Job Career and google - gobbledegook or a whole new language

I am a career development practitioner. What does this mean to you? If you are like most of the world's population, probably not much.

This is a problem. It is a problem for you, because without knowing about me and my colleagues and what we can do, you might be missing out on something unbelievably good: a better time at work, personal fulfilment,a feeling that life makes sense, and yes - achieving your dream career.

This is also a problem for me, and for my fellow career development practitioners, because without you, we have no job, we can't earn a living, and we can't achieve our own career dreams. We feel unfulfilled and dissatisfied.

The career development industry itself is just a little over one hundred years old. A man called Frank Parsons is the 'father' of our profession, establishing the first career assessment in 1907. Mr Parsons was the first person to show people that they could choose their own career. This was radical - prior to this time young people were handed a career, either through inheritance of the family business or because this was the work available in their area, and this was pretty much it for the rest of their lives.

Parsons' career planning tool was simple but effective, so effective in fact that career development practitioners still use a version of this today. Basically it involves establsihing career interests, working styles and personal preferences (or values) which become key career ingredients for that individual, then turning these into tangible career goals and developing a plan to make it happen.

Behind this simplicity, there is a lot of skill required. Unfortunatley, career development practitioners often do our jobs so well that we are almost invisible in the process. Let me explain.

If you are successful in your career and you have had the help of a career career adviser, counsellor, or coach, the success is all yours, and you will have put in some effort to make it happen. But perhaps a career counsellor was there at the start, helping you to sort through the haze of options, or to help you come up with ideas in the first place. Perhaps a course adviser was there to help you to make sense of the courses on offer to help you become accredited. Perhaps a career coach kept you motivated during times you thought it was all too hard.

These days, career development practitioners often take on all these roles to help you through each stage of transition. Obviously, to have all these skills requires a lot of training and ongoing skills development.

Even if you haven't ever actually seen a career person, our very existence has helped cause a mindshift. I am sure you would find it difficult to conceive of a time when you would have been stuck in a job for life, whether you loved, hated or loathed it. For this, you can thank the career professionals who have pioneered this way of thinking and working over the last hundred years.

If you have always thought that career people 'just work in schools', 'help with course selections', or 'are just for people who are not coping at work', it is time to think again.

You probably aren't aware that there are a lot of career development practitioners working from home offices or in co-located offices around the world. Alain de Botton's recent book called 'The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work' has a chapter on career counselling in which he describes the work of one rather quaint career development practitioner. Whether this is a good or bad advertisement remains to be seen; certainly people moving into this field come from a range of backgrounds and age groups, this is not addressed in de Botton's book.

OK, so what does all this have to do with google?

Given that the career development profession needs to be more widely marketed, and given that the Internet is arguably the best marketing tool in the world today, I am concerned that google may well dictate the future of our industry.

I have a website; it describes what we do accurately. Visitors often comment on how appealing it is, how easy it is to read, how professional it looks. They often decide to use our services. However, for every person who finds the site thousands of others do not. This is because the google search engine does not understand the words we use. Admittedly, it relies on input from searchers, who don't know what career development is - are you beginning to see the problem?

So, let's say you want to change jobs or figure out what you want to do with your life. What words do you enter into the search engine? Well, our recent research into google searches show that 'career advice' (which does not describe what we do at all well, nor does it sound attractive to most adults), 'resume help' and hardly sensible phrases like 'job career' and 'get help job' are popular. Should I change the words on my website from 'We are a group of career development practitioners' (which is the term we want you to know describes us and what we do) to 'We are job career people'?

Doctors, accountants and lawyers don't have these problems because their industry terminology was set well before the advent of internet search engines. But for the career development profession, we must now decide whether we should be led by the almighty cyberspace god Google, or to find some other way to get our message across.

I doubt that will happen, the Internet and google are far too entrenched. So just be aware that although we might just have to bow to public pressure and call ourselves 'career advisers', we don't actually give advice, but what we do give is so much more useful to you - we help you manage your working life in a way that reflects your individuality and prevailing needs at any one point in time.

