If only you had recognized the signs before you accepted the job! There are often warning signs during job interviews that a potential workplace may turn out to be a nightmare. Career coach Alison Green has some suggestions to help you avoid taking a job in an unhappy environment. And if you missed the signs the first time, following her advice may prevent you from making the same mistake again.
Poor organization
Warning bells should sound “if interviews are rescheduled multiple times, no one knows who you’re supposed to meet with [and] everyone you talk to has a different description of what the job entails,” Green writes in U.S. News & World Report. If this happens to you, she says, you can “assume that you’re learning something valuable about what it might be like to work there”.
A short interview
“Hiring is serious work, and good companies invest real time in ensuring they’re hiring the right person,” Green says. “If you get a job offer after a single short interview — for example, 30 minutes of conversation — that’s a real danger sign that the company doesn’t know how to build a strong staff.”
“Welcome to the family!”
Be careful if a potential boss compares the office to a family. This is not necessarily as nice as it seems, Green warns. “Employers who frame themselves as ‘families’ often (not always, but often) violate boundaries and expect inappropriate amounts of commitment from employees, even when it’s not in the employee’s self-interest.”
High staff turnover
How long do employees tend to stay at the company? “If you look around and see that few people have been on staff for more than a year or two (and the organization is more than a few years old), there’s a reason people are fleeing,” Green writes. And if “people look miserable or sound cynical when you talk to them”, you’ve just received another message that you should take seriously.
Poor communication
If “the hiring manager isn’t interested in having a real dialogue with you or answering your questions”, Green advises you to think carefully about whether this really is the right job for you. “Bad hiring managers tend to assume all candidates should want the job, and don’t recognize that good hiring is a two-way street,” she says.