Have I Stayed in My Job Too Long?

Is this day over? (iStock.com)

When I worked as a recruiter on the staffing agency side of things, we were told not to reach out to potential candidates about jobs who had been in their jobs for seven years or longer. Apparently, that was the perceived shelf life of a job - anything beyond that, the candidate was perceived as "stale." They were too stuck in the corporate culture to make a move, or too ingrained in their current corporate culture to appear dynamic or appealing to another employer.

This is all debatable, of course - it's opinion. While there is no hard and fast rule about job tenure, it is entirely possible to overstay your welcome at an employer.

Likewise, loyalty is a funny thing. Companies expect it from you – until they don't want it. I've seen employees who believed they held the company's best interests at heart by sticking around through thick and thin, and who were then selected for the first round of layoffs when times turned tough.

You may love your job (or you may not, who am I to say), but some movement in your career can be a positive thing. Here are some risks of staying with an employer or in a particular role for too long.

• You've Become Part of the Scenery: You've consistently gotten things done. You've completed every chore that's asked of you, and you've done it well. But you're so ingrained in the routine of things that there's little to help your work stick out or get noticed. Your tenure tells your boss that you've been here a while, and you're not planning on leaving, so why change things up?
• It's a New Regime: The department has new leadership, and the recently-hired Director is bringing in her own people who think like she does. You've been doing things the way your last Director told you to, and while it's not wrong, your thinking isn't completely in line with the leader. Simply put, she wants a new team.
• Your Skills are Getting Stale: Different companies do things differently, whether its office dynamics, or the technical applications they use, or the day-to-day work you're doing. Maybe you're a COBOL guy, and it's VB world out there. A new position will teach you new skills.
• There's Nowhere to Go: You don't have the skills to move up. Or the organization is too small for you to grow and develop. Or, they won't provide you with training to make yourself more marketable. Either way, dead end. Boring.

This isn't to say that you need to make a job change for the sake of a job change - there are many reasons to stay in a role, from salary to commute to job satisfaction. But it may be worth keeping an eye on the job market. I'm not advocating job hopping; that comes with its own ups and downs.

Here are some suggestions if you're concerned you've been in your current job too long.

• Have a Development Conversation With Your Manager. Get an honest opinion about your career path and your skills. Try to find out how to make the best of your current job. You may not have maximized your opportunities.
• Talk to That Recruiter. Sometimes you'll get a call out of the blue from a headhunter about a potential job opportunity. Take the call, make some time to talk, and ask plenty of questions about your background and the job opportunity. This might not be the job you want, but if you make a good impression, they'll keep you in mind for the future.
• Look at the Job Postings. Comb the job boards to look at positions which may be a good match for you. Try to benchmark your skills and experience to the roles. Perhaps there is a better fit out there, or you can develop your skills internally to improve your current situation.

Tired of working for other people? Pondering the life of an entrepreneur? Find out if it works for you here.

Want to get noticed when applying for jobs online? Learn more here.

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Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, and career coaching services, including a free resume review. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

3 Easy Strategies to Boost Your Chances of Getting Noticed When Applying for a Job Online

Getting a job is all about getting noticed. Employers want to find a candidate with the right skills, quickly.

But there's more to it than that. They want to hire somebody they like. And they want to be impressed.

Bear in mind, for every job that's posted online, there can easily be more than 1,000 applicants. If the position is with a highly desirable employer, or it's a really sexy-sounding job, expect the number of applicants to increase exponentially.

If you want your resume to be noticed by recruiters and hiring managers, you need to work a little bit harder than the average applicant. There's no guarantee your resume will be selected - or even reviewed - but there are some easy steps you can take to increase your odds.

First, a note about where your resume goes after you apply online; employers track their open positions and job seekers in something called an Applicant Tracking System. In short, this is a database that manages a company's hiring activities.

These Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS's) use algorithms to match job seekers against job descriptions, then rank the applicants for the recruiter who's reviewing all the applications. Every system uses its own algorithm, so there's no way to know exactly how it will rank you, but suffice it to say that a resume which more closely matches the terminology in a job description will most likely rank higher in the search results. By extension, if you're a recruiter and your time is limited, you'll spend your time reviewing the applicants who have been highly ranked by the ATS against the position, not those with low rankings.

