Favors and careers

Sometimes the difference between the narrative that the society presents to us and the reality is remarkably strong. I will not enter in the winner bias, whereby we only hear the stories of the people who succeed in their endeavors and none of those who failed even if, at least from the statistical point of view, the stories of failure should be way more abundant than the successes. As someone said to me, there are many ways to be sick, but only one to be healthy, so one might think that we would be interested in seeing how all these failures happened to learn from them, but mostly we hear about how the winners did most things right and at the right time.

A similar dissonance happens with respect to Human Resources: society tells us to get trained, show good disposition, be communicative, ambitious, etc., but most of the time all these factors get simply superseded by your network. And I do not mean your networking capabilities, but your actual current network: it does not matter how social you are or how aptly you can forge new relationships. The thing that matters the most is the people you already know today. Just to give you an example, I have had four jobs since I graduated and only in the first one I got selected in an "open contest" (and it was only a 6-month internship). For all my other jobs I had to resort to my connections, asking around who was looking for someone with my profile and then through friends of friends landed the job. Admittedly, in the 20 years since, as the end of my then-current contract was looming near, I have applied to some jobs and got selected in a couple of occasions in open contest, but most of the time all I got were flat our rejections.

Photo: piqsels

I come to think about this today because Liam, a friend and long-time colleague, called me this morning to ask for career advice. His project is drying out and there are no new projects in the pipeline that would directly fit his profile, so is looking into what options he has to stay in the house rather than finding a job elsewhere. As a matter of fact, he tried that a couple of years ago, when the renewal of his contract was delayed by various circumstances, but he did not know anyone, so he just went online looking for jobs and his results were not any more flattering than my own. Why is it so?

I have never been very fond of the resumes in the same way that I do not like planning documents: because it is very easy to misrepresent reality, but it is very hard to detect these misrepresentations. You can claim that a certain amount or work will take you three months or one year, depending on what the intended recipient of the plan wants to hear. Similarly, you can say that you have some knowledge of databases, python, project management, or any other skills and it would be very hard for the HR person to tell how true that statement is. And it is obvious that an applicant has to reasonably meet the requirements for the job, but with the current trend in the labor market of increasing flexibility and wider education some HR people tend to "weigh" the resume of the candidates that do meet the requirements and prefer the ones with a thicker folder, because theoretically they will be easier to re-train if need be.

That is why your connections are so important these days: if you fit the job description, anyone would prefer to hire someone from a "known source" than a total stranger with higher (but perhaps unnecessary) qualifications. In the case of Liam, my recommendation was that he looked in house for running project to see where he could fit. I offered to vouch for him or even make inquiries if need be, but the fact is that he has a much higher chance of finding a new job here than in the outside world. I have done this myself already twice, where I heard of a project that could use my services and I just spoke to the person in charge.

And now I have to leave you, because otherwise I will not be ready with dinner by the time my family calls in for the weekly zoom. Stay safe!