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05.26.09 Past Employers Have Equal Power Over Credibility As Your Resume  By Dan Morrill Louis Gray wrote an article about how Skill or Luck can influence how people perceive your ability to do work. Sometimes a bad organization can haunt you forever, and this goes for just about any place you choose to work. While it would be great to think that you could pick and choose where you want to work, that is not viable in the world today. Often we are just happy enough to collect a paycheck and pay our bills. When we start climbing out of the recession though in the next year or two, you really do want to check out where you are applying to, and find out what the company's reputation is. You might not have that luxury right now, but in a year or two you will have that luxury. Choose your company more carefully than they will choose you, because where you worked can follow you forever. Would you hire an energy trader who used to work for Enron? Would you hire an accountant who used to work at Author Andressen? Would you hire someone who had worked at six startups but those startups never went anywhere? Would you hire someone from Google? In the reputation economy, where you worked has the same perception as to your trustworthiness and credibility as your resume and your own experience. Louis states: In a time when the economy is in decline and unemployment is rampant, here and elsewhere, these rapid judgment calls are no doubt having profound effects. How do you explain your way around product failures, hostile takeovers and missed sales quarters? Should the guy whose company chose to go public three months before the market crashed, when yours didn't, giving them $100 million in the bank, and him a nice Mercedes, be considered a better talent than you? Should every former Google employee have a leg up on every former Yahoo! or Ask Jeeves employee, for example? Source: Louis Gray
While this might sound like a cold calculation, in many ways the people you worked for are as equally responsible for your credibility as those things you have personally accomplished. When we focus on teams in the work force, group think, we also run into group failure and group accountability. It does not matter if you were a lead accountant at Author Andressen or a new hire right before the collapse in the wake of Enron. The stigma of working for a company that is less than credible will in the longer run haunt you just as much as working for Google, Microsoft, or Bungie can help your career. The success of the corporation reflects on your ability to deliver, the failure of the company also reflects on your inability to deliver. While this will not hold true for everyone, in many ways, and over my career this has generally held true. If you work at a company that has a bad reputation, has execution or delivery issues, or is otherwise ill managed, or have other issues, those will reflect on you when you are job hunting. Not all companies are run poorly, but there are enough of them out there that you might have a harder time finding a job in the future if there is a major blow out at the company you work for. At this point, you need to think of your career as equally tied to your employer. Their reputation for quality and delivery is also your reputation for quality and delivery. Something to think about, as it looks like there is going to be a mass migration of people moving away from companies that have abused the current economic recession, and taken much of it out of their employees. You have the ability to seriously take a look at the company you will go work for, make sure that it is a great company, who treats their people well, with a great track record of accomplishment, delivery and execution. You can tell a lot about a company by not just how it treats its employees, but how well it delivers on its promises to its customers. Comments About the Author: Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community. |
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