It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. What new hires should wear on video calls
I recently received a job offer for a new position that I’m very excited about. My start date is a few weeks out, but I have started to wonder about what to wear as a new hire. Right now, everyone on my team is working remotely due to the coronavirus, so there will be a lot of video meetings. During non-coronavirus times, I’d wear something business casual to the office, but I’m not quite sure what to wear on video calls when I start my new job. From what I can tell, people tend to wear more casual outfits for video meetings nowadays due to working from home all the time. For instance, when I interviewed for the position, the hiring manager was dressed extremely casually both times (think cotton T-shirts).
For my current job, I wouldn’t think twice about wearing something more casual than what I would wear to the office on a video call with my coworkers. That’s mainly because I’m familiar with my team and have established a reputation as a knowledgeable hard worker. However, with a new job, I feel hesitant to wear something so casual with teammates that I haven’t met before. I want to make a good impression and get things started on the right foot, but I’m not sure if it’ll come off strange if I wear something business casual for video meetings and it turns out that I’m dressed much more formally than everyone else on my team. I am curious as to your thoughts about what a new hire should wear to a new job, given the pandemic and new norms about clothes worn for video meetings?
Wear business casual for the first few and get the lay of the land. If it turns out everyone else is in t-shirts and you’d like to be in t-shirts too, at that point you can. But business casual is still casual enough that even if everyone else is in sweats, you won’t come across strangely at all.
But it’s better to err in the direction of slightly more professionalism than to err toward less in the beginning, and then adjust from there.
(And while the hiring manager’s t-shirts during your interview might be a big clue, it’s also possible she’s the lone casual dresser of the office and everyone else is more formal. So observe other people first.)
2. What’s the etiquette around withdrawing from a hiring process?
If you interview for a role and decide it is not the right role for you, but you feel the interview went well and there is a chance you might be offered the job, when is the best time to withdraw your candidacy? Should you do so as soon as possible (like the day after the interview) so that they don’t waste time considering your application? Or should you do so only if they offer the job? Because there is of course a chance they won’t offer the role to you at all, so that avoids that conversation entirely (and doesn’t make you look presumptuous)? Bearing in mind you want to keep a good relationship with this employer and not burn bridges, just in case a different role comes up down the line that would be a better fit.
As a hiring manager, if someone withdrew their candidacy after the interview process, explaining that they realized the role structure/responsibilities were a different than what they initially thought, would you mentally blacklist this candidate for future opportunities?
If they explained this the day after the interview, would you think, “Well, we weren’t even considering progressing your application anyway, way to overestimate your strength as an applicant”? Or if they only explained this when receiving an offer, would you think, “I wish you’d told me this earlier, way to waste my time”? And which do you think is preferable?
Also, how much detail would you expect from the candidate? Is it okay to give a simple “after our interview, I realized that X comprised a larger element of the role than I previously thought, and my strengths and preferences are to do more Y” and leave it at that?
It’s completely fine to withdraw from a hiring process at any point, and you are over-thinking it! From the perspective of the hiring side, it’s much better for candidates to withdraw as soon as they’re sure they wouldn’t accept an offer. That way I don’t spend further time considering them and can focus on other candidates. It’s fine if that’s the day after the interview, or if it’s longer. But it’s also okay if it only happens until the person gets the offer; not everyone is absolutely sure where they stand until they have a concrete offer in front of them.
It’s never presumptuous to withdraw. In fact, if you were a weak candidate, withdrawing saves me from having to reject you (and I may figure that you simply saw the same mismatch I did).
When you withdraw, you can give a quick explanation if it’s easy to do so (your example about the role being different than you’d realized is a good one), but it’s also okay to just say you realized the role isn’t quite the match you’re looking for and/or you’re focusing on other positions.
Withdrawing is a very normal thing that happens. It’s normal to realize as you learn more about a job that it’s not for you, just as it’s normal for an employer to realize a candidate isn’t for them. No sane employer would blacklist you over it, unless you do it in a particularly inconsiderate way (for example, if you made it clear you were only interviewing with them to secure a counteroffer from your current employer or otherwise never had genuine interest in the job).
3. My boss is insisting I do video calls with my staff
I manage a music school, where I work directly under the owner/operator and oversee 11 instructors. Since March, our entire team has moved to online instruction over Zoom; between their work for our organization and other gigs, most of them are on Zoom 20+ hours per week. Recently my boss asked me to set up one-on-one check-ins with each of my staff to see how things are going. I did something like this back in March, when everyone was still acclimatizing to virtual teaching, and since then I’ve been in regular communication with my staff by email, text, and phone. I don’t feel disconnected from my staff or what they’re doing, but I understand why my boss thinks it’s important to do a more formal check-in so I complied.
