101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview (7 page)

Some companies are dominated by a single personality—a still-active founder or an executive who has exerted a strong, long-lasting influence on policies and style. Think Jack Welch at GE, Bill Gates at Microsoft, or Larry Ellison at Oracle. While there are exceptions, such companies tend to be closely held fiefdoms whose every level reflects the “cult of personality.” If that personality is a despot, benign or otherwise, even a decentralized management structure won’t create a company everyone wants to work for. (Gates, for one, is reportedly a very demanding boss.)

Family-owned companies often pose similar problems. Your chances to make decisions and take responsibility may be tied to your last name. Barely competent family members may wind up with cushy, highly paid jobs, while you and other “outsiders” do all the work. While many such firms are privately held, even publicly traded companies in which family members hold a significant block of stock (like Ford or Dupont) still answer primarily to the family.

Many larger, more decentralized companies will spread decision-making power and opportunities for advancement somewhat more evenly. However, such companies often encourage competition among workers, rather than focusing their collective energies on competing organizations, products, or services.

If managers regularly spend half their time politicking or writing self-serving memos to the boss, it’s a survival-of-the-fittest (or survival-of-the-best-memo-writer) atmosphere. People attuned to corporate infighting might relish such a company; those who just want to do their jobs and be rewarded for the work they do will find it an unfriendly place to work.

Some companies are bursting with energy. Their offices seem to reverberate with a steady hum of activity. Such a high-key environment is right for aggressive go-getters who are unafraid of such a fast pace and more than ready, even eager, to jump into the fray. Other workplaces are calmer, quiet, almost studious in nature. Such low-key firms are probably better choices for more laid-back personalities.

While a high-energy or low-key atmosphere says little about a particular company’s chances for success, it may have a lot to do with your own on-the-job performance, success, and happiness. Matching dissimilar corporate and individual personalities usually results in a new job search.

If you run across a company that seems to give off no signals at all, beware! This is usually the directionless organization, one that lacks both an agenda and dynamic leadership. Without such leadership, you can be certain that this organization will founder, usually when things start going wrong and the timely implementation of company-wide decisions is required.

Clearly, the more you know about the companies you’re considering, the better off you’ll be. For those of you—and that should be
all
of you—who want to research a specific company and/or job description,
Chapter 3
will give you the necessary hints and resources.

After you’ve analyzed yourself and investigated a targeted company’s culture, a simple but extremely important question should come to mind:

How does your self-description match that of the culture at the company you’re thinking of joining?

If you are laid back and not particularly driven to overachieve, a company that describes itself as “hard-charging” may not be for you, even if you can actually convince them to hire you.

The Gallup Organization is a unique example of corporate culture. When my good friend Tony Rutigliano was recruited by them, their offer was so enticing that it seemed like a “no-brainer” . . . until Tony asked exactly what he’d be doing, his job title, and to whom he’d be reporting.

“Well,”
the recruiter confided,
“we work a little differently here. We expect that you’ll wander around for a while, maybe a few months, and then you’ll tell us what you really want to do. We don’t really have formal job descriptions. And you can use any reasonable title.”

Needless to say, Tony, a veteran of a number of traditional magazine publishing companies, was a bit taken aback. Wander around? Create his own job description? Choose his own title?

Since Tony was a bit of an entrepreneur at heart and a confident bloke to boot, he decided to give it a try. Luckily for him, Gallup’s corporate culture, as unusual as it was, turned out to be a great fit for him.

Would it have been an equally rewarding and ultimately successful move for you? Not if you were someone who expected or required a rigid organizational chart. Anyone too uncomfortable to just “wander about” would probably have run for the hills after a couple of days (presuming they were crazy enough to take the job in the first place).
There may be nothing inherently wrong with an organization you’re considering—it just might be a horrible fit
for you,
one that could throw you completely off the career track you have outlined. Maybe you will survive, maybe you will thrive, maybe you will find yourself looking for another job in six months. Or maybe it will cause you to positively change your goals. In any event, you must know what you’re getting into and do everything you can to prepare for that environment.

The Importance of Goals

I’ve mentioned the importance of goals already. Now it’s time to emphasize them. Short- and long-term goal setting must become a habit. Once a year, reevaluate not just the progress you’re making toward your long-term goals, but whether they need to be tweaked, heavily modified, or even changed completely. Life is not static. Neither are your goals; they will (and should) change with circumstance, age, position, and the like.

Remember that setting goals will not only help you define where you want to go, but what you need to know and do to get there. If you have decided that you eventually want to be Chief Financial Officer of a large corporation, you may well need an MBA or similar graduate degree. When do you plan to get it? Would you go to graduate school full- or part-time? If the latter, will the company allow a modified work schedule so you can go to school while you work? Does the company offer a tuition reimbursement plan? Is there already a program in place to which you can apply? Your goals, and your estimation of what you need to do and be to reach them, will greatly influence the questions you ask.

It’s equally important to make your goals realistic. There is nothing wrong with reaching for the stars, provided that you have the right-sized step stool. If you aren’t a high school graduate, you
can
aspire to becoming chairman of IBM, but your short-term goals better include some serious additional education! If you want to be a prize-winning author, passing a creative writing class might be a nice first step. Goals are realistic if there is a clear-cut path that you can follow
to reach them. It may be a hard and long road, but if you truly believe you can actually reach its end with sufficient effort, then the goal is realistic.

