Try It Free
In this new age of information overload, passive job searching has been made so easy that it’s only a matter of time before it reaches parity with today’s dating apps. "Job looks decent enough, sure, swipe right. Oh, I matched! Gotta go text my boss and let them know today is my last day.”
To put that into context versus the past, job searching involved high effort exercises like actually preparing for and attending job fairs or searching through help wanted ads in newspapers. This provided so much friction, it made job searching a herculean effort. That’s all changed. I don’t know where to start getting milk delivered from the dairy directly nowadays. So face the facts. Most of your employees have visited a job search website in the past 24 hours. Probably from the company internet. Probably nothing serious, but it’s so easy, why wouldn’t they?
This brings me to the point of this post. You need to be transparent about job searching. You should be acting as a steward of your employee’s career and not just a passive participant. Embrace it. Encourage it.
This leads me to one of the favorite types of 1:1 meetings I would have when I was managing the sales team at BrightGauge. I’d ask the participants to bring me the job that they wanted to work towards from outside the company. I essentially asked them to job search. We would review what they brought back and have an honest discussion of how likely they would qualify for the job, try to find the compensation numbers, see if there were any cons... basically job search as a team for them. From there we would map out the skills they needed, what they had to work on, and where they truly stood now based on how they were compensated currently. This provided a great forum for open and honest communication about everything from job roles to compensation, without keeping either party guessing about .
I can honestly say that everyone who participated in this process has said it’s one of the best meetings the company would run. Think it through. Try it out with someone you’ve been meaning to get more clarity from. You might surprise them, and yourself.
