Why is Everyone Afraid of Dating?

Here’s a crazy thought.  Imagine you met someone through an online dating site.  You read their profile and liked what you saw; they had all the makings of a good partner on paper, they seemed interesting, attractive and to have a lot in common with you.  So, what the hell… you decide you’re going to go on a date.  You set a date and time, put on your best clothes to leave a good impression and spend a couple of hours together.  Maybe you go on a date or two after this.  Then, seemingly out of nowhere, well before fully getting to know this individual, trying things out in the sack, or getting to know their friends and family, you hop a plane to Vegas, find a chapel with an Elvis impersonator licenced in the state of Nevada and tie the knot. 'Till death or thousands of dollars in legal fees do us part.

Sounds absolutely crazy, right? This has to be either destined true love or complete insanity. Who in their right mind would get married after only a handful of dates, without meeting another person close to this individual to vouch for them and without ever experiencing some of the things that make relationships work: fighting, sex, compassion, challenge.   Well, as crazy as this sounds, I just effectively described what the hiring process looks like for many of us (minus the Elvis thing).

Think about it. Based on a resume or job application, a company finds you attractive. You go through a handful of interviews, perhaps meeting a couple of HR professionals along the way who hardly represent the image and culture of the whole organization. The company is never able to see how you actually work and you never get to experience the lifestyle of a typical day in the office. Finally, after a few meetings, a contract is tossed in front of your eyes and each party signs away a commitment to each other.

The divorce rate is currently hovering around 50% for all marriages, but I’d love to hear what the latest statistics are on corporate attrition.  Long gone are the days of people receiving gold watches for their 20 years of service; now you’re lucky to get 5 out of an employee. However, even if we discount the fact that people make many career changes in their lives, how many employees jump ship within less than 2 years of being hired simply because they didn’t like the job?

More importantly, what is so awful about dating? Particularly with new grads who are still trying to find their way in the world, why should organizations commit to an individual who has a decent likelihood of being awful at their job and wanting out? On the flipside, why should I be expected to take a full time position with a company I know next to nothing about?  Call me crazy, but I wouldn’t mind being hired on for a 3-6 month contract.  It would give me the opportunity to get to know the company, the clients and the type of work that would be expected of me.  At the end of this contract, both sides would have the opportunity to review the past, consider their options and either make a more firm commitment or move onto greener pastures. I know individuals hate the idea of such ambiguity and are usually more risk averse than this, but for a new grad in their 20s, is their really that much to lose?

If contract work frightens you, there are new services popping up from groups like Toronto’s Challenge Factory.  CF is a career services organization that offers a unique service to individuals: the opportunity to spend a day in the life of your targeted career. Instead of simply dreaming about what it would be like, Challenge Factory will place you in an office to volunteer for the role of your choice for a day (I always wondered if I would be a good cop). However, there is no guarantee that your day will be representative of the job, coworkers or organization you could be walking into.

I’m still a hopeless romantic who believes in love at first sight, Santa Clause, finding the perfect job, and one day having a wife, big house and 2.2 kids (pray for mercy for my third child). However, my warning goes out to women and companies alike: if you want to put a ring on this finger, you’re going to get to know me and really impress me before I’ll sign anything.

Do I Have to Go to Work Today?

The frightening thing is that increasingly, the answer is becoming ‘no.’ With more and more people working from home each year, taking flex hours and even basing out of a home office… there may very soon be a day when the answer to this question is no.

I recently read an article through CNN that talked about the office of tomorrow. It was a very visual piece that showed 3D renderings of an office in 2022.  Common place where items such as hologram tables, 3-D printers and even office windows which doubled as computer screens (though this one may be a lot closer than 10 years away). The article showed what kind of technologies are coming up the pipelines and set to be in place in the business world in 10 years. However, even this article acknowledges that there is a massive assumption precluding the entire piece: that you will even be working in an office in 10 years.

In my recent job hunt, I have already stumbled across full-time positions that list their location as “virtual.” These are not simply jobs where flex time or working from home is permitted, or even jobs based in a city where positions such as sales and support are mostly on the road. Increasingly, coders, consultants, writers, graphic designers and anyone else who doesn’t really need a place to call ‘work’ are being hired from locations across the globe. Particularly in cases where the majority of an employee’s work is done on the computer, meetings are held over Skype and documents are shared through the cloud, does it really make a difference if your co-worker is down the hall or across the globe?

