Career Change Considerations: Active - Passive Search, Loyalty, and Needed Research

This article is also included in CEM LinkedIn Articles Section as well as on LinkedIn on my newsletter site

Why do passive job seekers have an advantage over companies looking to hire? Fear of making a hiring mistake is the driving force behind this practice. It leads to some employers judging job applicants by their employment status, although it has nothing to do with their talent or ability. It seems clear that part of what drives this fear is that the hiring manager do not trust their own instincts

Good jobs are often filled by the HR department or a recruiter asking someone employed if they would consider a change or finding a candidate that looks like a great match on LinkedIn and even though they are employed reaching out to them to consider the job. (Strong hint here, keep your profile current)

The employer assumes in these cases that don’t need to worry about why the candidate really left their last job and that the person must have value since they have a job. The employer puts themselves in a postion of a buyer. They may overpay and find that they didn’t have all the facts they needed. A potential employee is in the position of a seller where they hae to present their case. They still make the decision on whether to take the job but they also have to present the reasons why they should get the job and in the case of a company approaching a currently employed person they have already taken the first step in the “buying” process.

These folks are called "passive candidates." They aren't even candidates for a job until someone from the employer reaches them out of the blue.

Why would any employer prefer someone a recruiter finds on LinkedIn -- someone who may never have heard of your company -- to someone who has invested time and energy in reaching out to you to inquire about employment?

These issues bring the subject of loyalty into some focus. Will the employee a company steals or entices to leave their current employer be loyal to them? Would a potential employee who research the market and determined that his best fit might be with a particular company be more loyal to that company because of the work it took in finding that job?

Does hiring ethics belong in this discussion? I am reminded of a friend who told me how he was hired away from another company around 1950. He was working for a company that sold to stores in San Francisco. He was well known and the bigger competitor had been impressed by his work. Things changed for him at his company and he approached the main competitor and was taken to the President of the company in his interview. My friend had taken a lot of their business and it was obivos that he would be a valuable new hire. The President saw it that way and hired my friend but under a special condition. The new hire was not allowed to call on any accounts, not just his own but any accounts in the area for one year, and was required to work in the warehouse. The reason was that the hiring company did not want to take advantage of their competitor. Non-compete clauses were not used at that time in this area and field but company ethics, when practiced, were all that was needed. My friend stayed loyal to this company and their President throughout his career from that point forward.

NEVER STOP BEING A STUDENT OF YOUR INDUSTRY →

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Burnout is often blamed on job stress that affects an individual’s physical and emotional state and causes mental exhaustion. Often burnout is considered the fault of management, suggesting that the workplace is not managed correctly.

Finding your ideas considered out of date leads to boredom. Placing the blame for boredom leads to denial of what may be the real problem of outdated ideas. I was talking with an old friend about his successful career. He told me he felt his longevity in the industry was perhaps perceived as a negative and wondered if others in the industry felt the same about his longevity. I had to ask myself how this could be. His vast experience should be viewed by himself and others as “added wisdom” gained by trial and error. His viewpoint spoke loudly to his own “burnout,” but is that what years of work must lead to?

The dictionary definition of burnout is “the end of the powered stage in a rocket’s flight when the propellant has been used up.” With people, energy is used up pursuing various goals, and when people are burned out, they feel bored and complacent. You can hear the burnout in someone saying, “We tried that once before, and it didn’t work, and it won’t work now.” Think of new approaches or new ways to use old products and concepts. This will provide you with renewed energy. As a veteran, you shouldn’t worry about making a mistake. You, of all people, should know that a failure or setback becomes an opportunity.

When worrying about burnout, we should stop thinking about the past and look to the future. Don’t start by asking yourself how things have always been done but look back at your past experiences and ask yourself what has changed and why. What is changing in the marketplace right now? Study your industry and learn new things.

Business analyst and author Peter Drucker said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." 

Your path forward becomes more apparent when you look back at where you have come from

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By Brent M. Jones

We see our own lives as a series of relationships and events, and as we connect them with the narrative, they become a story, our story.

Stories of outstanding leaders, who look back at their own lives and tell how their success came because of the trials and setbacks they had in life, are not uncommon. It is obvious that they didn't see the value of the problems when they occurred but only after years of rethinking the events. The self-acceptance of their challenges followed years later.

Previously I wrote an article titled “As You Look at Your Own Life Story You See Yourself Differently,” which included background research from Julie Beck's Atlantic Magazine’s 2015 article titled “Life’s Stories.” The subtitle of her article states: “How you arrange the plot points of your life into narrative shapes who you are and is a fundamental part of being human.” 

Beck quoted Monisha Pasupathi, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Utah, saying: “To have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story.” This means we have to know our own story; as our perspective changes, we change, and the story changes.

If the essence of accepting yourself is to know your own life story, then the question is, what is the story? Author Bill George suggests building a timeline of your life that includes the highs and lows, reflecting on it daily. A summary of your life brings you to where you are today, and a timeline points out when things happened of significant influence, representing forks in the road. The more recent events in the story often help you see the prior ones differently.

Our narrative and perspective are choices, and how we look at the events and people in our lives changes as those memories are filtered against other events and all of our memories. A lesson we learn from an event today can help us see what happened before differently. Connecting events and concluding is weaving together our life stories and defining who we are. Who we think we are is related to who we become.

A daily journal captures the events of our lives, and a summary of the journal offers some opportunities for concluding. Reviewing a written life story yearly will show how we see our past changes because our perspective makes a great deal of difference in what we think our history was. Save your story, but rewrite it as you see it differently, and save that too.

Think about your story each day and tell your story to your family and others, but listen to how you see things have changed and will change.