What Employers are Really Thinking

Many Employers need to put out a formal job description. In many professions, I completely understand why. Many environments are professional and as you know, there are some standards that you have to abide that are considered “professional”. However, I thought I would share with you a brief description of what most hiring managers and business owners are probably thinking and would prefer to put on the job description. Do you fit in these categories as an employee? 1. Be amazing. I mean this one. If you’re not consistently better at your job than everyone else around you, just keep being mediocre. No offense. We’re looking for someone who can manage themselves. We want our time to be spent improving our operations, not chasing our employees around making sure they’re doing their jobs. 2. Actually enjoy helping others. We need someone balanced meaning that they have an ability to be flexible in the case that something out of the ordinary happens. We want to continue to do an exceptional job of taking care of our customers and we need someone just as passionate about that as we are. 3. Dislike drama and create happiness. With the wrong people on board, the workplace can be rife with unnecessary drama. We need someone who has an ability to squelch it instead of creating it and who are good at cultivating happy workplaces. 4. Detail oriented. If you just think it would be so cool to work at our company but are a disorganized mess, there are jobs for you. We’re not hiring for that. We’re already good at being disorganized. We have worked for years to get more organized and we need leadership from our next employee to continue to get better. 5. Problem solver. People who are “problem solvers” exhaust a myriad of resources to try to find solutions and don’t throw their hands up in the air in defeat. We’ll have problems. We want to trust our recruiters to aggressively pursue creative solutions. 6. Be independent and entrepreneurial. We’ll ask you to think for yourself here and treat our company like your own. If that excites you, that’s great. If this requirement worries you because you really need someone to hold your hand, you’ll likely be more comfortable somewhere else. We’re looking for someone to come in with confidence and immediately contribute helpful new ideas from a new perspective. 7. We would prefer that you have some experience under your belt. Surely you understand why this is important. I actually saw a friend who had posted something like this up as his actual job ad on his social media page. Given, his environment is in the restaurant industry and there is some leniency there. However, I sometimes think that this honest of a description could not only help the employer to weed out people who just want to coast once they get the job (basically eliminating B players from applying) but it can also help the employee from getting themselves into an environment that would expect more than they are used to. From experience, I know that it is hard to hire A players, but just like Jack Welch says in his latest book. To paraphrase him “Candor can save everyone a lot of time and effort” This article is meant for insight for the employee and a reminder to look for these things for the employer. I hope that it is helpful.