YourFit ebook - The model for landing your next job by Landing.jobs

YourFit The model for landing your next job

Introduction JosĂŠ Paiva Co-Founder of Landing.jobs

I’ve worked in technology companies for over twenty years, and in that time interviewed thousands of candidates and personally hired more than 500 people in Europe and Brazil, from dozens of nationalities. It’s honestly a little exhausting just thinking about all that time spent in meeting rooms! But it really has been an incredibly rewarding journey of both helping people grow as individuals, and consulting companies on when they need to up-skill or take on more staff. I feel like I’ve learned a lot in my career of helping others build theirs, and despite an always-unique mix of people, companies, roles and timing, there are still key themes and areas that need to be aligned between candidates and employers to ensure a successful hire. Even before I launched Landing.jobs with Pedro, I had developed a model in order to help colleagues, friends and family achieve just this. After years of really positive feedback from using it in the wild, I think it’s time we officially unveil it as a key instrument in the toolkit. We’re calling it YourFit.

Contents

YourFit Model

1. Why

2. Work Environment

3. Challenge

4. Economics

5. Competencies

6. How to use

YourFit Model

Challenge

Environment

why?

Competencies

Economics

The YourFit model is comprised of five elements. At its core is “Why”, and where it begins. The fundamental question that must be asked first about any job; either one you have already, or one you’re trying to figure out if you should apply for. Environment, Economics, Challenge and Competencies are the other four parts, comprised of multiple chapters. These cover where you work, what you get paid to do that work, what set of challenges you undertake, and the necessary skills, achievement and potential to be a success.

1. Environment

2. Economics

– Cool Office/Location

– Fixed salary

– Culture/vision

– Variable salary

– Flexibility

– Benefits & perks

– Type of company

– Equity & shares

3. Challenge

4. Competencies

– Responsibilities

– Skills

– Team & leadership

– Work Experience

– Learning opportunities

– Achievements & potential

– Growth opportunities

– Life history & Ambition

Part 1

Why?

Challenge

Environment

why?

Competencies

Economics

But to kick things off, let’s start with what should be a fundamental first question that should be asked on both sides at the start of the process — “Why?” But why “why”? Because it gets to the heart of what’s important to us as individuals and what’s necessary for a particular job to be done well. It goes beyond describing “what?” and dives deeper than “who?”. We spend most of our waking lives at work, so if we are going to take steps to make that time more fulfilling, to achieve results, to remove stress — and really, to gain the happiness we deserve — we should seek to truly understand what makes us tick before making a change. As a candidate who is job hunting you should ask yourself, “why am I looking for a new challenge?”. Some typical answers might be: It may be something else. Whatever your reasons, figuring out the honest answers to this question will help you start making better decisions when it comes to your career path. Along with the rest of the YourFit model, it will help you figure out how to better sell your skills, experience and personality to potential employers.

Why am I looking for a new challenge? Typical answers

– for personal growth – to earn more money – to develop my career – to work in a dream company – to improve my work-life balance – to gain international experience – for personal reasons: family, health, etc

But it’s not just candidates who can benefit from this exercise. Before companies begin the complex process of recruitment, they too must consider the question — “why are we hiring for this role?”. It might be: Finding the answer(s) will help hiring managers and founders write better job descriptions, and better understand how to sell their work environment to attract the most suitable candidates. We think YourFit provides a lot of value to the hiring process, distilling the essentials required for a great professional match between candidates and employers, but the model was not developed in isolation. It’s morphed and changed over the years from contact with, and use from, those on both sides of the hiring process.

Why are we hiring for this role? Typical answers

– for growth – to support a new product or service – to replace someone who has left the company or become redundant – to firefight an out-of-control project – to upskill quickly and increase knowledge in the startup/corporation – to draw top industry talent

Part 2

Work Environment

Challenge

Environment

why?