Even if a goal is completely
un
realistic, I would not necessarily counsel you to drop it. First of all, who’s to say it really
is
unrealistic? You may have little or no natural writing ability and couldn’t draw a straight line if your life depended on it. Would I be willing to bet you probably
won’t
become the creative director of one of the world’s top three advertising agencies? Well, I’m a betting man, so I probably
would
take that bet. But the human spirit is an amazing thing. Who says with the right education, jobs, and practice that your goal, though “unrealistic,” couldn’t be realized? And even if it weren’t, the additional education and dedication certainly wouldn’t hurt your career prospects!

What if the goal is realistic, but you are simply unwilling or unable to do what’s necessary to reach it? Change it—why kid yourself? While luck plays a factor in many careers, it is certainly not the only factor; the one common denominator of virtually any success story is hard work. If you aren’t willing to work hard, almost
any
goal may be unrealistic.

Your immediate and future personal/financial goals will, of course, have a great effect on your decision-making and on the questions you ask (and answers you absolutely need to know). If you’re unmarried and childless and someone actually offers to pay you to wander the globe, you may be more than alright with the arrangement. But what if you anticipate getting married or having kids in a year or two? What if you know you have to prepare to take care of an older relative? Your financial needs may dramatically change. The kind of hours, travel, and workload that you’re willing to take on now may need to be radically overhauled. You may not mind relocating once a year
now
but resist relocating at all after you’ve “settled down.” If you have chosen a job/career/industry/company in which declining to relocate may mean the
end
of your job/career, your future plans must be part of your current equation.

Show Me the Money!

What is your current standard of living, and are you happy with it?

Can you comfortably afford your current lifestyle, or are you living beyond your means with nothing in the bank and a fistful of maxed-out credit cards?

What standard of living do you aspire to in 2 years? 5 years? 10?

What salary (or package) is required to meet these targets?

Besides salary, what benefits or package components do you consider essential? Nice? Unnecessary?

Answering these questions is obviously important. You have to realistically define your financial wants and needs. How can you know how much you need if you can’t figure out how to live on what you’ve got right now? Develop a budget. Develop a financial plan.

As you analyze the cost of some of your long-range planning, you’re going to shock yourself. Especially if you are a recent college graduate, laying out what “life” costs could be daunting. But don’t forget to look at the other side of the coin—what you’re going to earn. Even if your starting salary were $25,000 and you never got a better job or a raise (and leaving out the costs of inflation, which is just a pain in the butt anyway), if you work for 40 years, you’ll earn $1 million. Earn, on average, $50,000 a year, and you’ll wind up making $2 million. And if you quickly ascend to that $100,000 a year level? That’s right—$4 million or more 40 years from now.

If you are (hopefully) given the choice between two or more jobs, you need some basis on which to decide between them. If one job pays substantially less than the other but is much closer to your ideal career path, has more promise, or has some other greatly appealing quality, you really need to know whether you can afford to take it . . . because you very much might
want
to take it, despite the lower pay.

You need to look further into the future than tomorrow. Companies still do survive and thrive, and a company you’re considering (especially if it is a non-high-tech behemoth that’s been a Fortune 500
company for decades) may very well be around when your grandkids are reading this book. What does this mean in terms of your job hunt? Your financial prospects at that firm 2, 5, or even 10 years in the future may be very relevant indeed. Taking a position that pays less than you would like at a company where you believe (based on your research, conversations, maybe even promises from the interviewer) your financial goals could well be reached or even exceeded further down the line, may be a smart move. And the bigger the company, the more likely there will be significant opportunities to change jobs, even areas (hence, careers), without leaving the company.

What if you are offered more, perhaps
substantially
more, rather than less? Simple question: What will you earn if you’re fired or quit after a month, or three, or six? Isn’t that a reality you need to at least consider?

If you choose a job purely because it pays substantially more, and the job (or the company!) disappears after a month, or two, or three, what have you actually made? A heck of a lot less than you thought you were getting! Suddenly a $12,000 annual difference becomes a difference of $3,000, $2,000, or even $1,000. Not to mention that you are now out of a job. How much are you losing while you find another job? Yep. More than the $12,000 on which your supposedly well-thought-out decision was based.

There’s more to life than money, and money is only one aspect to consider about a job offer. Make sure you know enough about who you are, where you want to go, what you need, and what you want so you’re ready to make an
informed
decision, not just a comparison of dollars and cents.

This is not your grandfather’s job market (or, for that matter, your mother’s). There is no security. Do you remember (or have you heard about) those days when you took a job and could count on reasonable raises for 40 years or so until you retired with your gold watch? Those days are long gone, so making a decision to take a job that does not really fulfill your long-term goals (maybe not even many of your short-term goals) just because it pays more money (even a lot more money!) is not necessarily smart.

Interestingly, keeping money in this kind of perspective meshes nicely with the Five O’Clock Club’s notion of creating a “40-year vision” of your career. If you read any of the books by its founder, Kate Wendleton, you will see how often her members choose between three, five, or more offers and
wind up taking the one that pays the least in the short run
. This is not because each of them has decided that money is not as important as some of the other factors we’ve been discussing. In many cases, it’s because they had a clear vision of the financial
potential
of each offer and made a more long-term decision.

Besides, I doubt there are many people who have fervently proclaimed on their deathbeds,
“I wish I had just worked harder”
or
“I just wish I had made another sale.”
Always give personal goals the same weight as career/professional goals unless you have consciously decided to do otherwise. Most of us don’t consciously decide anything of the sort; we just let the professional goals overwhelm the personal. We “become our jobs,” which is not inherently a bad thing, but not a good one if it throws the rest of our lives completely out of balance.