It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Who was in the wrong on this interview assignment?
I recently had an experience with an interview assignment that left me confused about whether I was in the wrong or not. Last week I had a screening call with an HR person and then a phone interview with the hiring manager for a role that sounded interesting. On the call, the hiring manager mentioned having me complete a writing sample prior to my interview with the team. He said at least twice, “Please don’t spend more than 15 minutes on this! We just want to get a sense of how you think.” A few days later, I got the assignment in an email from the HR person, with the note “Spend no more than 15 minutes on this. There are no wrong answers.”
I spent 15-20 minutes on it and sent it in. Late Friday afternoon, I got an email from the hiring manager asking me to redo it because it had “missed the mark.” He said it should be “like a real example of the work you’d do in this job.” What he was describing sounded like significantly more than a 15-minute writing sample and I asked him to clarify. He confirmed that what he was expecting was a fully detailed specification comparable to a real work product. At this point it was Sunday morning, my interview was scheduled for Monday, and I did not want to devote my entire Sunday to this so I wished him the best and withdrew from consideration.
I’m mystified by what seems like an expectation that I would go far over and above what I was specifically told to do, and I feel like I dodged a bullet because I very much prefer to be managed by someone who is clear and transparent about expectations. However, I get the strong feeling that this company thinks I’m the one who was being unreasonable. Any thoughts? If I’m in the wrong I promise to accept your judgment and not get defensive in the comments!
You’re most likely right. I’m qualifying that because I don’t know the context and it’s possible that what they wanted really could be produced in 15 minutes by the right candidate. I have no idea is that’s true, but if it is, then this would just be a sign that you’re not who they’re looking for in the role. (And full disclosure, when I’ve made hiring assignments, occasionally I’ve had a candidate completely misunderstand what I was looking for and think it would take significantly longer than the 20-30 minutes it genuinely took most people … and usually that was part of a pattern of signs that they weren’t the right candidate.)
But I’m inclined to think they were the problem here, not you, because of the email the hiring manager sent asking you to redo the assignment. Most of the time, asking a candidate to redo an assignment that missed the mark … kind of misses the point. The assignment should be clear enough the first time that work that misses the mark should be treated as useful data. And asking you to redo it on a Sunday with only a day before your interview … I’m not impressed by that. If anything, out of respect for your time they should have moved forward with the interview and only asked you to take another stab at it after that, if they still wanted to move forward. (And really, they shouldn’t be scheduling interviews until after they see these assignments anyway.)
And yes, if what they wanted really would have taken a significant investment of time, then they were in the wrong there too (and would have been in the wrong even if they were up-front about the time commitment).
2. Will graduating college at 19 work against me when I’m job searching?
I am currently going into my senior year of a four-year degree program. I will be graduating at 19 years old because I did two years of college in high school, and I have had some people tell me that they think that will be a bad idea because they don’t think anyone will want to hire me. I really don’t want to go through an extra two years of college in order to graduate at 21 if it won’t help me that much, since I will end up paying more than $30,000 more over those two years. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Would you overlook hiring someone with a qualified degree simply because they are 19?
No. You don’t need to do two extra years of college!
Someone who graduates from college is 19 has demonstrated unusual drive and intellectual rigor. Those are good things.
I might wonder if a 19-year-old will struggle more with maturity, judgment, and professional polish just because they’ve spent comparatively less time in the world … but most 22-year-olds struggle with those things too. It’s part of being young and part of hiring young people, and I wouldn’t assume you’d struggle significantly more with those things than a 22-year-old would. Everyone new to the work world has an adjustment period.
All of that is to say most hiring managers won’t be thrown by this, might be impressed by it, and are likely to see you as an individual with your own strengths and weaknesses like everyone else.
Good luck!
3. We get charged points and PTO when we have unscheduled absences
I have a question about an attendance policy at my employment. If someone calls off or misses work (same day, not for time off planned in advance), they are given four points towards our attendance policy (toward the 10 points you’re allowed). Which I completely understand, but what I don’t understand is that if they still have paid time off available to them, eight hours of that is also taken along with still giving them the four points. This is the only place I have ever worked that gives you points and takes away your paid time off as well. In the little bit of research I have done, it seems that it is either “points” or paid time off but not both. Is this legal for them to do both without giving the employee the option?
