Fired? It Might Not Necessarily Be Your Job Performance...

Have you ever been fired? Laid off? Terminated? Cut? Made redundant?

It doesn't matter what it's called, it's often the same thing. The bottom line is that your position, and specifically, your place in it, were eliminated.

The key to ongoing success and promotion in employment is communication. Make sure that you develop a good rapport with your manager and your organization's leaders. Having strong two-way communications can often avoid misunderstandings, help you plan for the future, and maintain your professional reputation.

There are times when a termination is deserved - if you violated a company policy, your performance was sub-par, or you otherwise did something that merits parting ways with your employer, a company is going to exercise its right to let you go.

But in all my years in Human Resources, I've witnessed enough terminations to see clearly that it isn't necessarily due to a "terminatable offense". Here are but a few of the reasons a company may choose to part ways with you, even when you've given your best effort and have followed the company handbook to the letter.

1. Costs need to be reduced. Business is tough all around, and your job is vulnerable. You fall victim to a layoff.
2. Your manager doesn't like you. Perhaps you and your manager just don't share the same outlook on the world. Personalities matter - people like to work with people they like. And sometimes, there's nothing you can do about it.
3. Your manager is new to the company and wants to bring in his/her team. Your manager had a lieutenant and the last company they know and trust. Your job is the one role that person can fill.
4. Topgrading. I'm going to oversimplify here for the sake of clarity. Topgrading is a talent management philosophy where they company rates all its employees every year, and puts them into a forced curve. The individuals perceived to be on the bottom of the curve are culled from the workforce. Even if you met all your objectives and your work has been solid, your performance is perceived to be lower than your peers, so you're out.
5. Changing skill requirements. As the business changes, the skills required in the organization may change. If the company is going to be programming in Visual Basic, and you're a COBOL developer, your role in the organization may not be relevant.
6. The Peter Principle. Individuals who perform well in a role tend to be recognized with a promotion to a higher level. What happens when you lack the skills to survive at that higher level is the Peter Principle, the cynical belief that people rise to the level of their incompetence. I hate to say this, but it does happen. For example, a marketer may be great as a brand manager, but once they get promoted to a leadership role, they don't possess the people and vision skills to survive at this elevated position. Sometimes it's sink or swim.
7. A mistake follows you. Let's say you had a bad day, and were short with a coworker. Somebody witnessed it. Then, in your performance appraisal it comes up that you have poor interpersonal skills, as validated by this same incident. When it comes time to rank the workforce (see #4), you end up in the bottom of the pack due to your lack of people skills.
8. Pressure from above. You give a presentation to the CEO, and it failed to impress. The CEO makes clear to your manager that your fit with the direction of the organization is questionable. Rather than defend your overall performance, which has been solid, your manager feels it would be easier to push you out of the organization and replace you with a new face.

Bottom Line: Do your best to be astutely aware of your work situation. And know that sometimes, it may just be time to move on.

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.

We're All Replaceable - Are You Prepared?

I recently read an opinion piece in the New York Times by Dan Lyons, who worked at a software company where it was a matter of routine to . In the article, he details how involuntary turnover (i.e., getting fired or laid off) was the norm. The fact that you could be fired on any day for any reason was routine.

Rough and tumble corporate cultures are nothing new. There was an article last summer, also published in the New York Times, about the bruising culture at Amazon, where they detailed the employees' tears that seemed to be the norm, at least at the time of publication. I myself have worked in an environment where the management model was capricious, to say the least.

While not every company is a meat grinder, the truth of the matter is that deliberately tough work environments exists, and employers aren't necessarily selling themselves as best-in-class places to work. They demand results, and the agreement is simple: We give you a paycheck, you work in the environment we choose to foster.

Websites like Glassdoor will show you reviews of companies' work environments by former and current employees. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that this increased level of transparency has led some companies to embrace the fact that working there isn't going to be a Shangri-La. It's kind of freeing for executive leadership, in a way -  if people know you're not too worried about employee engagement, you can focus that energy on producing results.

Going back to the opinion piece mentioned at the beginning of this post, the detail that really caught my attention was that Lyons' employer evaluated employees in their appraisals with a metric called VORP - value over a replacement player.

