should I penalize a candidate for an infographic resume, my employee is horrified by pests in our old building, and more
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Should I hold a candidate’s infographic resume against him?
I am the hiring manager for a position that is notoriously hard to hire for. We always have to do a national search (in spite of being based in NYC) because the role is managerial, but requires a specific skill set in order to manage the team effectively. I was reviewing the latest resumes and was finding myself really disappointed with the quality of the candidates until the last resume in the batch. The candidate has all the right skills, good manager experience, and works at a company that I have connections at so I’ve already heard good things about the candidate before he even applied.
However….his resume was an infographic resume, which I hate. I actually had to get a highlighter and go searching for all the things I needed to know to make sure he met the requirements I was looking for. I can usually scan a resume and make a decision in less than a minute, but just getting through this resume took me about five minutes. In the grand scheme of things, not a big deal, but I find myself still being really annoyed.
Would it be super petty of me to put him in the “maybe” pile instead of the “yes, interview” pile just because of the gimmicky resume?
It’s not that it would be petty, exactly; it’s that it wouldn’t be great hiring because you’d be making a decision based on something that doesn’t speak to his ability to do the job, in a situation where you don’t have a lot of other strong options.
I am right there with you on thinking infographic resumes are ridiculous and annoying, but if this is a hard-to-hire-for position and he’s one of the few good candidates, you should talk to him. You’re not hiring for his ability to put together an effective resume; you’re hiring for skills and experience and reputation, and he scores well on those fronts. Lots of people get bad job-searching advice, and that may be all that happened here. (The exception would be if you were hiring for a position where it’s key to present information in a way that meets your audience’s needs. Even then, I’d still talk to him since you don’t have many good candidates, but I’d make a point of really testing his ability to do that.)
2. We’re in a historic building with pests, and my employee is horrified
I work in a historic building, on the ground level, in an area full of cabinets and nooks and crannies. Read: A total pest hot spot. I have worked in these kinds of large, old buildings for my whole career and am accustomed to a certain level of presence of pests. Usually there are good guidelines for people’s food to only be kept in specific areas/containers to cut down on pests in people’s offices, but there just are cockroaches and mice, especially visible when the weather is changing and they’re coming in from the cold.
I have one direct report, and they are relatively young, this is their first job out of college. They have (self-reported) OCD and are visibly distraught by seeing dead cockroaches in stairwells, etc. They just came to me in tears because they spotted some mouse poop near the area where our office microwave is. I want to be sensitive to their needs for a healthy and comfortable workspace, and also totally agree that mouse poop near food is another level of concern above cockroaches in stairwells. But I also need to be realistic about my limitations of effecting change in a giant old building that will likely always have pests. I don’t want to come across as too cynical and uncaring, but I’m really not sure what I can do to help make things better.
This is compounded by a total tragedy of the commons in our work space, with a sort of kitchen area that happens to be in my employee’s shared office. Keeping that sink area clear is not the job of our custodial staff, but no one ever steps up to clean the sink, so it falls on my employee to do because they have higher standards than everyone. It’s not ideal, but the sink is also not nearly as bad as other work kitchens I’ve seen (a low bar to be sure!). I honestly don’t see trying to enforce a job roster in our small office area working well, I imagine it might just result in more resentment. I am also relatively new here so I don’t feel like harping on people who have been here over a decade for not sweeping away their crumbs. I guess I’d just love some advice as to how to both help my workplace be better, my employee feel more comfortable, but also be realistic about the nature of work kitchens and also the presence of pests.
The best thing you can do is to be honest about what will and won’t change, so that they have that info and can decide how to handle it. For example: “I know it can seem gross. I’ve these kinds of large, old buildings for my whole career, and it’s pretty normal for them to occasionally see evidence of roaches and mice. I know the building maintenance tries to keep it under control, but a giant old building like this will likely always have them.”
In other words, your role here isn’t to solve their discomfort or to try to find a solution for a problem that (a) isn’t likely to be easily fixed and (b) it doesn’t really sound like you have standing to fix regardless. Your role is to just be clear with your employee about what to expect, and then it’s up to them to decide what they do with that information (which could be anything from working with a therapist to better manage their response, to finding a job in a newer and cleaner building).
That said, is there any chance you can move their workspace? Having to share space with the kitchen is probably making this far less bearable.
