Climbing back onto the saddle

I did not blog last week was because I was in a foul mood. Much of it had to do with the feedback from my interview. This was the product manager job at the internet division of a newspaper company where the manager said I was “too eager” and was not a good cultural fit with the team. It knocked me off my horse because it reinforced a general feeling I have about my job search – that this particular job (or any other jobs that I am interested in) does not call for anything that I cannot do. Yet because of subjective standards such as “personality” or “cultural” fit, I spend my weekdays looking for a job while 96% of my classmates are actually working at one.

 

While I am on the topic of my classmates, I have done quite a deal of soul searching as to just what it is that separates them from me that they have been more successful at finding a job. They certainly are not any smarter than I am. I was reassured of this last week when I was putting together a cover letter for a non product management position at a computer hardware company. I started thinking about a classmate who works there. One day in our Data, Tools, and Decision class the professor said that while X percentage of women voted for Bill Clinton, only Y percentage of the votes Clinton received came from women. This classmate proceeded to raise his hand and ask “I don’t understand why there is a difference. Shouldn’t the two numbers be the same?”

 

This is both reassuring and upsetting. It’s good to know that my employed classmates are not any smarter than I am. Yet it’s disturbing that this classmate has a job and I don’t. If it’s not a matter of intelligence, then what is it then? I think a lot of it has to do with the relevancy of my experience. A plurality, if not majority, of my classmates have worked in either consulting, finance, or marketing. A classmate once called this the “MBA median” because this is the mainstream which MBA recruiters consider most relevant and most transferable to the positions they are hiring for. And because I worked as a software engineer and my duties was not related to either consulting, finance, or marketing, I need to significantly spin my experience to make them relevant to recruiters.

 

And spinning is where the rest of my problem resides. Selling myself is something that I am hesitant to do and on many interviews, I find myself psychologically scaling a wall that I cannot get over. After I started working at AOL, I began noticing that I regularly found myself in situations where someone would ask the obligatory “where do you work” question and when I gave the name of my employer, the person’s facial expression would change. It’s almost as though I became more valuable because I worked at AOL. This made me uncomfortable and eventually I began telling people that I worked “at a software company.” I compare this to other MBAs who always manage to talk about themselves in most glowing way possible. And sometimes they do not allow the truth to stand in their way. A 2003 Kenan-Flagler alum once told me about the bad job market during his second year. His classmates tried to sell themselves to recruiters by lying that they had received other job offers. In contrast I have a problem hearing people say that they live in “DC” when their homes are in Arlington, Virginia.

 

The small bit of good news (in a secular sense) is that hitting the bottom often gives me the chance to bounce back. I scheduled a meeting with someone at Kenan-Flagler later this week who provides career counseling for MBA alums and made arrangements to go to a job fair in DC … oh wait - it’s actually in Alexandria, Virginia - next week. Two weeks ago someone commented that she was surprised I didn’t have a job. She said I should have no trouble getting a job because I am outgoing and have a great personality. So in some ways I am hoping that this “personality” thing is not so subjectiveafter all.