Tag: misfit

The Misfit Job Market

Exactly 15 years ago, I was looking for a job. I had graduated from IIMB four months earlier, taken my first ever full time job 3 months earlier, and was already serving notice. Very quickly on, I had figured that I was not a good fit for the job that I had taken up, and so decided to cut my losses and move on.

The only problem was job hunting was hard. Back then, most people I spoke to seemed suspicious of me because I was getting out of my first job so early. For the longest time (years later), people spoke to me as if there was something wrong with me because I had quit my first job within three months. Finally I ended up taking a 20% pay cut to take another job where I seemed a better fit.

Thinking back, I don’t think I’m alone. The sheer randomness of the campus placement process means that a lot of people end up in jobs that they are ill suited for, purely based on a bit of bad judgment here and a lucky interview there. And most smart people figure out quickly enough that in case they are in jobs they are not a good fit for, it’s better to cut losses and move on. If it is their first ever jobs (applies for undergrad jobs, and for MBAs without prior work experience), the desperation to get out of their misfit jobs will be high.

I think this is a highly underserved market. Companies fall head over heels over themselves to access premium slots in the random process called campus placements, without realising that a significant part of the same pool will (theoretically) be available for a proper interview just a few months hence.

5-6 years back, an old friend of mine had started a company which was essentially a clearinghouse targeted at this precise market – to enable companies hire people in their first years of employment. Unfortunately the company didn’t take off, suggesting that the market design problem is not easy to solve.

Anyway, in case you are a just-graduated student who believes you are a misfit in your first job, and instead want to do analytics, get in touch with me. Having been on the other side, I’m more than happy to fish in this pool, and I know that I’ll get some temporarily undervalued talent here.

Just that I don’t know what sort of market or clearinghouse I need to go to to tap this supply, and so I’m putting out a bid here in the form of this blogpost.

PS: In case you’re a recent reader of my blog, I’ve written a book on market design.

Jobs and courtship

Jobs, unlike romantic relationships, don’t come with a courtship period. You basically go for a bunch of interviews and at the end of it both parties (you and the employer) have to decide whether it is going to be a good fit. Neither party has complete information – you don’t know what a typical day at the job is like, and your employer doesn’t know much about your working style. And so both of you are taking a risk. And there is a significant probability that you are actually a misfit and the “relationship” can go bad.

For the company it doesn’t matter so much if the odd job goes bad. They’ll usually have their recruitment algorithm such that the probability of a misfit employee is so low it won’t affect their attrition numbers. From the point of view of the employees, though, it can get tough. Every misfit you go through has to be explained at the next interview. You have a lot of misfits, and you’re deemed to be an unfaithful guy (like being called a “much-married man”). And makes it so tough for you to get another job that you are more likely to stumble into one where you’re a misfit once again!

Unfortunately, it is not practical for companies to hire interns. I mean, it is a successful recruitment strategy at the college-students level but not too many people are willing to get into the uncertainty of a non-going-concern job in the middle of their careers. This risk-aversion means that a lot of people have no option but to soldier on despite being gross misfits.

And then there are those that keep “divorcing” in an attempt to fit in, until they are deemed unemployable.

PS: In this regard, recruitments are like arranged marriage. You make a decision based on a handful of interviews in simulated conditions without actually getting to know each other. And speaking of arranged marriage, I reprise this post of mine from six years ago.

Handling Jesus

A few months back, perhaps during the football world cup, I had talked about the role of Jesus Navas in the Spanish attack. He would mostly be brought on as a “plan B”, mostly when the Spanish tiki-taka failed to break down the opposition defence.

And by hogging the right touchline, he would single-handedly offer a new line of attack, without taking too much away from the existing tiki-taka attack down the middle. Though quite under-rated, I think he had valuable contributions in the Spanish victory.

So I was thinking about the conditions that are essential for the success of Jesus Navas. And the primary condition, I thought, was the support of his team-mates. For example, when Xavi passed the ball right to Navas, he recognized fully well that there was little chance Navas would give it back to him. Xavi would recognize that Navas would play his own game, and all he had to do would be to perhaps send Sergio Ramos to support and get players in the box waiting for the cross.

It is to the credit of Xavi and the other members of Spanish “Plan A attack” that they recognized this and allowed Navas to play his own game whenever he came on. If they hadn’t, Navas would surely have never been as effective. In fact, he would have been a complete misfit and failure.

You might want to draw your own analogies from this but what I want to say is that when you have a guy in your team who does things differently, who is there to “provide a different angle to the attack”, you need to create conditions to facilitate his work. At the very least, you need to ensure that all members of the team recognize that this guy is different, and what they need to do to enable his success.

Talking about diversity and diversity policies is all fine, but to get the best out of the diversity policy, you need to create conditions to extract the best out of the “diversity hire”, in whatever context you choose to view this.