Competencies

Economics

Once you’ve figured out why you’re looking to recruit new staff or find a better job, you can start to think about the other four quadrants. Now we’ll be looking at workplace environment as a deciding factor. Basically, it is the answer to the question, “what’s it like to work there?” All across Europe and beyond, there’s a chronic lack of qualified tech professionals for the opportunities available, so it’s critical that companies invest in their workplace environment — and selling its appeal (AKA employer branding) — to attract the best candidates. More and more potential employees will expect to see content of, and have insight into, how the company operates day to day — what the office is like, etc. Rich media in the form of photos or videos of the work environment, interviews with staff and the like, are incredibly effective at getting this information across in a way that a simple job posting increasingly does not.

“So, what’s it like to work there?”

Office and Location

If you’re going to spend most of your waking life working in an office, it’s pretty important to make sure it’s one that you feel you can do a good job in. In fact, workplace environment ranks as one of the highest factors in employee satisfaction. According to a survey, people who liked their workplaces were 31% more likely to be satisfied with their jobs, with over half of those looking for work saying that a company’s office space affected their decision on whether to accept a job. Fostering an attractive, comfortable physical environment enhances productivity and success, and attracts a higher calibre of employee as a result. Employers don’t need to invest millions in limited edition furniture or sculpture to make the office a welcoming and fun place for workers to be happy to arrive at each morning and spend productive days in. Involving employees in the decision-making process for office decor and decoration can help increase a sense of teamwork. On the opposite end of the spectrum, an uncomfortable office that is inconvenient to commute to can foster a contagious sense of dissatisfaction that not only hurts productivity, but can work to bring down an entire company in the long run. Location is equally important. A company with an inner-city office can sell the surrounding culture as a key benefit to potential employees. An out of town business park with on-site parking and gym facilities may appeal to a different type of candidate.

Culture/Vision

Products, services, strategies and tactics can all be readily duplicated, but how they all come together, are made and delivered is very much down to a company’s culture and vision. While many companies have lofty mission statements and “brand values”, it’s important as a candidate to make sure that this isn’t all hot air, because it is these intangible qualities that give a company its personality, and inspire its employees to do great work. A sense of shared purpose and a commitment to deliver work to a high standard with a good attitude not only helps a company vanquish its competition, it makes organisational learning effortless as co-workers teach each other the latest thinking and practices, brings down fear, stress and improves the overall health of the team. You’ll feel much more motivated and engaged when you work in a company and industry that fits your ideals and interests, and you need to be motivated and engaged to deliver your best work. A question for both sides: is the company delivering on its purported brand values? This will matter a lot in the long run.

Flexibility

You won’t be a stranger to the concept of work-life balance. We’re all expected to burn the midnight oil on an important project or an unanticipated early deadline from time to time, but if employees are working overtime every evening and sacrificing all of their weekends to work too often, then there’s a real risk of burnout, and that irreparable damage is being done to employees and employers alike. In the tech sector, many jobs are organised around task completion, so it’s quite possible that flexible work hours are or can be made available to employees to deliver on their responsibilities in time slots that suit their lives best. Let’s face it, some people have already been to the gym and done an hour’s work before the sun rises, and others are at their productive peak when most people have gone to sleep, and still others seek to fit a full-time job around their families’ biorhythms. Ubiquitous computing and network connections are even making mandatory office presence a thing of the past for all but the most essential meetings, so if top performers are capable of delivering great work from a laptop at home or by the beach, it’s certainly worth considering giving a bit of leeway.

Type of Company

Large or small company? Startup or corporate? Programming global systems at a pharmaceutical company or developing the first code for a music app? There are pros and cons to all of the above, but doing your research will go a long way to ensuring you end up with a match that’s good for you. Large companies have obvious structural advantages. They’ve been around for longer, offer clear paths of career progression, associated training schemes and benefits packages that would bankrupt your average startup. But if you’re looking to be more than a cog in a machine you have little influence over and seek continual change or company-wide recognition, you may be in for disappointment. Smaller outfits can offer more accountability, challenges and acknowledgement, but they also tend to lack effective workflow processes, training opportunities and you may not be as well rewarded financially. Also consider the industry — “tech” is continually subsuming all sectors, so you may relish the chance to transform a business stuck in an analogue world, or be more comfortable working in a company whose employees don’t know how to use a fax machine.

Part 3

Challenge

Environment

why?

