Evaluating Career Opportunities: It’s Not Just About the Numbers

There are few decisions in life that have a bigger impact on yourfuture potential than selecting a new job. Sure, there are matters ofthe heart: marriage, children, etc. But when making a career move, youneed to use your head and do your research. The time to start decidingis before you start looking. While we are conditioned to evaluateopportunities based on compensation, there are a wide range of otherfactors that need to be weighed. So creating a framework for evaluatingopportunities before you start looking will help you say yes to theright opportunity and walk away from everything else.

Evaluating multiple competitive offers sounds like a great scenarioto have to deal with, doesn’t it? The idea that several companies arevying for your skills; that you have options. But if this is the pointat which you start really assessing your options, you are at risk formaking a hasty decision. There are different decision making styles, tobe sure. But some preemptive filtering based on your personal needs,your preferences and your long term career goals will help alleviatesome of the noise around the decision making process. Be smart and gointo the job search with a clear idea of what you want. By targetingthe companies and industries that can meet your objectives, you’ll beable to toss off the ones that don’t meet your criteria and work yourway down to a few offers from which you can choose. By deciding withboth your head and your heart, you will experience a better outcome.

Ready to start sending out resumes? Whoah there, Tiger. Once youdecide you want to make a move, it’s hard not to start taking actions,but life’s most important journeys take a little extra thought. Do youhave a company targeting strategy? Or were you just going to floataround the internet and see what’s there? First thing you need to do isassess your values. I’m not talking about whether you love your motherand let cars cut in front of you in traffic. I’m talking about what isimportant to you, in your next job and in life. Only you can make thosedecisions but I can offer a few things for you think about.

What do I want to be when I grow up?

It’s hard to think about your career end game. There’s a positionout there for you where your dream job meets your talents. So many ofus think about our next role, but not beyond that. We want it all andwe want it now. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way. To acompany, you are a collection of skills; sure there’s a personattached. But the business transaction is money paid for work done. Sowhen they hire you, it’s for what they know you can do and that isgenerally based on proof of what you have already done.

I started out recruiting in the temp space, which isn’t reallyrecruiting as much as it is placement. People walk in your door and youfind them temp positions which may turn into full-time positions. I wasgetting my feet wet and it was great experience. I was also impatientand ambitious; and I wasn’t going to take over the world working in anoffice complex in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois. My dream job: editor. Butthat wasn’t going to happen either. My realistic job goal was to be anin-house recruiter for a well-known company. That position was another3 job moves away. It took five years from beginning to landing atMicrosoft. How do I know I took the right path? I’ve been here foralmost nine years and still loving it.

I receive resumes all the time from people that want to get intomarketing at Microsoft but lack any marketing experience. My advice tothem is to find a position that allows them to utilize the skills theyhave and to foster new marketing skills; a transition position, so tospeak. The company pays for the skills you have, you gain new skills inthe process. In my transition from temp recruiting to MicrosoftStaffing Manager, I was doing just that. It’s hard to think of asuccession of positions as baby steps toward a bigger career goal. Butthat is the smart way to do it.

So what does this mean for you? You need to identify that next bigcareer milestone, assess the skill gaps between where you are now andwhere you want to be down the road, identify a subset of those skillsthat you want to gain in your next position and then find companies andindustries that both value your current skills and will help youdevelop the new ones. Where can you find this kind of information?

• in company job descriptions, corporate career sites
• by networking with people in different industries and companies
• engaging with bloggers at companies that have knowledge of the work you want to do
• LinkedIn
• web searches
• conference presentations, user group meetings, MBA Alumni socials, etc.
• talking to recruiters
  

The information is out there. It’s just a matter of knowing what you are looking for.

Location, location, location

This isn’t as simple as deciding whether to move or not. You shouldhave in mind a short list of places that you would be willing to moveto for that right position. Of course, being married with childrenmakes this a bit more complicated (but in a good way, I am told). Thisis something to be thought through BEFORE you start to look for aposition. Most every recruiter you talk to will have stories aboutgetting a candidate through the entire interview process before thatcandidate discusses with their spouse the idea of moving to the newlocation: “my spouse doesn’t want to move” is an incredibly frustratingresponse to an offer, in the eyes of a recruiter. It says that youdidn’t prepare for the interview (and while it may not matter thistime, you don’t want to burn a bridge with that recruiter).

Some people are fairly mobile and can pack up and move at any time.Others have houses to sell, kids in school, concerns about building anetwork of new friends. Your job is to know which one you are and whichlocations will meet your needs if you are willing to move. And beyondthings like cost of living and weather, you need to think aboutlifestyle and social networks that you will be able to build in the newlocation. There are a number of online tools focused on evaluating andcomparing cities, including homefair.com. They will help you calculate differences in salaries, real estate costs, schools and the social scene.

Don’t forget that most large companies offer a range of resources topotential recruits based on their geographical locations. Some may setyou up on an area tour or allow you to work with a relocationspecialist before an offer is even made.

