Know When to Bail on the Wrong Job Opportunity -- and Do It!

One of the patron saints of the Human Workplace is the professor Dr. Temple Grandin, who's based in Fort Collins, about an hour north of me. Dr. Grandin has autism, and she teaches people without autism how autistic people see the world.

People with autism don't synthesize information the way non-autistic people do. Information hits them in a rush, without filters. Dr. Grandin writes about how she sees the world much as prey animals do.

We non-autistic people have filters upon filters. We over-filter everything. We don't see most of what we see, and don't hear most of what hits our ears. We don't see or hear those things because we think we don't need to. We've developed frames, or mental models, that tell us "In this situation, you do X. In that situation, you do Y."

We have frames for everything - for the Rolling Stones song playing when we walk into a 7-11 or the sunset out the passenger side window as we drive home from work.

Our busy left brain is hard at work! It's sucking up all the attention we've got. Gotta get that budget done, dang, that meeting is Thursday, or did it get cancelled? Last time I saw the boss he was all "I'd better like those numbers on Thursday," damn! I'd better look at those numbers again tonight.

Sunset, you say? What sunset?

Dr. Grandin explains that when you synthesize everything such that real experience seldom penetrates into your conscious experience, you lose out. We have frames that we've been building since we were children, and those frames dictate how life is supposed to go.

The collection of frames itself becomes our religion. We don't question our frames. We're very comfortable with them, because we grew up with them. We don't even see them. It's the examination of those frames, questioning them and pulling them apart, that makes up much of our activity and our worldview at Human Workplace.

One of the biggest job-search frames most of carry around is the frame "You're lucky to get a job at all. Who are you to be choosy?"

Another one is the frame "The employer is always in the driver's seat."

Buy into that one, my darling, and you're toast on a job search!

Surely there is some employer who'd be lucky to get you, isn't there? Let's start there, with the job you wouldn't take. That's a healthy place to start, because until you remember that you have something valuable to offer and that not every job or organization deserves you, you're going to be a mewling, supplicant job seeker and your judgment will be impaired.

Are there jobs you're too strong for, right now - jobs you wouldn't take? Of course there are. Start there.

Work your way up, mojo-wise, over time. Start with slam-dunk jobs that you know you'd hate but also know you could snag with no trouble.

You could even go and interview for some of those jobs, just to regain the mojo you lost in the process of leaving your last job or leaving school. Don't take any of those too-small-for-you jobs, of course. Apply for them and interview for them just to regain your mojo and muscles, to remind yourself that you're not quite so desperate after all.

Once you're back to an altitude that makes sense for you, where you're pursuing jobs that pay a sum you can live on with job descriptions that could grow your flame and embellish your resume -- then create a frame for your target job offer. Write down the details of your target job offer.

Don't improvise in the moment when you get a job offer. Know in advance what you want and need, and also know where your floor is.

When you're in a selection pipeline for a given job, it's very easy to get sucked into the vortex. People start to be interested in you, and your resolve can wither. That's bad. You can start to rationalize like crazy then, and give people bad-behavior passes they don't deserve.

They might leave you cooling your heels for a month after an interview with no word, not even an email message. They might start cancelling interviews without apologies, expecting you to wait around forever as they try to distinguish their tush from a hole in the ground.

I'm not bashing anyone. It's hard to keep all the pieces together, for any of us. But the lame excuse "We're so busy, surely you understand" is unacceptable. If you're busy, your first priority is to fill the job opening and get some help, right? It's rude to keep people waiting, and it's both rude and unethical to lie to people and fail to keep your commitments.

When we rationalize and forgive bad behavior, we don't do anyone any favors. We reinforce their fear-based frame that the way they overpromise and underdeliver is fine, it's normal, and everyone around them surely understands how important and time-pressed they are! You want to help the people around you? Hold them to their commitments.

Make a plan for your job search, and draw your lines in the sand. Here are a few to get you started. These are very reasonable requirements; many mojofied job seekers set higher bars than these:

  • I'm going to bail on this job opportunity if there's a two-week gap in communications after I've been promised an update or a next step.
  • I'm going to walk away if there is a significant gap between what the recruiter told me about the job and what the hiring manager says. That means the hiring manager doesn't know what s/he wants, and no one could succeed on those terms.
  • I'm going to step away if somebody throws me a curve ball midway through the process, a la "Maybe this should be a contract role" or "Maybe this job should report to Marketing."
  • I'm going to flee if I find that there are any of Liz Ryan's Six Reasons to Run in the mix.