Competencies

Economics

“Challenge” is perhaps the most important part of the YourFit model, because technology has advanced so quickly (and continues to change at an exponential rate), that if we don’t seek out new challenges, we will quickly find ourselves without a professional purpose. It’s essential that we continue to seek out challenges that make us leave our comfort zone, help us learn and keep up with this rapid pace of change. We should therefore be continually asking ourselves, and of our current occupations: – Am I, or am I not, being challenged in this role? – Am I, or will I, continue to learn new things? If it’s going to take up the majority of our time here on earth, our jobs should do more than help us pay the rent. Look for ones that will help you grow through challenging assignments, or new educational opportunities. Demand excellence of yourself and inspire it in others. Be a part of a team that sets the same expectation and you’ll be so much more than the sum of your parts. While we clearly have a viewpoint on the importance of YourFit’s segments, remember this is a framework for asking what’s important to you, not a set of commandments to obey. Let’s have a closer look at what you should investigate of yourself and new opportunities that come your way.

“What’s the challenge?” 25

Roles & Responsibilities

Ill-defined specifications = ill-defined products. The same can be said of jobs and the people asked to do them. Each role should have a clear role purpose, a definition of what a person will do within an organisation, and what is expected of them to do that job well. Likewise, an outline of responsibilities directly related to the role is essential. Who will the employee report to? Who reports to them? What business KPIs are they responsible for? What are the measures of success? If there’s confusion in this matter, there might be a mismatch. Candidates should be careful when analysing a proposal whose role isn’t clearly defined, as you might end up doing things you don’t want or will not contribute to your learning and career progression. It’s easy to understand that this will only contribute to demotivation and dissatisfaction with your assignment. Clear communication of this at the start will not only attract great people, but make day-to-day life far more fulfilling and less confusing. As a candidate, you should seek out opportunities whose functions and criteria for success are clearly articulated. As a hiring manager, you should keep this in mind when seeking out top talent.

Team & leadership

Who are your colleagues? Who’s your boss? Pretty important questions, and if the answers don’t lead you to feel confident, then you’re probably looking at the wrong opportunity. You don’t need to be best friends, but you need relationships based on confidence and honesty or else the spirit that keeps teams motivated will evaporate. Leadership, in the form of your direct boss, or the management structure he or she is a part of, is hugely important and is often the key point of motivation — or the main reason for quitting. A bad relationship with a boss is not always enough to quit. If everything else is good, then these issues can usually be worked out or improved over time. However, if it’s so bad that your performance, advancement or sense of wellbeing is being affected, then it may be time to call it a day. When you’re able to ask deeper questions in job interviews, inquire about internal communications processes. Be on the lookout for constant feedback loops. Everyone likes to know how they’re doing, to be recognised for achievements and alerted to missteps. Do you have frequent catchups with your manager? Are objectives clearly defined? Are colleagues rewarded when they hit milestones? Sometimes “thank you” is enough. People who feel appreciated do better work. People who don’t, won’t.

Learning opportunities

As I stated earlier, we must never stop learning in order to keep fresh and up to date with what the job market has to offer. Being employed does not mean this comes to a halt. Quite the opposite. It helps to think of your ongoing professional learning and development in three strands:

Self-taught Ongoing professional learning and development

Autonomous and on-the-job, the bulk of your learning comes from having the discipline to make sure a portion of those background browser tabs are something other than Facebook.

Peer learning Ongoing professional learning and development

Also in the workplace, you should volunteer to work on projects with more experienced colleagues who will push the limits of your knowledge. Get your hands dirty. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll learn a great deal and increase your stature.

Formal training Ongoing professional learning and development

Advanced certifications for new technologies, evening classes to learn business frameworks, or a part-time MBA on the weekends over a couple of years will all pay off â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and not just at the end. You can apply much of what you learn as you go, and could even get funding from your employer to do these things.

Whether it’s a firm that invests in formal professional development schemes, or a corporation which organises mentoring programmes that allow for on-the-job training, or perhaps it’s a startup where the learning comes from experimentation and building everything from scratch, people want and need to learn. To sharpen their skills and pick up new ones. To find new ways to solve new problems. Keep an eye out for roles that don’t penalise failure — learning from mistakes is often more useful than from success.

