Landlord White Paint | No BS Career Advice
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
People hire me for No BS Career Advice globally. That can be with a job search, hiring more successfully, supporting management and leadership issues, assisting with a career transition, or resolving a workplace issue.
DID YOU KNOW: Today, I released episode 2500 of No BS Job Search Advice Radio, the longest-running job search podcast in iTunes and elsewhere. Subscribe wherever you listen to or watch (on Spotify, it is a video) podcasts.
Business Transformation: The process of homogenizing, pasteurizing, and standardizing something so we can hire cheap disengaged people to do it in the future.
Landlord White Paint
I grew up in New York City and lived there for a lot of my life. Unless I paid to have my apartment painted, every apartment I lived in was painted in what is referred to as “landlord white.”
What is landlord white paint?
It is cheap white paint, commodity paint, that doesn’t age well. It starts to yellow, chips easily, and does not look well in a short period of time.
When people are young, they take their experience from many of the schools they attend that the way to do well in school is to act like everyone else, regurgitate a bunch of facts when we tell you to do so (tests), do what we tell you to do when we tell you to do it) and to act like everyone else in an interview and in the workplace, say the same things as everyone else leaving hiring managers with little to choose between and wondering where they can find fresh ideas.
Like business transformation, the system has created monotony and drudgery.
Few American corporations would ever hire the adult Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, or Caterina Fake even though each created billion-dollar enterprises and enormous value for investors.
They prefer nice college graduates from good schools even though Ev Williams (twitter, medium), Jack Dorsey (twitter, Square) and Biz Stone (twitter, medium) never graduated college. Neither did Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook or Rob Kalin from etsy. Oh! Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn’t graduate either.
Why do so many businesses hire the human equivalent of landlord white paint and are surprised when they are disappointed with the results they get?
Why don’t many firms look for the story behind the story in each person to identify their “color” and then help that color become more robust? What is it that makes someone special, and not just landlord white paint?
Statistics show that in the US, employee engagement statistics show 33% of workers are engaged. 67% are either quiet quitters or “not-so-quiet quitters” (disengaged workers).
If these are the results you want, keep doing what you’re doing. Otherwise, it’s time to revisit your processes and change them to make them deliver better outcomes.
Ⓒ The Big Game Hunter, Inc., Asheville, NC 2022
STEM Search Group wrote a good article about writing job descriptions and job postings. Meg Guiseppi wrote an article for her blog about the importance of personal branding. Both are short reads and well worth the 4-5 minutes to read each.
Spooky Leadership and Management Mistakes That Scare Your People Away
Starting with a personal story about the jerk I was working for at the time of 9/11, I share leadership and management mistakes that drive people away.
I know you hate the idea of thinking of yourself as a brand but the absence of any branding effort on your part results in you being a generic brand. My guest, Kevin D. Turner and I discuss how to progress from “blanding to branding” in ways that are uncomplicated.
These are eight rules for negotiating compensation and salary you must follow.
You’ve interviewed for a while and now it’s time to give notice because you found a new position. Don’t make any of these ten mistakes.
If you would like NO BS Career Advice from me, schedule a paid session at TheBigGameHunter.us/schedule. If you aren’t sure and would like to evaluate my ability to help you, use the same link to schedule a free discovery call. At the site, the blog has a lot of useful information to help you professionally plus information about my courses, books, and guides.
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. He is hired to provide No BS Career Advice globally. That can involve job search, hiring staff, management, leadership, career transition and advice about resolving workplace issues. Schedule a discovery call at my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us
He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2500 episodes.
I do a livestream on LinkedIn, and YouTube (on the JobSearchTV.com account) Tuesdays and Fridays at 1 PM Eastern. You can send your questions about job search, hiring better, management, leadership or to get advice about a workplace issue to me via messaging on LinkedIn or in chat during the approximately 30-minute show.
Website: www.TheBigGameHunter.us
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