How to choose the right company for you
Ideas on how to keep your personal values top front while job hunting
The last time I was job hunting I was lucky enough I had no need, I was in no hurry. I was not working so I had free time to dedicate to really choose where I wanted to work. I spent almost two months doing over 100 interviews for over 30 companies.
I learned a lot.
Why so many?, you may ask. Because I wanted to make the right choice.
I don’t want to share tips on how to land a job, but rather on how to choose the right company for you. What I’m proposing is what I actually did during my time interviewing. I’ll share some examples of questions you can ask and what you should be paying attention to if you value the same things I do. If your priorities are different from mine, you’ll need to tailor the questions and red flags to your priorities, but, I hope you get the idea about how to go about that.
If you don’t have the time to go through many processes, this may not be for you, but it can still help you identify some important things that may give you a heads up about what to expect when joining the company
Steps you can take to help you choose
Define what’s important to you
Define what you would like to find in your job and what you wouldn’t, based on what’s important to you.
Put together a list of questions and situations or examples you’ve already been through that you like or dislike. Asking these should get you information that might help you understand if you will find what you are looking for.
Work on identifying red flags and expand this list as you progress
Choose carefully how you invest your time. Don’t complete processes you know don’t convince you.
Prioritize according to your values and notes once you have the offers. Trust your gut feeling as well to make the final choice
1. Define what’s important to you
Changing jobs is huge for me. If you are in Tech as I am, you’ll have the luxury of being able to job hop frequently if needed, but, I tend to stay years at a company. It’s a big part of our life. However, being a big part of your life, work itself is not your life. This means, whatever we choose needs to be in sync with our priorities and our core values. Otherwise, we might have a hard time or not really enjoy it. We spend too much time working to allow that to happen.
After years of experience, it was very clear to me what I considered important at the time. Keep in mind this is very personal, changes from one person to the other and even for the same person, it also changes over time. So you need to ask yourself:
What do I value the most right now?
In my case the answer was:
People
Work/life balance
Flexibility
Consistency
2. Define what you would like to find in your job and what you wouldn’t
How do your priorities translate into concrete things you are looking for? What situations or behaviors better represent or contradict your values?
In my case, according to the previous values, I could identify I was looking for:
A manager who would have my back, whom I could learn from and who values people as much as I do
A company where people are not just a number. Where the company values are not just words painted on the wall
Flexibility and true work by objectives. Freedom in hours, schedules and days
Good relationship between Product and Engineering. Partnership
The possibility to have people without prior experience in X technology join because we see their potential
Established processes but autonomy to run my team as I deemed best
On the contrary, I knew I didn’t want:
To spend time and energy dealing with toxic people who enjoy drama
Burnout culture
Startup culture
To change managers four times in a year
A company that gives a message but acts differently
To navigate chaos and have to build processes for the company or area from scratch
3. Put together a list of questions and situations or examples you’ve already been through that you like or dislike
Aside from routine questions as in, What does the team look like today? What are the team’s challenges, upcoming projects?, etc based on what I was looking for, I set up the following questions. I made a point to ask all or most of them in every interview. That allowed me to have a standardized way of comparing responses and processes.
To my potential manager:
What will you expect from me?
How do you plan on building our relationship? What would our daily collaboration look like?
Do you set goals? How? How will you support me in achieving them?
How long ago did you join the company? Do you expect to keep working here for the next 2 years? Why? What does your career progression look like here?
To everyone interviewing me in general:
We lead by example, so I like to show my team it’s just as natural to work on a Saturday, exceptionally, if something is on fire, as not working at all on a Tuesday if you are feeling under the weather and having a really bad day. How do you feel about that?
My hometown is not the same city where I currently live. Sometimes I need to take a 14h roadtrip to get there. I’m used to doing that any day in the week without affecting my PTO, but rest assured everything that needs to be done that week will be done as expected. Will this be a problem?
I was once fired because, and I quote, “they wanted a Manager who said yes to everything”. I’m not that person. I will give feedback, often, openly and directly. I’m a challenging person who is always trying to be and do better and looking for ways to improve everything. How do you feel about that? Can you give me an example of a time when a manager or team member gave feedback or suggested an improvement that was actually listened to and implemented?
Have you ever gotten the feeling or the feedback that the team is burning out? If you have, what did you do about it?
How often do you have to work on the weekends? Why do you think that is? What are you doing about it?