Opportunities to grow

The primary reason for changing jobs is career advancement. People hit the ceiling in terms of progression within the company they’re in, they get bored, or an irresistible opportunity from without comes along. Opportunities for advancement are often oversold in interviews, so candidates should be prepared to discuss this with detailed questions on available paths of progression. If a company is growing, then opportunities will appear for employees to seize. But whilst companies without the hypergrowth to generate a multitude of future career paths do not have this advantage, they can still seek to grow those who work for them through clear continued learning, training and supporting other initiatives. But let’s not forget that growth is not just about goal-setting and achievement. Often, just keeping your options open — consciously leaving space and time for serendipity, being observant of your surroundings and passionate about personal hobbies and interests — is the difference between stagnation and progression.

Part 4

Economics

Challenge

Environment

why?

Competencies

Economics

We know that people value challenge and the work environment highly on their priorities list when they are looking for new opportunities. But what about that big elephant in the room? Money. The financial incentives and benefits of a job weigh heavily when considering a new opportunity. The main motive for wanting to change jobs is often the desire to seek out a new challenge, but an increase in salary or other economic benefit is almost always a prerequisite for someone to actually make the leap into a new role. Inertia is a powerful force and often the only way to overcome it is from the momentum that better pay (or the delayed potential of monetary reward) brings with it. It’s become fashionable of late to say that money isn’t a principal motivator. In a recent survey we found that, while it’s not one of the main concerns for techies, it’s a big factor to entice professionals who are not actively looking for jobs. This is especially true when dealing with senior candidates, since they usually have more monthly expenses to cope with. They might be interested in a new challenge, but if the salary doesn’t match their expectations, companies will fail to hire them. So what are the types of compensation and benefits one should keep in mind when thinking about the next step in their professional life?

“Pay me.” 37

Fixed/Base Salary

Most commonly listed as a gross or net yearly figure. Make sure you figure that one out first! Depending on the country, job, local tax systems, you might have to do a bit of calculation in order to figure out what amount of cash ends up in your bank account every month. Be sure to ask your prospective employer the exact details on this so you don’t end up having a bad surprise. Base salary will be the money you can expect to have to make ends meet. You can see this as your baseline, the “level” of your purchasing power. Experience, specific skillsets, role responsibility, your geographic location and local demand will all influence this number. As such, if your own experience and skills have “gone out of fashion” or just aren’t as relevant to a new path that you know you need to take to ensure better opportunities down the line, you may need to accept a lower salary in order to change area or career path. Whatever the case, do your research and check out benchmarks (websites, peers, mentors) for each variable to understand what you’re worth and what you should aim for.

Variable Salary

Sometimes listed as a percentage of the fixed salary, sometimes as an additional amount, this is most often utilised to provide a financial incentive for specific goal achievement in a set period of time — for instance in commercial roles, where the values are indexed against sales figures, and can be well over 20% of total pay. Sales aren’t the only roles to use variable salaries though: – You can also find variable salaries attached to productivity gains, whereby high-performance employees are awarded more cash for better-than-expected results; – Stack-ranking is a somewhat-controversial performance measurement system whereby managers have to place all their direct reports on a bell curve. Only a small percentage of employees, usually 10%, can be designated as top performers, relative to their team, with a similar proportion of mandatory “low” performers, who are often fired; – Project pay versus timesheet pay can also be considered variable, most often with freelancers. The former is paid a set amount to deliver on agreed-upon requirements, while the latter receives money for the hours worked. Whatever the variable in your salary package, you’ll need to think about what suits you best. What do you need coming in each month to survive and pay your expenses? Start from there and you can plan your next move. Once your basic costs are met, you can more effectively judge fixed and variable offers.