That said, here are some strategies to increase your chances of getting noticed when applying for a job online:

1. Apply early. If you apply within the first couple days the job has opened, it's much easier to stick out – you're competing against fewer job seekers. Hiring managers NEED somebody to fill their open position, and there's a good chance they're putting pressure on the recruiter to find them somebody quickly so they can mitigate the pain of having to do their employee's job as well as their own.

2. Tweak your resume. Be strategic in reviewing the job description; try to understand terminology that the employer may be using. Review the job description for specific verbiage in describing the essential skills, competencies, or tasks required. If your background aligns with the requirements, tweak the terminology in your resume to more closely match, and then upload the tweaked version of your resume. This may influence the system to rank your resume higher.

3. Locate an appropriate contact at the company and send them a note. After you've applied to the position, search through LinkedIn and try to find an appropriate contact at the company to tell them you've applied and about your passion for the role and the company. A LinkedIn premium subscription costs you a few bucks, but gives you great search capability and InMails (direct communications to people you're not connected to), which can be incredibly valuable during the job search. Be strategic about this - try to find the leader of the department you're applying to, or maybe the human resources contact, or somebody else in a key position in the company. Send them an InMail telling them that you have applied to the role (always after - otherwise, they'll direct you to apply online), a line or two as to why you're qualified, and thanking them for their help. I've seen notes like these bubble a candidate to immediate consideration whereas they were previously buried in the results.

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Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. He is a Human Resources professional and staffing expert with almost two decades of in-house corporate HR and staffing firm experience, and is a Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) and Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC).

Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, and career coaching services, including a free resume review. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

What Does It Mean When a Company Says I'm "Not a Cultural Fit?"

This should fit, right?

This has happened to many of us: You've interviewed for a job. You know you can do the job - well. Damn well, as a matter of fact. You know the duties of the job inside and out.

Then the recruiter calls you to tell you didn't get the job.  The reason? You're "not a fit for the job."

What does that mean?

It means that something you said or did gave the interviewers pause. True, your technical background and work history contain everything they asked for.

But there's more to being a fit for a job than just having the right skill set. It's often a matter of whether the company feels you're going to fit their idea of the kind of person who can not only get along, but thrive, in their environment.

"Applicants can come to the table with a record of past successes but the company culture needs to be compatible with what the candidate values as the way they are comfortable getting things done in an organization," says an SVP of HR I spoke with on the topic.

Translation? It's just as often not about what you get done, but how you get it done.

Imagine you are selecting a new employee to join your highly productive team. Let's compare the profiles of two potential employees:

Employee 1: Meets most of his/her productivity goals. Is described by his/her peers in references as, "a team player, a pleasure to work with. Understands what it means to work well with others."

Employee 2: Exceeds all of his/her productivity goals - in fact, was a top producer for their company last year. In reference checks, is described as, "a real Machiavelli type. Will step on anybody to get what they need. Two team members cited this employee in their exit interviews as a major reason they left the company."

Who would you choose as the newest member of your team?

Granted, Employee 2 could make a tremendous financial impact for your team this year. But is he/she worth the amount of time it would take to referee disputes on the team, or replacing the people who leave because of this single hire?

Cultural fit comes in many different forms, this is but one example. Employers can evaluate people for cultural fit based on their energy level, teamwork abilities, work ethic or a variety of other factors.

A more realistic example might be one of the work environment itself. A certain employee might fit better into a slower-paced, more established company, while others may have the skill set to adapt on an ongoing basis to faster-paced, constantly changing environment.

"I evaluate fit by understanding when a candidate has been happy and most engaged in a past job/company and when a candidate has been most frustrated or felt least successful," says the SVP. "Identifying the environment of both scenarios will help both parties realize best culture fit."

It's also incumbent upon job seekers to find the best fit for themselves. Not every company is a fit for their own personality and values. The SVP quoted here recommends that job seekers askinterviewers how they would describe the culture in their organization.  The more people the ask, the more they will find the commonalities that define the culture within that organization.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. He is a Human Resources professional and staffing expert with almost two decades of in-house corporate HR and staffing firm experience, and is a Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) and Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC).

Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, and career coaching services, including a free resume review. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.