It bothers me that you get no choice as if you want the time off unpaid or not. If you have five vacation days left for the year, you plan a vacation to use those days, then something happens and you have to call off, and you now only have four days of vacation left.
Well, first, attendance policies based on points are overly rigid and infantilizing. (For those who don’t know how they work, the idea is that you can be fired after racking up X number of points, and this is common in environments like call centers.)
But within the world of companies that have points systems, this policy isn’t that unusual. They’re charging your paid time off because you’re missing work and still being paid for the day. It’s very normal for companies not to let you choose to take the time unpaid, because giving you X paid days off a year means they plan their staffing on the assumption that people will only miss X days off a year. Rather than saying “you can take as many days off as you want, but we’ll only pay you for X of them,” most jobs have limits on how much time you can miss, and the number of paid days off they offer is generally that limit. (Usually you can get exceptions made in unusual circumstances, but they don’t want you thinking of it as a free-for-all.)
The points are a totally separate thing and are there to disincentive last minute call-in’s (presumably because those are more disruptive and require them to scramble for coverage). The points themselves are crap because they penalize people for legitimate sick days, but that’s the thinking.
4. Telling a manager about food allergies, in food service
My teenaged son just landed his first job working at a fast food restaurant. He has several food allergies. He’s never had a severe reaction, but he does carry an epipen and allergy medication at all times just in case. Since he’ll be working with food, I think it’s a good idea if he tells his manager and the other staff about his allergies for safety, but we’re wondering when and how to share this information. I’m worried his manager will feel like he should have been up-front about this during the interview/application process. Is it okay to just pull the manager aside and let him know about the epipen on his first day?
It should be, yes! The exception is if there’s a chance he’ll regularly be exposed to his allergens in a way that could make the job prohibitive for him, in which case he should raise that before his first day (ideally before accepting the offer) so he can explore whether there’s a way for him to perform the job safely. But if that’s not the case and this is more “there’s a small chance this could happen so let’s cover our bases,” then just raising it matter-of-factly on his first day should be fine. In that case, it’s really just “FYI, here’s this thing about me and here’s how I handle it.”
5. No one is communicating with me during my furlough
I’m on furlough from work and have been for two months. In that time, no one from the company has contacted me except for company-wide emails from HR. The CEO releases statements to the company every two weeks or so, but that’s it. I’ve contacted staff working for me on my team to check they’re okay and keep in touch, but am I wrong to expect that from my own manager and above?
During this period I have also found out, via a departmental email, that a member of my team has been moved to another team. There may well be good a good strategic reason for this, but am I wrong in thinking it would have been nice to be informed before a general communication was sent out?
Other furloughed staff have now returned to work and the longer this goes on the more anxious this is making me. I feel quite undervalued.
This is pretty normal. I agree it would be ideal for your manager to check in on you at least once, but none of this is terribly unusual. In particular, it makes sense that they didn’t talk with you about moving your staff member to another team — because that would be a work-related conversation they shouldn’t be having with you right now. There’s a very fine line between keeping you updated on what’s going on there and making you feel obligated to act in ways that you really should get paid for. (For example, if they’d told you they were moving your team member and you had concerns about it, you could easily end up in a work-related strategy conversation that you shouldn’t be doing right now. And for that conversation to be meaningful or useful, they might need to fill you in on lots of other context that they also shouldn’t be using your time on while you’re furloughed.)
The reality is, being furloughed is just hard. It keeps you in an in-between state where you don’t know if you’re going to be part of the company again or when that might happen, and meanwhile things are moving forward without you. It’s just a tough thing, mentally, and I think that’s what you’re responding to. (And meanwhile, do make sure you’re job searching, since being furloughed does not guarantee you will be brought back in the end. A lot of furloughs have been converting to layoffs, and you don’t want to be starting from scratch if that happens.)
no one is communicating with me during my furlough, interview assignments, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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