Perks & Benefits

Perks, benefits in kind, prerequisites — these are the various types of non-wage compensation that employees can be granted in addition to salary. In most countries, these benefits are taxable, and can include things like health insurance, retirement schemes, sick leave, meal allowances, rental support and educational supplements. Perks tends to be a catch-all term for more discretionary benefits like company vehicles, free refreshments, summer half-days, choice of stationery and IT equipment. All of the above can add up to a considerable amount, so they’re very much worth keeping in mind when considering new offers of employment. Not only are they things you don’t need to pay for out of your post-tax salary, you can often deduct them from your liabilities to benefit even more. For instance, let’s say a company provides you with a health insurance plan worth £1,000 a year. If they didn’t offer this, and you wanted to get the same for yourself, the company would have to pay you that plus your tax, plus their tax and admin obligations to make it worth your while. Perks are a great way for employers to make the workplace more enjoyable. Half-day Fridays, on-site gyms, casual dress codes, catered lunches, nap rooms, snack carts and on-site daycare all take the sting out of the worst and most stressful aspects of work. By keeping employees happy and healthy, retention rates go up, costs go down, and everyone feels a little bit better about themselves.

Equity Compensation

Quite common nowadays in the startup world, the risk of joining an unproven company just starting out is balanced by owning a percentage of it, which could turn out to be a substantial sum of money if it becomes successful. It’s a common way to attract top talent when there isn’t a huge amount of money on the table. Usually meant to “vest” (accrue and become available in chunks over a set period of time), it ensures longevity of the initial waves of hires, and with a sense of ownership comes talented employees who see themselves as partners willing to go the extra mile. If you are more of a risk-taker, this can be a great opportunity to trade a lower salary now for big gains later.

Conclusion Let’s face it, if you’re doing alright in your job, even if you’re tempted by a new challenge, even if that new company has a really cool office with free food, video games rooms and designer furniture — the most likely reason you’ll move to something new is a big financial incentive to do so. Just be aware that when comparing financial benefits of your current job with a new one, or multiple new offers, there’s more than gross salary to consider. You really have to bring your negotiation skills to the table!

Part 5

Competencies

Challenge

Environment

why?

Competencies

Economics

“ The competencies that I like and I’m good at.”

Last but not least, we come to the final element of the YourFit model: Competencies. This is all about the abilities that an individual possesses to do a job properly. It is therefore different in overall concept than the previous elements: where they referred to what the company could offer to the candidate, Competencies is about what the candidate can offer to the position. YourFit is a model to evaluate the fit between a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interests and skills and a given job offer. Working as a self-assessment tool, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s up to the users to evaluate their current competencies and those they wish to improve by selecting jobs that require the practice of those competencies. Alongside YourFit, we created YourValue to help candidates discover how much their competencies are valued by companies in the market. YourValue is an assessment service being developed by Landing. jobs specialists that evaluates a candidateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s information and job history, further complemented with tests and interviews. YourValue can be described as a seal of approval given by an expert to a candidate that guarantees they are fit for a given job/position.

Regarding this, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a very particular concern that candidates must have when they plan to change jobs: your value in your current job might be different from your market value. A good example is when someone works in a given position for very long and knows all the tricks of the trade. In this case, that person is very valuable for that job, since they know much more than a potential newcomer, but that knowledge will probably be almost useless in other companies, meaning their market value will be lower than their value at that specific job. On the opposite side, there are those people that do a job far below their skill level, which is common if there are no growth opportunities in the company. In those cases, they will have a bigger market value, because their skills are underused in the current assignment. Our suggestion is for candidates to do a YourFit self-assessment to understand what is good and whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not so good about their current jobs and, if they decide to change, to try YourValue before starting to look for new opportunities. Knowing is half the battle.

Skills

Evaluating one’s fit when it comes to Skills is complex, because it really requires us to separate the skills we perform well, which ones we love to use and which ones create value for companies. Only in a very few cases would the picture be a single circle with all 3 areas merged together… and those people are very lucky indeed! But, for the rest of us, we have to carefully evaluate the situation. Trying different things helps a lot, because you don’t know if you like or are good at doing something until you try it. Ever thought about doing side projects or moonlighting? They are perfect opportunities to figure this out. You always have to consider the present vs future perspective of your skills. Even if the “Good at/Love it/Add value” triangle is working out for you now, that doesn’t mean it will stay like that for long. Your company can change its work methodology or technology and render some or all of your former skills obsolete. On the other hand, the practices your company uses can become outdated and that starts to impact your productivity. You have to always #Aimformore.