When you have your two bookends firmly in place --- a clear picture of your ideal role, job description, and salary range on the one hand, and your list of Time to Bail items like our bulleted list above on the other -- you're set to go.

Your job-search energy will go toward exploring possibilities, rather than looking for slights and insults. We're hoping and looking for our ideal situation. We're going to stay high in our flame and light on our feet during a job search, fully confident that the right situation is out there.

I don't want you to obsess about every little slip and impoliteness you might experience interacting with an employer. I do want you to be aware of your own terms for walking away. If you aren't, you're likely to come blinking into the sunlight two months from now with a craptastic job offer that you have no desire to accept -- and worse, no memory of how you got there.

If you have never meditated or spent time reflecting, a job search is a great time to start. If you play a musical instrument, pull the instrument out of the closet now and play. If you don't have your instrument anymore, go to the thrift store and buy one. A job search is a great time to grow your flame, and in fact you have to grow your flame during your job search or the job-search experience itself will grind you down to the nubs.

If you like to draw, draw! Notice that the flame-growing stuff is almost always free or very inexpensive. Mother Nature knows what's good for us. She is a wise old broad.

When you walk away from the wrong job opportunity, don't be sad. It's an occasion for rejoicing, although it doesn't always feel like that in the moment. You are moving in the direction of the right thing. Call the recruiter or your hiring manager and say "I'm going to drop out of the process, and I wish you all the best."

Not everyone deserves you. Don't stick around and ignore the slings and arrows hoping that the toad opportunity will turn into a prince. I'm super old, and I've never heard of that happening, not even once.

Look around at the people who are doing amazing, impossible things in the world, cheerfully and full of faith in the future. How are they different from you? They are not. They have a high level of trust. They trust themselves, and they trust in you and me and the earth and galaxy we all grew up in. Sound hippie-ish? I grew up in North Jersey, where you could get shivved over a parking space.

I grew up in Tony Soprano-land. Fear and trust are real, far more so than balance sheets and the rest of the business bullshiz that we tell ourselves matters so, so much. You are the point of your life and your career, not the forecast or the PowerPoint presentation. Believe in yourself, first. Hold the line on what you require for yourself, and the whole world will oblige you.

Here is Liz Ryan's story "I Hired the Wrong Guy: Now What?"

Our company is called Human Workplace. Our mission is to reinvent work for people. Our CEO, Liz Ryan, is a former Fortune 500 HR exec and the world's most widely-read career and workplace advisor. If you like our message, here are ten ways to get involved:

  1. JOIN Human Workplace as a free Friend member or premium Individual member.
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Jennifer Stein

Healthcare: Patient Experience, Patient Flow, Information Systems

10y

Ditto to all the comments about people needing to recognize their own worth. This is a great article, a necessary reminder to people in the job-search process. I take exception to one point, that it's OK to go on interviews for a job that you know is "too small for you". If there is any glimmer that it might work out, then sure, go ahead. But if you are certain you won't, then it's not really right to waste the interviewer's time just to get your confidence back. Not to detract from the 99% of the rest of the article-- it's a much-needed insight that normally isn't covered in job-search classes.

Peggy Molloy

VILLAGE REAL ESTATE ARCATA Lic. 02151151

10y

I am very emotional, the good news is I have emotional intelligence, the bad news is I can be easily hurt. Therefore...(drumroll) I use a different barometer when choosing to leave a particular workplace. It seems most people do not make value based decisions, however, I have an incessant calculator regarding behavior on the job for myself & others. I keep this machinery to myself as few others are as watchful as I am. If there is funny business going on, jokes about cheating on taxes, sexual advances towards underlings, gossip & back-stabbing, one can either stay there to "tough it out" (ych) or make a gracious exit. I choose the gracious exit, partly because I can see the writing on the wall. If the staff is overweight, miserable, bitching, no sense of humor, no thinking allowed on the job, I am gone.

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Marchell Andre B B.

Country Market Manager/ APAC+JSK Head (adv, intl trade, telco cards insurance, fintech IT, retail, arch/interior design)

10y

Liz, you are the modern Esther-Jerry-Abraham Hicks, Bob Proctor, Bandura and Felice Leonardo Buscaglia of the workplace world. Thank you very much for being a force in trying to put HR's head back on straight using your pen, wit and wisdom and thereby starting a movement to bring back love, positivity, common sense and humanity in the workplace... Your work will in the future become an organic testament to what it means to be a fully working person, a person truly alive, helping us find in more ways than one how to actualize our potential while feeding the family. Your work, wit and writings will also gather momentum that will cause global HR to rethink its processes and "best practices".

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