The Work Environment

This is where a little bit of heart comes into the evaluationprocess. What kind of work environment is going to get you jazzed toshow up every day? Where, in the past, have you felt most “at home” atwork? What types of people do you want to surround yourself with? Whocan you learn from? Some of these questions around the immediate teamyou will have to assess as you go through the interview process. Butmuch of the corporate culture questions can be answered before youstart your search.

If you put off thinking about this until you start interviewing, youare running a risk. Let me be clear about one thing: on the interviewday, companies are making their best impression. That’s not to say thatsome don’t leave a bad impression, despite good intentions. But whatyou get on the interview day, while it may provide glimpses of reality,is not reality. You get what the company chooses to show you. Your bestbet is to research this online. For larger corporations, you’ll findreferences to corporate culture and atmosphere in articles anddiscussion groups. For smaller companies, you may have to dig deeperinto blogs and social networks. At the very least, you need to give itsome thought before you show up for the interview. Which will bug youmore: the guy playing foosball outside of your office or the fact thatyou need VP approval to spend $100 on a trade magazine subscription?Think about it.
The people you work with will most likely have thebiggest impact on your job satisfaction, yet this criteria is rarelygiven the weight it deserves in the job change decision. My best andworst work experiences involved managers that I clicked with orseriously didn’t.

There’s probably not a lot of research you can do on this before youknow who you would be interviewing with but it sure is something thatyou should be thinking about throughout the interview day. A littlesoul searching about the types of peer and manager relationships thatenable your best work is in order. How involved do you want yourmanager to be? How much time do you want to spend with peers and inwhat type of environment? Do you leave your work at the office or willthese people be part of your social circle? Through networking andresearch, you can find some actual employees and ask them to tell youthe truth – the good, the bad and the ugly. Every company has itsblemishes but when you understand what you are getting into, you’ll behappier about your decision.

Career Progression

Speaking of long term thinking, what if you could build a career inone company by trying out different roles? Could you get to your careersweet spot in one company and if so, why wouldn’t you want to? Notevery company is thoughtful about internal movement. At the same time,the company that is most willing to take risks on you based on yourrecord of achievement is the company that you are already working for.So it would be a little silly not to think about building out a careerinside that company. Checking this out is fairly straight-forward.First, look at the company’s career site to see if they have the typesof roles that you could see yourself moving into down the road. Thenlook up the bios of people working at that company and look forevidence of job changes within the verbiage (for example, if someone“has held a variety of roles”). And again, it would be wise to engageyour network to discuss this with employees of some of your targetcompanies.

Compensation – The Big Picture

Sure, compensation is important; it pays the bills. And you probablyknow to check the cost of living (or cost of housing, tax rates)estimates in any locations you are considering. But there’s more tothink about when it comes to compensation. You definitely have to lookat the big picture. Something may sound like a “benefit”, but if it wassomething that you were paying for before, it impacts yourcompensation. It might make sense to pull together an Excel spreadsheetand work this through. Think about things like child carereimbursement, medical deductibles/co-pays/flex spending accounts,transportation assistance (bus passes, car pools), reimbursement forcell phone or Internet, corporate discounts, levels of coverage formedical/dental/vision, legal assistance programs, paid holidays andvacation time, tuition assistance, health programs (weight management,smoking cessation). The list goes on and only you can determine what isimportant to you. But comparing base compensation from company tocompany really doesn’t adequately show whether you will be financiallybetter or worse off at another company.

A Final Note…Plan Ahead

There should be other categories that you are assessing based onwhat is important to you in your life and you will certainly weigh somecategories more heavily than others. The point is to know what thesecategories are and think about them now and frequently (especially asyou are starting a job search).

I often tell people that when you think about building out yourpersonal network, when you need to start looking for a job, it’salready too late. The time to build your network is when you alreadyhave a job, when you have something to offer those in your network andwhen your judgment isn’t impacted by the fact that you HAVE to find anew position. I think about the prospect of weighing the meritpotential next roles in the same way. The type of company loyalty thatexisted for prior generations is dead. Now, people stay with companiesas long as the relationship is mutually beneficial and the currentsituation is better than the prospect of looking for a new position andthe change and risk associated with it. It’s a pretty simple formula.So right now, even if you are very happy in your current position withno immediate intention of moving, you should have in mind where yournext career move might potentially be. And to do this, you need to takea hard look at what truly makes you happy at work and create a simplemodel for evaluating your next step.

Heather Hamilton manages Microsoft Staffing's central teamresponsible for marketing candidate generation, research and community.In this role, she leads Microsoft’s efforts to build a pipeline ofqualified marketing talent and creates strategies aimed at deliveringthe industry’s best talent to Microsoft’s hiring teams via prospectresearch and community building programs. Aside from managing atalented team of staffing professionals, Heather is probably best knownas a blogger. She is a requested speaker on topics related to candidateoutreach and community building and her blog, One Louder, has resulted in significant press interest including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Fast Company. Contact Heather.