Work Experience

The value of work experience is always increasing in the jobs market, not only because it’s a sort of guarantee that the professional knows how to succeed in a given position, but also allows recruiters to qualitatively assess the candidates by evaluating their previous employers. Working at highly reputed companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) increases the candidate’s desirability because employers know that they already underwent and succeeded in previous rigorous recruitment processes. “Tell me for whom you worked and I’ll tell your value”. We usually measure the work experience in “flight hours” or years in a given position or industry, as this is a clear indicator of success for future employers. One thing is to hold the title of product manager in a major company for 3 years and another is to only do this for 3 months. Which one would you trust the most? You have to take into consideration if your practice is up to date: 3 years doing something 10 years ago is not the same thing as doing that in the last 3 years. You have to keep practicing and exercising your professional muscles to keep fit! You also have to think if the job’s requirements are in line with what you want and need: are you a junior applying for a junior position or are you a senior that had to step back and do some lower level work? From the candidate’s perspective, the most important thing is to understand if a prospective employer and job offer will improve its curriculum and market value. Always compare present and future scenarios!

Achievements & Potential

We usually talk a lot of what we’ve done and very little of what was achieved. However, achievements are much more important, since they are a clear indicator, both to us and to others, of whether we need more challenges or if we still have a lot of learning ahead of us. If you’re successful in your job for a year, it could be considered luck. Do that 2 years in a row and you can ask for further challenges. Achieve that for the 3rd year and you can almost demand it. Otherwise, you should start looking for new, more demanding opportunities. We also have to have to carefully look at the opposite case, when we’re having a bad performance, and question ourselves if that’s happening because we’re biting more than we can chew or if it has to do with being demotivated. Either way, it could be a cue to start looking for something more in tune with our desires and skills.

Life journey (History & Ambition)

This is all about connecting the dots and understanding the “whys”. To reach our goals, such as working in a company we adore or creating a new business we have to make a career plan. Our life’s history is made of what we achieve and what we aim for, and our career is built the same way, e.g. our high school grades will impact the college degree we can choose and the degree will open the doors for specific careers. It’s no coincidence that in most job interviews the recruiter spends most of the time trying to understand the “why” behind every step the candidate took and wants to take during their professional experience. A few examples of questions: what was your favourite subject in college? Why this 2 year hiatus between jobs? How do you keep your skills up to date? From my experience, the more talented someone is, the more control they have (and want to have) over what they choose and their career history. An easy way to measure this is to ask ourselves: is my value today greater than this time last year? How about the next year? Will changing to another position increase my value more than if I stay in this one? You need to be aware that any choice you take professionally will directly impact your future.

Part 6

How to use How to use YourFit Model in your job search

First things first: you need to know how to evaluate your current job. You could be one of those persons who hates their job, but the worse thing to do is to be emotional about it. You really need to pinpoint what you don’t like in your current assignment, so you avoid making the same mistake. I’ve seen a lot of young students stressed beyond reason with questions such as “which is the most prestigious university to attend?”, “what’s the best degree to choose?” and other academic related nervous breakdowns. However, it’s not uncommon to see people accept a job just because it’s near their home or they have a friend there. The truth is, deciding the kind of jobs you get and the ones you look for is even more important than choosing your degree, as it’s an ongoing, long-term process. It could empower or debilitate your career progress and your freedom of choice in the future. Becoming a rising star or a stagnant fish in a small pond is an outcome that correlates very strongly with your skill in managing your career path. And for succeeding in that you need to do some self-assessment to know what you want and where to go.

The YourFit Calculator

With these necessities in mind, we’ve developed a tool to calculate the YourFit score of your current job (or prospective job offer) by considering your personal preferences. Thus, the YourFit Calculator was born! In each quadrant, there are four categories (e.g. Environment has Office and Location, Culture/Vision, Flexibility and Type of Company) and you can give a score to each one according to how well the job offer fares in this domain or will satisfy your needs. Example: you give a score of 4 to Office and Location for an offer that is near your home and 2 to one that is too far away. This is all good and proper, but imagine that you don’t consider the office’s quality and location to be a very important factor. That’s where the Weight comes in. You can give custom weights to each factor and tailor it as you please, and it will tell you if the job is a good fit by weighting the relative importance that you attribute to each factor.