I offered my staff an option of a Zoom or phone check-in, and while most of them opted for a Zoom call, two of them picked the phone. When my boss learned this, she asked me to rebook them for Zoom calls. (She did not tell me in advance that they needed to be Zoom check-ins.) I pushed back gently by explaining my thought process behind offering a choice, and she’s now firmly insisting that I rebook them to Zoom, that video calls are more engaging and will better help the instructor feel connected to me/the org, as well as sent me a bunch of articles about the benefits of video calls.
Personally, I’m completely over video calls and if I never have another one in my life, it will be too soon. Obviously some people like them (including the majority of my staff!), so I’m happy to comply. But if anyone asked me my preference I’d pick a phone call (or, even better, an email) every time. I felt like it was important to give my staff a choice based on their own comfort.
I’m willing to be wrong, but honestly — is it THAT much more important to do a video call over a phone call, especially when someone has made their preference known?
No. And your boss is being too heavy-handed in dictating it.
There are benefits to video calls — you can see facial expressions and body language, make eye contact, etc. But those benefits decline when someone is less comfortable with video (which they could be for all sorts of reasons, including pandemic shagginess, not having a private space in their home to take the call, or just general dislike of video).And either way, the benefits aren’t so significant that your boss should be overruling you and telling you how to manage the logistics of calls with your team members. If she were responding to some specific problem that she thought this would target, that would be different. But it sounds like she’s just pro-video-call and thinks you should be too.
4. Candidate is applying for job but also wants an informational interview
I have a question about a LinkedIn message I just received, and how you’d respond to it.
I’m lucky to work at basically my dream job, a very cool position in a very cool industry, one that gets pretty glamorized in pop culture — so as you can imagine, there’s a lot of competition for any open jobs, made more intense by the pandemic. My team at work has an entry-level job listing right now, and I’ve had a sudden increase in people connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
One person in particular has reached out telling me that she’s interested in applying, but also asking me to schedule a 15-20 minute call with her to talk about my specific experiences at my job. I do try to be available for informational interviews (they’re important in this industry), but given that she brought up her application, this feels more like a blatant attempt at an informal job interview. At the very least, it seems like an excuse to reach out so she can get me to pass her resume along. Am I right in being a little put off by this? How would you respond?
Yeah, this isn’t an informational interview; it’s an attempt to get a leg up in the hiring process for a specific job she’s applied for. It’s also not terribly uncommon for people to try, so I wouldn’t be super put off by it — but I would tell her no. The way I usually say it is something like, “Because we get such a high volume of interest in our openings, we’ve found the best way to get to know people is to steer candidates to the process we’ve created.”
It’s also okay to just blame your schedule — “I’m in triage mode right now with my schedule and can’t schedule a call, but if you’re selected for an interview, you’ll have lots of opportunites for questions as we move forward.”
5. When to ask about a contract going permanent
Five weeks ago, I was brought in on a three-month contract as a member of the communications team for a much larger corporation. I got the interview because I knew someone who knew someone who knew they were looking, and happened to be a great fit.
They brought me on for the three-month contract while they “reevaluate the position,” but the vibe I get is that it’s kind of a trial period, and the contract is serving as a probation they can wrap up easily at the end of three months if it’s not working out. I could be wrong about this, but I have a very strong feeling that’s the case.
I am absolutely in love with this job. It’s the kind of work I’ve always wanted to do as part of an amazing team and I wake up every morning genuinely excited to go to work. I’ve gotten great feedback from my coworkers and supervisors, who all agree that I’m learning quickly and doing a really good job. The money is great and the benefits (if I were to be made an offer of more than contract) are incredible. We’re remote right now but I’d get to stay in my dream city long-term working for them.
Either way, I’d like to know as soon as possible. If they keep me on, great, but if not I’ll need to start looking somewhere else eventually, and jobs aren’t particularly easy to come by these days so I’ll need to prepare. I know that five weeks is probably too soon to start asking, but when would be the right time to bring it up?
Wait until it’s been two months. When there’s roughly one month left to go, it’s reasonable to assume they’re at least beginning to think about whether they’re going to wrap up at the end of the contract or interested in keeping you on. That means you probably do need to be job searching in the meantime so you’re not starting from scratch only a month before the contract ends, but it doesn’t really make sense to expect an answer from them earlier than that when they’re still evaluating.
what new hires should wear on video calls, withdrawing from a hiring process, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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