It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Old coworkers who won the lottery now want to come back
I’m a divisional manager. I manage several smaller teams and report to the manager of our entire department. Several years ago (long before I worked here), one of the teams won the lottery as a group. The entire team played except for Mary. Mary was invited to play but chose not to. After the win, everyone quit, including the manager.
In the years since the win, Mary has moved up to team manager. The lottery money has been a problem for her former team members and manager. One died from an overdose and another is in prison (both events made the news).
Our department is expanding, and some of Mary’s former team have applied to work here, citing financial issues and the need for an income. The departmental manager, Jon, has said he wants all of them to work on Mary’s team. Mary and I both think this is a bad idea. Mary thinks her old team will be bitter about having to come back to work and to have her as manager (at the time they left, she was entry-level and the most junior person on the team). A few of Mary’s old team have publicly expressed bitterness and regret about spending all the money and needing to work again. There are spots on other teams where they would be qualified to work. The spots on all the teams are entry-level only. Jon said he doesn’t think that Mary managing some of her old team members will cause conflict, but Mary and I both disagree. Do you have any idea how I can approach Jon with these concerns?
Mary is a great employee and will follow Jon’s direction, but I want to support her. She is also worried her old team members will resent her because she chose not to play the lottery because she believed the money would bring nothing but trouble and no good would come from it.
Mary is the one who will have to manage them if they come back, and so Jon should be deferring to you and Mary’s judgment on this.
But I don’t think you should suggest that they be hired for those entry-level spots on other teams, if they’re not entry-level. The goal here isn’t to find them jobs at all costs; it’s to hire the best person for each opening you have. If that might be one or more of them, then great … but shoehorning them into entry-level jobs that they’re overqualified for (if indeed that’s the case) doesn’t meet that bar.
Why not suggest a compromise with Jon — that you and Mary will interview each of them who’s interested and will keep an open mind, but that if at the end of that process you continue to be concerned that they’re not the best hires you could make, you’ll select other people?
2. A seemingly credible company has a fake-seeming website
A friend recently interviewed at a company that, from her cursory “due diligence,” seemed on the up-and-up: credentials, mutual colleagues/alumni, and a nice office in a swank building. There was no sensitive personal information disclosed or anything unusual about the interview itself, and she even ran into a former, trusted colleague on the way to the interview itself.
However, when my friend happened to look on the company’s web site again, she found what appear to be fake/doctored/planted press clippings, fake or unverifiable examples of the company’s innovations, and many cases of contradictory information (board member names, phone numbers, locations, etc) within the web site itself. Some discrepancies were obvious; others were only apparent to those with some experience in the field.
My friend applied for this position through a leading job-site aggregator; this company contacted her shortly thereafter for an interview (if I recall, via their corporate recruiter in another state or country).
A cautious and retiring type (by her own description), she is sure she hasn’t unluckily stumbled onto some nefarious fraud or Madoffesque upstart–but is annoyed at the waste of her time and energy. She is also concerned about the impact of having her name linked with any public “asking around,” as she is just a few years into her relatively small, niche career.
I haven’t heard of such a scenario before and am simply out of my depth here. (My guess is it’s a bizarre, cutting-edge set-up for a new reality show or an elaborate, and awful, practical joke).
The piece of this that doesn’t fit is the mutual colleagues. If you’re saying that she knows people who have worked there (and she’s sure they really did, and it’s not that their names have been coopted by some nefarious company), that makes it a lot harder to write it off as a scam or a strange reality show. Or who knows, maybe everything is on the up-and-up but they have a really horrible web communications person and haven’t figured that out or dealt with it yet. Or, a third possibility — since she’s only a few years into her career, is it possible that she’s evaluating the stuff on their website incorrectly?
In any case, I wouldn’t worry that she’s somehow connected herself to them by asking around about them. If the people she asked had strongly negative impressions of this company, presumably they would have told her when she asked. And no one is going to hold it against her for trying to do some due diligence on a company, particularly if there’s something shady to be learned.
