Photo by Ir Solyanaya.
You likely saw this one already. Either the original piece about the importance of thank you notes after job interviews. Or the follow on cheerleading on LinkedIn. Or the ensuing twitter storm about how unstated expectations undercut candidates who don’t look like the folks already working in your organization. Or maybe the very bad follow on piece that the author wrote to clarify what she meant in the very bad first one.
Wherever you caught this giant mess, two things are clear. One, it succeeded as clickbait. *slow golf clap* And two, hiring managers who play these types of power trip games should fail.
This is you, as my future boss, withholding critical information from me. This is you setting me up to do a worse job when you could have just told me what I needed to know to succeed. Even if I get to the end of this g-d awful process, how will I ever trust you when I’m actually in the role?
The people who hire this way should fail. We should eat their lunch and steal their best candidates. It won’t even be hard.
Because when you run a clear and inclusive recruitment process, you don’t play games. You don’t disqualify a startup candidate for wearing a suit. You don’t disqualify an agency candidate for failing to wear one.
You give people the information they need to come in and shine. And they feel like you’re in their corner from day one because if they’re about to trip over some weird insyncratic preference, you say, hey, if you’re interviewing with Jessica, make sure to send a thank you note.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
Al Gore is near the end of his quest to save the Earth. Nina Barrett just got started.
I used to live down the street from Al Gore. Well, sort of. I did my undergrad in DC and the veep’s mansion was on the downhill walk to the good (and cheap) pizza.
Post-Inconvenient Truth, I hadn’t kept up with Al. And then I stumbled onto this piece from The Washington Post. The subject is a bit dark. It’s about how Gore is getting older. And he knows he’s going to die. Not immediately but well before we solve the climate crisis.
So he’s faced with this conundrum. His life’s work will be left unfinished. And he’s been off training up the next generation of leaders to continue the work after he’s gone.
The article manages to be a lovely, even feel-good read while tackling big topics like environmental racism and voter suppression. But the line that stood out that I keep coming back to is this one:
There’s an old hymn that says, ‘May the work I’ve done speak for me.’ When those future generations remember us, may the work we did speak for us.
Around the time the Gore piece came out, two tech-specific articles called me back to the same quote. One in Buzzfeed called We Built A Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground. And the other in Bloomberg, YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant.
Now seems like a fine time to check in on what you’re building. When you look back on it, will you be proud of what you’ve built? Will you want that work to speak for you?
What Johnathan’s reading
I’m sure that you’re all better than I am at keeping up with the Connecticut Post. But in case you missed this article:
Connecticut might outlaw non-compete clauses for low-wage workers
Non-compete clauses are one of those things that only sound good if you don’t think about them very hard. Like all-you-can-eat sushi, or deep-frying your turkey.
The article does a good job of laying out the issue. The short story is that non-competes started in executive contracts as a way to avoid corporate espionage. New executives would sign job offers that restricted them from being able to go work for a competitor. And they would be paid giant bags of money to feel good about it.
Even in the case of executives, non-competes are a sketchy thing, and hard to enforce. But executives do get the keys to the kingdom. And maybe you can make a case that it’s fair to want some guarantees that those keys aren’t for sale to the highest bidder. You’d pay heavily for those guarantees, of course, but maybe that’s a case that could be made.
That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about low-wage workers having non-compete boilerplate in their contracts. We’re talking about geriatric care workers barred from continuing to work with their residents when the facility changes ownership. That is, and I’m using a technical term here but stick with me: horseshit.
What non-competes do, especially for middle- to low-wage earners, is suppress wages. Competitors are the most likely employers for your current staff. They need similar skills, and are probably recruiting comparable roles. Not being employable by a competitor means not being employable. Executives can hop between industries, or wait a year to let a non-compete lapse, or dodge it with a “consulting” deal. None of that is available for hourly workers. And I know I’m banging a familiar drum here, but: when you take options away from a group of employees, guess who suffers most?
If you said “women and minorities,” you get to be right today. What a sad thing to be right about! But yes, all these power games kneecap the people already at a disadvantage. And in service of what? Preventing espionage and leakage of corporate secrets? Really?
If you’re a leader in a company who still has non-compete language, a great thing you can do today is send a note to HR or the CEO. Send them that CTpost article (or this newsletter!) and ask to get the non-compete clause out of your contracts. Not everyone has the privilege to be able to do that. But if you do have that privilege, this feels like a good place to spend it today.
