Looking for a new job?

I ran into a friend a back a few weeks ago who shared that, after nine months of searching, she’d finally found a job! Following a lot of consideration and prayer about the future, my friend left her job last year to search for one in a related-but-different field.

Her credentials were impressive and her experience was pretty much all any organization in this new sphere could ask for. She pounded the pavement for months looking for a job: doing numerous informational interviews, reaching out to old contacts, making new contacts, submitting countless resumes and applications, going on formal interviews, starting negotiations for specific positions.

She was *this close* to an offer for the type of job she was looking for several times. It looked like everything was lining up, and yet it never quite did.

This job she finally got (and is very excited about) came through just when she was near the end of her rope and near the end of her savings account.

I was reminded of several important lessons while watching her job search:

-       Network, network, network: most of the “close” offers she received were a result of relationships she had built, and being recommended for positions by people who knew her.
-       Be prepared to wait: I’ve heard an anecdotal statistic that for every $10,000 you hope to make in your salary, expect one month of concentrated job searching. It takes that long to network with the right people, for enough of the right types of positions to open up, and for your skills to match with enough of those positions to be considered. I don’t know if her salary lines up with that statistic, but I do know it is rare that you start looking for a new job and find one in the first month or two.
-       Don’t be afraid to say no: while she was getting anxious to find a job, she closed down negotiations on a few positions that were moving towards an offer. She knew they weren’t a good fit for her. Taking the “wrong” job out of fear or desperation just leads to another search in a few months or years. Or, even worse, you could end up being stuck somewhere you dislike for a long time all because you weren’t confident enough in what you wanted to say “no thank you.”

  • I know this is a tough one when your finances are tenuous – some people don’t feel they have the “luxury” of saying no to a job because they need the income right away. But even if you have to take a job for financial reasons, keep looking for the “right” job.

-       Follow Up Again: the job she is now working in was a result of an informational interview she did back in the winter. She emailed them a few times between then and now letting them know she was still available and interested. If it were me, I might have taken their first “no thank you” and walked away, thinking that were the end of the conversation. She was persistent, but not pushy, reminding the company of her skills, interest and availability. It resulted in her getting this job.

Finding a new job is hard work – it almost seems like a full-time job itself!  Be prepared financially and emotionally for a longer search than you might want. But network, be patient and keep following up!

Cheating... just a little

In his new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Duke University Professor Dan Ariely explains how his experiments with 30,000 show that “only a few people cheat a lot, but a lot of people cheat a little.”

In a June 4 interview on NPR, Dr. Ariely describes an experiment he conducted where people were asked to self-report the number of math problems they answered correctly. They received $1.00 for every correct answer.  People generally responded that they got six questions correct, when, on average, they only got four problems correct in the time allotted.

“Across all of our experiments, we've tested maybe 30,000 people, and we had a dozen or so bad apples and they stole about $150 from us. And we had about 18,000 little rotten apples, each of them just stole a couple of dollars, but together it was $36,000.”[1]

Do you cheat … “just a little”?
I was amused by the radio segment on the drive home - the stories were funny and Dr. Ariely seemed to have a good pulse on human nature.

But when I thought about it more critically, I knew he had a good pulse on my own human nature. I think we all let ourselves get away with “minor infractions” – stretching the truth on our time sheets at work, lying about why we’re late getting to a meeting, using the printer for personal purposes and justifying it with “everybody does it” and “it’s not like I’m really stealing - it’s just some paper.” Interestingly, Dr. Ariely also talked about how not seeing a real monetary value assigned to something made us more prone to steal.

But the Bible doesn’t say, “it’s okay to do this little stuff as long as you can be trusted with the big things.” It says the exact opposite. In Luke 16: 10-12 (NIV), Jesus is speaking to his disciples about stewardship. He tells the story of a debt collector who worked for a rich man. The debt collector gets “creative” in collecting his master’s debts, and Jesus says:

“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?"

So when I demonstrate that I can’t be trusted with the “little” things, like lying to coworkers about why I’m late, can I expect God to entrust me with all the “big” things He wants to call me to do?

I believe it’s a lifelong battle, but I know I want to stop cheating “even just a little.”

 

[1] NPR Interview: The “Truth” About Why We Lie, Cheat and Steal by NPR Staff, June 4th, 2012.

Deviations from the Script

During my senior year of high school, our English teachers assigned us to write the script for the next 10 years of our lives. The plan was for our advisors to return our writings to us at our 10-year reunion (I actually wrote two versions because I couldn’t commit to just one vision for my life!).

This past Sunday John Tiller was the guest speaker at National Community Church. Seven years ago his family experienced a tragedy when their 3-year-old son, Eli, fell out of the second story window onto their asphalt driveway. While Eli survived, he suffered pretty serious brain damage.

Their lives have seriously deviated from the script he had written for them. He spoke of how, in times of tragedy, people return to what they know in their lives. He said that we make a few major decisions in our lifetimes: where we’ll go to college, what we believe, who or if we’ll marry. We then spend the majority of our time living out and managing those decisions. You can listen to his whole talk here, and Eli shares a few words at the end and sings. It is such a testimony to Eli’s faith.

While the main point of John Tiller’s talk was about how we respond when our lives deviate from the script, I realized I needed to start by taking an account of the scripts I’ve already written.

While we never had a 10-year high school reunion, I remember what I wrote and I know life has turned out differently than I’d planned. So far, actual life is far better than imagined life: I became a Christian, I’ve had countless adventures, and I married a man I couldn’t have dreamed of at that time.

That was a high school exercise, and while I haven’t actually written it all down again I know I’m still writing scripts. A script for a marriage that will look a particular way (from now until the end of time); a script for a job where I’ll be able to accomplish certain things and people will respond to me in a certain way; a script that the book I’m writing will be received with a specific type of attention.

It’s a good thing to plan and to dream. But it’s not a great thing if we aren’t prepared to improvise when life goes off script. I want to be honest with myself, and with God, to leave room for these unplanned deviations.