3. Working while grieving
My father died a few days before Christmas, and it was extremely traumatic for me — he was a single parent to me when I was growing up, and we were extraordinarily close. I’m also 31, which I know isn’t a child, but I also didn’t really expect to be dealing with this sort of thing for another decade at least. On top of that, he was unmarried and had no other children, so when it comes to the business of settling his affairs, it’s pretty much just on me — our home, for example, needs to be sold, and it’s in California and I’m in New York.
I do have help, and I’m lucky to work at a place where everyone is understanding and generous — I was out for two extra weeks and haven’t been docked any vacation or sick leave, for example. That being said, I’m having a really hard time back at work: things that would simply irritate or minorly stress me out before feel extra big now, and I generally feel more fragile and sensitive than I have before. So far I feel like my work performance hasn’t been TOO impacted, but I’m anxious about that happening at some point/how much energy I’m expending keeping myself together. I’ve just started seeing a grief counselor, which I’m hoping will help, but in the meantime would be so grateful for any advice on how to manage this at work, at least for now.
I’m so sorry about your dad.
Lower the pressure on yourself — you’re not going to be functioning in the same way that you were before this happened, just like you hopefully wouldn’t expect yourself to come back at full speed right after being out for a debilitating illness. It’s going to take some time for you to recover your equilibrium at work, and that’s okay.
One thing that will help is talking to your boss. Let her know that you’re dealing with a lot right now, that there are a lot of demands on your energy not only because of the grief but also because all the logistics are falling to you, and that you may not be yourself right away. She probably already assumes that, but you’ll feel better for having said it.
If you’ve been there a while, trust that you have enough of a track record built up that you’ll be given the space that you need. If you haven’t been there a while, trust that people will still be compassionate because they know what you’re going through.
Hang in there.
4. Taking a job with a manager who’s less experienced than me
I am now at the last stage of the interview process for a very interesting middle-level position. I have a doubt, though, and I would really like to hear your thoughts. My industry is very small, so I ran across the person I would be reporting to a few times in the past. They are a couple of years younger than me and less experienced. I’m saying that they are less experienced after doing my due diligence on this position, on the company, and on the tasks of this person, not out of jealousy or delusion. While the age factor is not an issue, I’m concerned that reporting to a person with less experience than me could be a recipe for trouble.
The selection process is happening in English, which is not my or this company’s native language, so I already had the doubt that they were looking for somebody more junior than me, but after reviewing carefully the vacancy I think there were no misunderstandings there. Am I overreacting or would you see this as a red flag, or something I should pay attention to? In consideration of how the selection process is going, I think I have good chances to get an offer.
If the person is great at what she does, it’s not likely to be a problem at all. If she’s not great at what she does, that would be a problem even if she had decades of experience more than you. So really, focus on what you know about her competence and achievements, and how she approaches her work and her management on the people on her team, not on her age or years in the industry.
Plus, in many roles, a manager really doesn’t need to know how to do the work of the people she’s managing; she just needs to know how to manage them effectively. More on that here.
(Also! If you literally mean “a couple of years” younger than you, that’s basically nothing that should even cross your radar — a few years of experience isn’t likely to make the kind of difference you’d notice, at least not in most fields.)
5. I was rejected after a manager looked at my LinkedIn profile
I recently applied for a job through an organization that I am really interested in becoming a team member of. I noticed on Monday that a senior manager in the department looked at my LinkedIn profile on Sunday. However, I was sent an automated rejection letter that morning. My profile is pretty similar to my resume and I am unsure if I am over analyzing it or should fix my profile and or resume for future references.
Nah, don’t read anything into it. I look at LinkedIn profiles of candidates who I end up rejecting for other reasons all the time. Very rarely, if ever, is what I saw on LinkedIn the reason. I’m just looking to get a better sense of them, or even sometimes because I’m curious about one particular fact, or all sorts of reasons. Assuming that your LinkedIn profile isn’t really messy or quite different from your resume and that you don’t have a wildly unprofessional photo up or something, I’d assume you were rejected for non-LinkedIn reasons.
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old coworkers who won the lottery want to come back to work, a credible company has a fake-seeming website, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.