The combination of Weight and Score will produce a 1 to 5 Fit score for each of the four quadrants and a 1 to 5 Overall Fit Score for the job offer. You can then compare “oranges with oranges” by using a standardised way of evaluation. You can also evaluate the current level of satisfaction by understanding how many quadrants the professional has with a positive fit, ranging from 0 to 4. Next, I’ll share with you a few tips for gathering info and interpreting the results.

The Precious Info

It’s rather easy to collect information about your current assignment, but prospective job offers can get a bit shady sometimes. Usually, the hardest to obtain are: – Economics as a whole – Team and Leadership – Culture and Vision To wrap up this chapter, we’ll cover the most common scenarios for professionals by understanding the 0 to 4 fit in the YourFit quadrants.

Economics as a whole Most companies bury this in the negotiation process, but you can use a few tricks to get this.

Team and Leadership Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really hard to understand the leadership part, but you can try to speak to current or former employers using LinkedIn or attending events such as the #LandingFestival to understand what makes that company tick.

Culture and Vision One thing is what they say to potential candidates and another completely different thing is reality. Nowadays thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interesting possibilities (moonlighting, challenges or freelance work) that allows you to really dig into their way of doing things.

Are you in or out?

When I evaluate how close someone is to leaving their job, I divide that by 4 stages: – Away (from the market) When they are completely satisfied with their job; – Thinking When they talk with a few people about that, but it’s just a remote possibility; – Gathering (information) When they wish to leave, but don’t take action; – Applying They’re set to leave and start actively searching and applying to offers. The most interesting thing about these stages is that they correlate perfectly with how many YourFit quadrants they are satisfied with.

Quick example: Imagine a very talented professional whose job got stale. Everything else is fine, but the Challenge part is getting worse every month. That’s the part where someone starts to wonder how it would fare in other places. Our math: Fit in 3 quadrants = candidate is Thinking. Therefore, this is more or less my conclusion: – Away: 4 fit – Thinking: 3 fit – Gathering: 2/3 fit – Applying: 1/2 fit

How Fit are You?

It’s very rare to find someone who has a fit in all 4 quadrants. Usually that only happens when someone enrols in a new job they love. It is even rarer to find someone that doesn’t have a fit in any area: if they are not (even) doing it for the money, why are they there? The most common and stable cases are when there’s a fit in 3 areas, usually leaving Challenge out of the equation. This happens mostly when people start getting older and want to raise a family, sacrificing exciting and unstable jobs for something safer. In these cases, professionals enjoy their companies, the money they make and the position itself, but are getting quite bored. They will assume this status-quo for several years and only later, when their children are more independent, will consider changing jobs or even starting their own business. This is one of the main reasons top companies are providing more flexible work arrangements and perks that help their workers have a more stable and rewarding work-life balance: they want to retain them during their “best years”.

Another (unfortunately) stable case occurs when professionals enter “mercenary mode” and are doing it just for the hard cash. They sacrifice Challenge and Environment for a job they can excel at (Competencies) and pays them a good salary (Economics).

Other particular cases: – Family businesses The professional works there because “it’s meant to do that”, so it is only fit in Competencies; – Positions obtained through Favouritism Fit in Economics, possible fit in Environment, lacks skills and will (Competencies and Challenge);

Do you recognise yourself or someone you know in any of the scenarios mentioned before? Just contact us at wegotyourback@landing.jobs if you have any questions.

And thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s it! Ready to get started?

You are? Great!

Go to landing.jobs/yourfit/calculator to calculate YourFIT today. And remember — we’re always here to help!

#Aimformore

Title YourFit: The model for landing your next job Author JosĂŠ Paiva Literary review Hugo Monteiro and Matthew Carrozo Illustrations Bernardo Mota Design Mafalda Sequeira 1.st edition September 2015 ÂŠLanding.jobs, 2015