4. Work on identifying red flags
You are interviewing away, asking all these questions. What should you do with the answers? In most cases, it’s just useful information. In some, you will be pleasantly surprised, and in others, if you are lucky, you will be able to identify concerning things that may not be aligned with your priorities.
Picking these things up may be tricky, but as you learn to recognize them, expand your red flag list as much as needed.
This is what my red flag list looked like:
If someone told me “we hire slow and fire fast”. This worries me because people may not be that important. The company or area may not be taking the time to understand why someone is underperforming and how they can help him do better. This is not the kind of leader I am.
When someone uses the word “obsessed”. As in: We are obsessed with delivery. We are obsessed with our customers. We are obsessed with efficiency. Obsession does not have a positive connotation for me and could mean some aspects of work or life are relegated. If you are obsessed about delivery you maybe don’t care that your team is burning out.
When someone proudly states that the team is happy to work on the weekend or overtime. As work/life balance is important to me I would expect them to be concerned about this, not proud.
The person who is interviewing you doesn’t seem to actually be listening to what you are saying. This is particularly important if the person is your would-be Manager, your would be Director or someone who should be working closely to you.
5. Choose carefully how you invest your time
If you have a clear idea of what is important to you and what you are looking for, as you move forward with interviews, as you ask the right questions, identify red flags, concerns will start popping up. At the end of every interview you should ask yourself if you are still looking forward to the next interview or to an offer from this company. Would I enjoy working with this person? Could I learn something from this person if we worked together? Or… has something changed for you after this interview?
If you are in many processes, and, for example, during the fourth interview with who would be your Product Manager you got the impression that he only cares about delivery, furthermore has been a dev before, so, challenges and micromanages the team while their code… are you willing to deal with this? Are you willing to try and change the situation? Will you have the energy and resources to do that? If it’s not something you’d like to go through this time, write to the recruiter, say thanks, and move on to the next process.
Of the 31 processes I started, I only chose to complete 7 of them. I dropped out of one of them at interview number 7. Shouldn’t have I finished it? Well, no. At that point, I realized that even if they eventually made an offer I did not want to work there. So save your time and energy and the recruiter or interviewer’s time and energy.
6. Prioritize according to your values and notes once you have the offers
You’ve finally reached the point where you need to make a decision. You may have more than one offer on the table. How do you decide?
I suggest gathering your notes, thinking about your priorities, salary, benefits and start prioritizing your offers with clear pros/cons for each.
However, if you got to this point paying attention to all the above, it means whatever offers you now have probably meet your value criteria with the information you’ve discovered so far. If they are similar regarding salary and benefits, that makes it a bit harder. But, never underestimate the power of your gut feeling.
It is very likely you already have the answer to the question and you just need to acknowledge it.
This being said, you have every right to take a few days to think about it. You should be able to communicate this to the company. If they have a problem with this, well… then that is another red flag just right there! At least for me, as my number one priority is people.
You should also be able to let them know:
you are completing another process and you’ll have a decision once you’ve completed both. It’s a good idea to provide a due date, as in you will provide an answer by the end of the month
other companies are waiting for your answer. You can request to make a process move quicker if it really interests you. It’s a good idea to provide a due date, as in you need to have an offer before the end of the month
To summarize, I firmly believe we should always be looking for the right company as much as the company is looking for the right employee. Let’s aim for a good match!
Happy interviewing!
Bonus Tips
Keep notes of every interview you do. When you are doing a lot of them it’s very easy to start confusing the details
Set your salary and PTO expectations in the first interview of the process, even if they don’t ask you about that. Save everyone’s time and energy and the disappointment of going through a long process and realizing at the end you are not in sync about basic but important stuff.
Cut yourself some slack. Interviewing can be stressful and hard. If you have an opportunity you care about more than others, try and get through a couple of the other interviews first so as to remove the initial stress factor and be more relaxed by the time you get to the one you care about. Take it from me, after enough interviews you will be relaxed no matter what is happening in the room.
Know that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Your questions are just as important. Request time to ask as many questions as you need. Request to meet as many people as you need to if you are in doubt. If they are not willing to do that, that is also giving you lots of information.
Don’t hesitate to ask for feedback and especially if you get rejected at some point. What were they looking for? Why didn’t you meet their expectations? You may discover you did nothing wrong! Or you may get valuable insights on what you can improve or focus on.