This is a baseball statistic that general managers use to decide when to trade or cut their players. In other words, if there's a second baseman on the market who can do the same jobless, or deliver better stats for the same pay, it tells the GM that they may want to make a change at second.

This, according to the article, is transparent to employees, they can tell immediately how much the organization values them. What's scary about this, in my opinion, is that Major League Baseball is a truly elite work environment - at any given point, there's only 750 positions available at the highest level. And these players are paid elite money to deal with the uncertainty - and the level of performance they are expected to deliver.

The average MLB player knows the odds - there are hundreds of thousands of people competing for his job. And his career averages 5.6 years in length. Longevity isn't necessarily part of the equation.

But the fact that this practice has entered the mainstream should serve as a wake-up call to employees in general. We are all replaceable. There is always somebody ready to come along and do our job.

The best thing to do, is to be prepared.

• Be self-aware. Are your skills up to date? How about your soft skills, do you get along well with others? Your employer and coworkers are aware of your strengths and weaknesses, and you should be, too. If you realize you're lacking in a certain area, work on developing your skill set. Make the time, it's worth it.
• Know where you stand. Have regular touch-bases with your manager. Engage in open dialogue about your performance and expectations. Make sure you're both aligned.
• Keep your resume current. And your LinkedIn profile, too. Change may come faster than you anticipate, and not necessarily on your terms. You need to be ready in case opportunity knocks.
• Always. Be. Networking. The worst time to start building up your connections is when you need a job. You should have that network in place and give it some TLC. Pay it forward - help people in your network when you're in a position to do so, so that others have a reason to give you a solid. Be nice to people, it pays dividends.

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.

The Recruiter Only Rings Once...

You're plugging away at work, and your cell phone buzzes. You're busy as hell, and you decide to let the call roll over to voicemail.

You get a break about ten minutes later, and you check your phone. It's a recruiter from a staffing firm reaching out to you to talk about a job opportunity they're working on, and he said he'd like to talk with you about it because you might be a good fit for the position.

The fact of the matter is, you're tied up right now, you're perfectly content in your job, and the last thing you feel like doing is taking 15 minutes talking to some recruiter about a job when you're trying to keep above water.

Let's take a moment to talk about staffing firm recruiters and what they do; these men and women are hired by companies to find talent for open positions. They get paid by their client companies when they place somebody on the job. So, when they get an open position, they go through the effort of trying to find the job candidate most likely to fill that role, so that they can make a few bucks then move onto the next position. It's their job to keep a pulse on who's out there in the job market, and who might be a good fit for their openings.

Staffing firm recruiters might find about you in one of several different ways:

• LinkedIn. Staffing firms buy subscriptions to LinkedIn, they can see who has an applicable profile, whether the candidate is looking or not.
• Job Boards. Monster, Career Builder, etc... any place that an active job seeker might post their resume, a recruiter comb for candidates.
• Referrals. One of their clients or other candidates might drop your name as a qualified candidate. Somebody staked their reputation on your name.
• Cold Calling. This doesn't happen quite as much as it used to, but it still exists. A recruiter looking for a computer programmer, for example,  will call into a company asking for the IT department, and then strike up a conversation with whoever answers the phone.

The bottom line is, a recruiter will reach out to you to talk about a job opportunity, and how you react may impact whether you will be considered for this – or any other – job they work on.

Going back to the scenario detailed above, it's easy to get annoyed at recruitment calls, especially if you aren't expecting them. But try to think about the value in taking or returning the call.

• Recruiters are human, too. They have feelings and emotions, and if you treat them with dignity and respect, you're going to make a better impression and probably establish a positive working relationship - even if you aren't interested in a job change.
• Recruiters are doing their job. They need to generate candidates for their open jobs, so their call is all in a day's work. 
• Everyone the recruiter talks helps build their network. The old adage recruiters follow is that everybody you meet is a candidate, a client, or a referral. If you can be one of the three, you'll raise your value to the recruiter.
• Aloof candidates pay the price. Candidates who never return calls or act annoyed by recruiters usually get placed on a "do not call" list as unresponsive or difficult. Just try to remember, your job may be secure today, but your company may go through layoffs tomorrow and you could be on the chopping block. If you blow off a recruiter enough times, then you try calling them only when you need something, they'll probably be disinclined to want to work with you.

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.