How important is workplace fit?

After they receive instruction on how to take details of a job vacancy, one of the first things new recruitment consultants are taught is how to find the ideal candidate. They are taught to shortlist based on these three criteria:

1. Can they do it? (i.e. the job, which means they have the skills, experience and other requirements outlined)

2. Will they do it? (i.e. do they appear highly motivated, will they be happy to do the tasks, work at that level etc.)

3. Will they fit in? (i.e. to the workplace, with the team, will they be accepted by others)

Of all of these, No. 3 is the most difficult for recruiters and employers to get right. I am sure we all agree that a person who is a good fit will be happier, work more productively and probably stay on longer than someone who is a square peg in a round hole.

Anecdotal evidence from colleagues in the recruitment industry indicates that the 'best fit' criteria is fraught with difficulties. I would be interested to receive some real data if anyone knows of any research into this area.

The issues created by 'bad fit' employees include: excessive days off, poor performance, poor output, teamwork hampered by delays, right through to conflict and outright sabotage, all of which have a devastating affect on the bottom line.

So why do hirers get this wrong so often? There are many reasons, and not all of these can be blamed on human error. For instance, a couple of years ago, before the GFC, there simply were not enough people applying for positions, let alone ideal ones.

Now, we seem to have the opposite problem. With excellent candidates coming up for a large number of jobs, it is often a matter of choosing between two or more who seem equally ideal. While a recruiter may tend to place too much emphasis on assessments and impersonal processes, they will generally have a greater ability to remain objective than their client, who is more inclined to
- recruit 'people like us'
- look at the past, trying to fill a former employee's shoes, rather than focusing on how the replacement can help the organisation move forward into the future
- spend time gaining 'intelligence' from people in their network rather than relying on their own gut instincts
- select the person who interviews best (i.e. who appeals to their ego), rather than the one who is more likely to work hardest and most productively

Compounding the 'fitness' issue is that ephemeral issue of blatent discrimination - yes, it still exists, just look around a range of workplaces with eyes open to find real evidence that we have not become any more tolerant of people who are different to us, or aware of the negative results of prejudice. This is now more heavily cloaked, because we are sufficiently savvy to avoid expressing openly discriminatory remarks. With Recruitment 101 firmly embedded in their brains, no real data to work with, and an unwillingness to harm their relationship with their client,recruiters are often left to second-guess the 'best fit' part, usually based on their own preconceptions, on a hunch of how their client thinks.

So what is the best way to determine 'best fit'? I believe this has less to do with the physical attributes of the candidate OR their cultural background than with the prejudices of the hirer. For example, do they avoid hiring someone from India or Venezuela because of a preconceived idea about the standard of work they can expect, or the time they might front up after lunch? Do they fail to see the possibilities in any female candidates because 'they have always had a male' in the past? Do they eliminate a person who worked in an organisation they don't respect, when the reason that person left that organisation was they didn't like the way it was being run?

What if 'best fit' was based on a whole different set of criteria, such as 'having a different viewpoint' to the interviewer, or that the person who interviewed least well was potentially the best person for the job? This can happen, because often the person who is most keen on a position is the one who is most nervous and who, as a result, performs less well than someone who really couldn't care less if they got the job or not.

Arguably, one of the biggest interferences in the selection process is superificial appearances. Few people will admit to rejecting a candidate because he or she was too short, too fat, too 'foreign' in appearance, but it still happens, and far too often. If job interviewers had to 'blind interview' each candidate, so that they were unable to make assumptions based on presentation, would they be more successful? Obviously, because then they would have to focus on skills, strengths and the best fit of worker to the job. Add a voice distorter to hide accents and we are beginning to develop a recipe for success. And building a culture that welcomes people who might not look, dress, act and speak exactly the same as everyone else in the workplace will ensure that they fit most comfortably into the team. In a golbal, dynamic and unpredictable climate, giving the 'best fit' criteria a complete makeover is one step in the right direction for the bottom line and the future of an organisation.