Still at the Fair

In my first post about job fairs, I noted that you will spend lots of time being told to go to the company’s website and apply for various jobs online. This may not sound like a good use for your time, since you could easily have done this without ever attending the job fair in the first place. In fact, there were at least five companies at the MSU job fair I attended last week to which I had already applied (most of whom hadn’t even bothered to acknowledge me). Of the remaining companies, I noted at least a dozen who were not even pretending to accept resumes, and were just handing out business cards or promotional literature and telling people to go to the web site, before I lost count and just started flinging resumes at random and then scurrying off. But as annoying as these human billboards were, I can’t help thinking that the worst part of the fair was the inclusion of companies that no sane person would ever want to work for in the first place…

I’m not going to name any of them because, as previously noted, I’m not really into getting threatening letters in my mailbox (or threatening emails, but that’s another story), but at every job fair I’ve ever attended there have been a mixture of people who claim to be hiring people but actually aren’t. My favorites are the people who will only “hire” you for jobs in which you give them money. In my simplicity, I had believed that a job was a relationship in which a company gave YOU money for some kind of behavior they wanted to happen, but for a lot of companies, a job is when you give them money and in return they give you a bunch of merchandise that they claim you can sell for somewhat more money than you gave them in the first place…

These range from the ones who are mildly insulting your intelligence (you give them $600 and they will give you $750 worth of product, that after expenses, you can actually make $20 selling) to the ones who are completely insulting your intelligence (like the “Travel Agent” scam I’ve written about in the past, where you give them $900 and they give you an embossed card that says “Travel Agent” on it and claim that you can save more money on special secret deals that are only available to travel agents than the $900 you gave them upfront). And then there are the pyramid schemes…

Naturally, none of these companies think of themselves as Ponzi schemes; the industry term is “multi-level marketing organization” or MLM. And, in fairness, there’s more to most MLM schemes than just taking money from the new people and giving it to the established people on the levels above them; most of these firms also require the new people to sell things and give some (or most) of the proceeds to the established people on the levels above them. There are a bewildering array of these, selling everything from household cleaners to retirement plans, and they keep proliferating (despite the best efforts of the State and Federal authorities) because they are effectively making money off the stupid, the credulous, and the greedy, and there’s no way we will ever exhaust any of these abundant natural resources…

Almost as bad, though, are the financial companies that want you to sell insurance, stocks, or other intangibles for them. These sound more like actual jobs, in that they will provide training (sometimes even including your Series 6 and Series 7 broker’s licenses), office space, telephones, advertising and so on. Unfortunately, that’s all they will provide; the “jobs” are commission only, the company does not provide you with leads or even telephone numbers to cold-call, and if you do succeed in finding and selling your own customers, the company will still expect you to cough up the majority of the money you made. And if you fail you’ll have to leave and get a job that will actually pay you enough to live on; they won’t even have to fire you before they sell your desk to the next young hopeful…

I’m not putting down commission-only jobs, or the people who do them. I made my living that way for a number of years when I was younger, and even had fun on some of them, but over the years I’ve come to believe that those aren’t really jobs – and that the people who are recruiting for them should not be allowed to tell young, naïve and idealistic college graduates that they are…

Job Descriptions and Procedures Manual

In my last post, I mentioned the idea that Institutional Memory can be captured in permanent records outside of the employees themselves. Two of the common methods for doing so are humble documents you’ve probably seen around the office before, and never thought much of: Job Descriptions and Procedures Manuals. Like many other business school staples (mission statements, operating philosophies, business plans, etc.) these two documents are often seen as some kind of magic bullet, as in “All we have to do is document all of our procedures, and everything will be perfect!”

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Very few documents can effect real change in an organization just by existing, or even through the act of being created. In this case, job descriptions are often treated as mere busywork by line personnel – something that Human Resources requires us to write down for some reason of their own, probably because they are too lazy to do it. Quite often people will recycle the same description of a job for years, rather than update it to reflect the responsibilities of the position as it currently exists. Procedures manuals are even worse – too often, line personnel will be insulted at the very idea of creating a set of instructions for their jobs, as if this implies that they don’t know what they are supposed to be doing or are so disloyal and/or flighty that they might quit at any moment, without warning.

The truth is a bit less dramatic. A typical Job Description is simply a catalog of the tasks, functions and responsibilities of the job, along with an overview of anyone the position supervises and who the position reports to, salary and benefits offered, and so on. A well-written description will also include occasional and back-up duties, the positions backed up and supported by the position, and the minimum qualifications needed to do the job. If any of these things are not obvious, it is possible to add information to the job description or create additional/supplementary text to explain why a given position backs up someone in another department, or why a rather mundane accounting position requires CPA or MBA credentials, a background in auditing, and certification as a Level I Hazardous Materials Responder, for example.

Similarly, a procedures manual needs to document what the members of a work group actually do on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis, not just what senior management would have them do. If there is a chance (however unlikely) that all of the Accountants II will have to put on coveralls and respirators and go outside to mop up a toxic chemical spill at some point, then the procedures manual needs to explain how the unit goes about completing this task, and what the more junior accountants and bookkeepers are supposed to do while the Accountants II are occupied with the chemical spill. If a given team member has to fill out all of the office supply requisitions, then that individual’s job description should reflect that duty and the procedures manual should reference getting all office supply requests to that person before the deadline for each week’s order, whether this is an official job duty or not.

Ultimately, of course, there is no way to record all of the minutiae of a job in any written description; to really get all of the nuances of the position across you will need a more advanced and comprehensive way of transferring the experience…

But that’s our next topic…