Instead, what I would really wish to have seen out of the CNN article is forecast technologies to support the increasing trend of home workers. The snowballing power of mobile technology is encouraging (and I always loved the quote about Nasa and Angry Birds), however where will this technology lead us in 10 years? Will desks be obsolete? Will we see living spaces better designed to handle work flow?  Will we see home innovations that are able to replicate more of the functions of the office such as white boarding, co-worker socializing, getting fired (though George Clooney may have already proved that one a bad idea) and even frowned up on business activities such as cheating on your partner with your secretary.

Are we moving towards an era where those massive, brilliant buildings that scatter and inspire our cityscapes become obsolete?

It seems there will always be an argument for some form of in-person collaboration. A few years ago, I read the book Blind Faith by Ben Elton.  While the book was nothing more than a futuristic, sexual-tech-theology adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 (yes, I’m equally confused by my own description), it did raise a few interesting points. The book was set in an oppressive future where digital sharing of information had become all-encompassing and individuals could no longer have independent secrets or personal lives. With the pervasiveness of the online life, everyone with an office job worked from home. However, due to growing social dysfunction, fizzy coffs (visits to physical offices) were made mandatory to encourage people to get out of the house and interact in a face-to-face manner.

So perhaps the question shouldn’t be, ‘do I have to go to work today?’  Instead, we should be asking what is the right balance of office work, work from home and travel. Also, if I do end up working entirely from home, how can I be expected to riddle my coworkers with nerf darts?

…Never mind.

Why Can't Jobs Find Me?

Job hunting is an area very near and dear to my heart since, after an unfortunate economic climate and a revoked job offer upon my return from Thailand, I find myself back on the market. I, like so many others, find the job seeking process to be one that is painfully outdated and if I’m being brutally honest, massively ineffective.

I’m going to seemingly contradict myself here, but bear with me for a minute.

I feel that I have a fantastic resume; I also despise my resume. Let me explain.

By comparison to the resumes of my peers and those who I would be competing against in the job market, my resume is probably pretty damned impressive. That said, those simple 2 pages say almost nothing about how useful I could be and how much potential I have to grow within an organization. Part of the issue is that when you condense a human being’s life down to 2 pages, just about anyone is going to sound impressive when they list only their greatest accomplishments (particularly if HR professionals are spending an average of 15 seconds per resume, or wherever that statistic is at these days). However, companies don’t just want to know how you are going to be at your best. They should also be curious as to how you will perform on a day-to-day basis and, even more importantly, at your worst.

The other issue is that your resume states almost nothing about your future and who you could be. What are your goals (real goals, not that cheesy opening sentence you have at the start)? What kind of potential and ambition do you have for growth? Why are you even interested in this position? What are things you may not even know about yourself that someone else may see?

At the heart of the matter is this: companies are still engaging with talent in the same way that they have been for over 50 years. Sure, the process has become much more streamlined and automated with the use of keyword software and filtering surveys, however, all this has really done is reduced the number of man-hours required by HR. Resumes are static documents trying to represent the complexity of a dynamic individual hoping to score a job in a (hopefully) dynamic organization. I understand that no company could ever spend the required time looking at each of their applicants, but given the number of jobs that are filled outside of the traditional method (through networking, referrals, internships, etc.) one has to question the effectiveness of traditional recruiting.

I’m sure any HR professional reading this is cracking their fingers, eagerly anticipating the literary assault they are about to unleash on my comment section about the effectiveness of resumes and the things they like to see.  Regardless, I maintain that each individual is different and as such, each hiring manager is looking for different things. With most recruiters hiding behind the anonymous veil of an online posting, applicants can only hazard a guess as to how to tweak their resume and write their cover letter to give them the best shot at an interview.

Well you know what? Not me.  I’m done with job postings. In the first two weeks of January alone, I have scheduled 9 different meetings with people at companies I am genuinely interested in. These meetings give me the opportunity to engage with another person who represents the culture of their organization. From there, I can tell them the things they are actually interested in, instead of a line about being the high school council president. I can also ask them questions about both their organization and the job position. You know what? I have no idea what the hell a Competitive Intelligence Outside Consultant does and the two paragraph description just doesn’t cut it.

