Finding the perfect job and fitting into the job role is eerily similar to the boutique-dress trial experience. Afterall, you will spend major part of your time at your office, other than home. Often candidates get carried away by job designation and brand name and forget that they have to find out the company culture, if it suits them or not. Adapting and sustaining in new environmental situations can sometimes be hard, even provoking fear in some employees.
Specially, in the case of a temporary employment, it can make some new hires pretty uneasy. After all, temporary job assignments generally mean that you have to learn a new organizational culture with each assignment you take up. Hence, taking a scientific approach to this factor is very important. Making observations and giving your answers using the research you have done is important. Though each organizational has different work culture and values, this approach will generally work for most of the situations.
Here are four strategies and helping questions that can ensure you to land in the job that best suits you and company that has best working organizational culture:
1. Be honest and research
Going back to the fashion boutique comparison, any job description is similar to wanting to try that blazer on a dummy model. Reading through the job and seeing the company premises and it's aura gets you excited and start thinking about your cubicle that could be at some cozy corner of the floor. However you need to know more and ask yourselves:
• Will the job description or organization that is offering the job, is speaking specific to your career path and it is going to enhance it?
• Imagine the normal factors their impact on your daily routine. Think if your job location and it's summary is suitable to your natural way of working on a day.
2. Use Interview as your Trial room
Everyone needs to work to earn their bread and butter. But if you attend an interview, shift your focus on how your company motivates you automatically to get the job. Keep your eyes and ears open to cultural hints which will help you gain intrinsic details of what your actual day-to-day experience is going to be like.
• Take a keen notice of physical surroundings your job location. Ask yourselves, if how the offices are? Check to see if there are open cubicles? Do the present employees look happy? What is their dress code? The point in making these observations is to form a basic idea of how formal and informal policies and values of the organization are going to be.
• Remember, that interview is a two-way process. As the interviewer is assessing you, in finding out how fit you would be in the job and company, given an opportunity to speak to the manager, similarly you should as well take advantage of asking about company's culture and values. Most of the time employees leave managers, and not businesses, hence use this valuable time to ask and find about company's philosophy in terms of leadership. Find how best it is to work with them by taking verbal cues in that short span of interview to form a mental picuture of how your manager is going to be.
• Always there is an 'inner voice', that gut feeling when you walk out of the interview. Ask yourself if you are content and happy or uninspired?
3. Communicate Your Assumptions Clearly
It's normally our second-nature that we do not attempt to match our career options with the job and it's description, because we've been never been told that comparing our nature and company culture gives a better chance at landing at suitable job. Take some time out to really ask and think through these interview questions, in order to match up your expectations about the job to your own definition of career success. Do not just tell the interview or the hiring manager what they want to hear. Instead try these:
• Where do you see yourself in five years?
• Is this job role and the organization interests you?
4. Temporary Staffing Companies
A temporary staffing company by its nature, has a regular inflow of people coming in and going out from the agency or a company hired for. A group of hiring managers run the show to place you with other companies. Hence, it is more important for a temporary hire or contractor to get a perception of company's culture that they would work with, for a short duration. And more importantly, as a temporary worker, as you’ll be employed for a short duration it is important to have correct insight of the organizational culture of the company you work for an assignment.
Bottom-line:
Going back to that blazer shopping experience, would you buy if doesn't fit you.
There is no hard and fast rule that you should take up a job if you're offered unless there is an obligation. Be ready to turn down an offer if it's not correct for you and doesn't fall in place with your career path.
