you broadcast that to the interviewer. Rather than this creating anger, it actually entices the interviewer. That’s because you project confidence, not arrogance; and that’s intoxicating to a potential employer. (See the box on page 111: How You Should Act on Interviews.) She suddenly is working hard to talk you into taking a job you haven’t even been offered. It’s remarkable how many times clients of mine come back from interviews for jobs they really didn’t want and report that they were offered the moon to take the spot.

Contrast that with the number of times people go into interviews desperate for the job and don’t get the offer. I think that’s because the interviewer reads desperation rather than confidence. Desperation is not an attractive trait. The best response it can generate is pity, and that’s not sufficient for most employers to offer you a position. Instead, he’ll feel uncomfortable with your desperation and will cut the interview short just to get out of the situation. An hour later he’ll turn around and offer the job to someone who doesn’t really want it.