3. Is it normal to have super flexible hours in office jobs?
I have a question about workplace norms in white collar/office-type environments when it comes to things like lunch breaks and work hours. I know this is going to vary by employer, but generally speaking: If you have the sort of job/boss where you are trusted to get your work done, is it commonplace for people to not come in until their first meeting or leave after their last meeting of the day? And is it expected that your “lunch hour” does not include travel time to and from wherever you are going for lunch?
I ask because this seems to be the case in many office environments where I have spent time, but I’ve never heard anyone explicitly say so and I fear asking would make me sound like I’m looking for excuses to slack off. Particularly, it seems like a lot of people leave early (3:00 or so) to go to the gym or pick up kids from school or go to happy hour. And it seems like a lot of people take lunch breaks much longer than an hour to run errands or work out, or to travel to and from a restaurant. I get the impression that this is pretty normal and not considered inappropriate as long as it’s not something you do every day (and as long as you don’t opt to do all three in one day!). And I’m assuming maybe there is also an expectation that you will hop on to your email for a bit in the evening to to offset some of the time you missed?
As someone who has worked in some super uptight service/retail environments, I am kind of in awe of the apparent freedom most office jobs seem to permit.
It really does vary by employer. But at many offices where you’re treated like a skilled professional, it is indeed common that that people in some jobs will manage their own hours and their own workload, showing up and leaving at whatever times make sense for their schedule that day. Even in those offices, though, it’s common for not everyone to be able to do that — often more junior staff won’t have that flexibility, and there will often be roles where it’s just not possible (like the receptionist or other jobs where coverage matters).
But there are also lots of offices where this isn’t the case — where hours are fairly rigid and what you’re describing wouldn’t be done, or wouldn’t be done by anyone who wasn’t pretty senior.
More broadly, it’s not typically the case that your lunch hour (or lunch half-hour) wouldn’t include your travel time to and from wherever you’re getting lunch. If it looks like that, what you’re seeing is probably just that people manage their own time and aren’t held to a strict 30- or 60-minute lunch.
If you’re ever unsure of the norms in your office, it’s fine to ask and won’t make you look like a slacker. You can say something to your boss like, “Can you tell me how people usually manage their schedules? I’ve noticed a lot of people coming and going on what look like pretty flexible schedules, but I didn’t want to assume anything without talking to you.” And similarly, “Is there a certain amount of time people usually take for lunch?”
4. Our manager wants us to start working night shifts with no extra pay
My manager keeps decreasing the workforce for budget issues. When an employee leaves, she doesn’t hire for the position at all or she hires for part-time but the workload remains the same. We have an employee on military leave for a year. She has saved her position but has not hired a temp to cover for her.
Recently an overnight employee left, and she requested that each person on the evening shift work one 12-hour shift per week from 3 pm to 3 am. The kicker is that we have to leave early on a day of her choice so we do not have overtime. And this is during the holiday months. We are constantly short staffed. It would seem more fair if she were to request volunteers and reward them by paying overtime. How do we approach her to negotiate this?
As a group. There are power in numbers, and if you all say, “No, we can’t work overnight shifts without compensation (or at all),” it’s going to be hard for her to hold it against all of you. It’ll be possible, but unlikely. Talk to her as a group and say something like, “We’re not able to work night shifts. Some of us find it wreaks havoc on our sleep for days, and others of us have dependents we need to care for in the evenings. Some of us would be willing to do it for additional compensation, but none of us are up for doing as part of of our normal schedule without being paid overtime. We’d like to ask that you re-hire for the evening shift so that the burden doesn’t fall on us.”
5. Should my cover letter mention the person who referred me?
A former colleague recently reached out to me to let me know that there was a position opening up on her team at her new company. She passed along my resume directly to the hiring manager (her boss also), but I have to apply officially to the job posting via the company website. The form includes a space to include a cover letter. Should I mention the colleague by name in the cover letter? Would that help her to make the connection in a sea of applications?
Yes, you should mention that Jane Smith encouraged you to apply for the job. In some cases, that will get your application a longer look than it might have otherwise, or will jog the hiring manager to remember, “Oh yeah, this is the candidate Jane told me to watch for.”
should I penalize a candidate for an infographic resume, my employee is horrified by pests in our old building, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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