It dawns on me that I shouldn't end this rant completely doom and gloom. Technology is changing and organizations are hearing the cries of the hopelessly unemployed such as me. LinkedIn has started recommending jobs to me based on my profile, though I wish I could tell it to stop sending me entry-level engineering jobs now that I have my MBA. The Ladders has suggested thousands of jobs to me as well… I just think it has me confused with Patrick Bateman. Regardless, both still ultimately funnel your application down to the traditional resume & cover letter.

Perhaps the most promising technology is in a company I have had an opportunity to pilot: WhoPlusYou. The premise is simple: you build a very extensive profile that distills you down to your most basic and important skills, traits and interests. Jobs find you based on a matching of those same basic elements. When a match is made, the organization and the individual are connected, allowing the individual to choose to share a variety of support documents such as presentations, videos, PDFs, images and of course, traditional resumes. While the company is in early days, I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen so far. 

Yet while I am optimistic, I am cautiously so. I still question whether 2 pieces of paper, a software program or a handful of survey questions can ever gauge a person in the same way that a 2 minute conversation with another human being can.

Is Business Sick?

This question is, I suppose, the premise to this entire blog. Why would one need a counselor if there was nothing wrong? If business is sick, should we even be concerned? Is there anything we can do to help or, like the common cold, should we just get some rest, eat chicken soup and mope around the house for a day or two? If we believe we can help we must determine what business is suffering from and what we can prescribe to cure its ails.

While the recent 'occupy' protests would argue that the sickness is systemic and terminal, this is a rather daunting premise to admit that our entire way of life is flawed. However, given the impetus of these protests and the past 4 years of economic turmoil, anyone who says that the body of business is a picture of health may need some therapy themselves. Instead, I would argue that we observe business illnesses in the same way we regard those of people (we do, after all, give businesses many of the same rights as people). Each business, as each person, must be evaluated and approached on an individual basis. In certain cases, we can collectively group together illnesses among common groups or industries.

Take the example of the US auto industry. While healers much wiser and more experienced than I are currently trying a cocktail of different treatments to fix the industry, one has to wonder how the situation became so dire. With the benefit of hindsight, nearly anyone can see that the auto industry was suffering from some archaic ailment which should have been identified and cured long ago; a kind of corporate smallpox where everyone is shocked that this would happen in our modern age. By the time symptoms began to show, it was almost too late: dealerships were closed, plants shutdown, GM became government property, Chrysler was bought by Fiat and the United Auto Union. These companies had been operating on 50 year old business models, producing cars that people didn't really want and manufacturing parts at ridiculous costs under iron-tight union contracts. Meanwhile, foreign automakers had been eating away massive market shares from the Big Three.

I read an article in the fall (which for the life of me I cannot find) that made a drastic proposal for the auto industry. The article suggested that auto manufacturers should focus on their core competencies - designing, marketing and selling cars - and shed the distractions they are engaged in, such as manufacturing parts. What? A car company that doesn't manufacture anything? How would that be possible? That idea is almost as crazy as a computer company that doesn't create any electronics.

Say what you will about big blue, but IBM is one company who truly believes the old adage 'adapt or die.' In the early 80s if you wanted to buy a personal computer, your decision was pretty much down to Mac or IBM (note, not PC, but IBM). However, IBM had the foresight to see that hardware was going to eventually be a commodity and that they would have difficulty competing with foreign electronics suppliers who benefited from labour savings (sound familiar?). Enter the PC clone. IBM didn't stop making computers (not just yet at least), but for the most part, they became an assembler. Beyond this, they standardized PC design and parts and not just allowed, but collaborated with companies such as HP and Compaq who created PC clones. IBM still got their cut by licensing versions of MS-DOS which was arguably their true core competency at the time.

Imagine a world where Ford did nothing but design and sell cars. They could set the standard for parts which would be integrated into Ford cars and allow the market to take care of making parts at the lowest possible cost. So long as those basic criteria were met, companies around the world could optimize part design and create standard parts that could fit across not just one, but a wide range of vehicles. Cars would be modular, and brought together in an infinite number of configurations. Much like building a custom desktop from Dell, people could design and customize their own new car which would be exactly as they want it. Exhausts and mirrors and frames could even be specified from different suppliers much like choosing Kingston RAM over generic or a Seagate hard drive.

But I digress. This is simply one of many ailments facing the corporate world today. Each Friday I will attempt to (and likely fail to) tackle an issue which plagues modern businesses, be they individual organizations, industries, or business as a whole. Your feedback, comments and questions are always welcome: I love a good chat.