Read the job description carefully. And then whatever the job description says – expect the opposite. Let’s start with a simple example. The job description is for a production/manufacturing job. That’s great! Manufacturing jobs can be quite straightforward. At least they used to be.
The job description for this position says that you will lead a team that assembles components or products. The job title says ‘Team Leader.’ It sounds like you will be leading a team, right?
Wrong. Whatever you think leading is – if you think it’s a good thing – the company’s idea of leading will be quite different. What leading will actually mean is telling everyone to go talk to your boss because you can’t do squat.
The company isn’t exactly trying to lie to you and everyone else when they create job titles like team leader. They really wish they could have teams and people who lead them. But they are mortally afraid to. So they do what people do – they say they are doing something and then don’t do it.
In this case, they are mortally afraid because what if a team leader leads his team to do something different from the way they’ve always been doing it? Scary!!
Can’t let that happen. I mean it might be good if it happened because maybe things could be improved, but what if they didn’t improve and something changed? Terrifying! Can’t let that happen. So if you get this job, they will tell you that they want you to lead and then they will do everything necessary to prevent you from doing any leading.
Here’s what they will actually want you to do. They will want you to watch like a hawk to make sure everyone on your “team” is doing things exactly the way they want them to be, which is according to the process they have always used. And then they want you to run like a little snitch immediately to your supervisor or chief or whatever they call it and breathlessly report any deviations from the process they have always used.
If they had labeled the job ‘Chief Snitch’, they would not actually have wanted you to be a snitch at all.
They would have wanted you to resolve problems within the group yourself using various interpersonal skills and persuasion modes and conflict resolution techniques. They would have wanted you to snitch only after you exhausted all possible means of solving the problem without snitching.
Because that’s the way people are. They don’t necessarily mean to say the opposite of what they want – but that’s what they say. The people writing the job description are just people. They didn’t want to write a job description. They wanted someone to magically show up and fill the job without them doing any work at all. But that didn’t happen. So maybe they went to a job posting website and copied some existing job descriptions.
But those job descriptions didn’t sound quite good enough so that they added some stuff so that the job description would be even less like reality than it already was. Because who likes the actual reality of jobs and job descriptions? No one, that’s who!
Meanwhile, your job that’s labeled as ‘Team Leader’ that actually wants a snitch emphasizes that a primary qualification for the job is ‘interpersonal skills.’ Now, if you’d been applying for that fictional Chief Snitch job, you’d have actually needed interpersonal skills. But since this company with the real job as a Team Leader puts interpersonal skills first, what they mean is that you must have TERRIBLE interpersonal skills.
You have to be the kind of person who is happy snitching on people. You have to be the kind of person who is happy yelling at people that they’re doing things wrong and not fast enough. You have to be the kind of person who is comfortable being racist and prejudiced because the people who founded the company over 100 years ago were and nothing has changed since!
You can also learn about the company as a whole by applying the principle of opposites. Let’s say this company describes itself as ‘passionate about manufacturing and professionalism.’ Seems reasonable. It’s in the manufacturing industry. It has been for a long time. So sure.
What this actually means is that every single person who works at that company is really tired of manufacturing. They really wish they could retire. Or get out of manufacturing altogether. They’ve had enough of manufacturing. They are going to continue manufacturing because it’s lucrative. But if there’s one thing they don’t want to deal with on a regular basis, it’s passion or enthusiasm for manufacturing. Or even strong feelings about manufacturing. Or desire to improve it – god no! I mean they’d prefer you not absolutely hate manufacturing – but if you have no feelings about manufacturing whatsoever, that’d be great.
Not everything in a job description is going to be a lie.
If the job description says you will ‘assist’ with something, it’s probably true that you will have something to do with whatever you’re supposed to be assisting with. For Team Leader perhaps you are assisting performance evaluations. But you kind of already knew that because you figured out that you were going to be a professional snitch. And your snitching would affect the ‘team’s’ performance reviews. Are you actually going to be giving out performance reviews? No, because they truthfully told you that you’d only be assisting.
A job description tends to get more honest as it goes along. For example, your team leader job description dispenses with the ‘leading’ fantasy further down and starts talking about training people in inspection techniques. Okay, so see – it’s all about inspection. You will be just one of many people doing inspecting.
Which is fine. If you are fine inspecting things and think quality in manufacturing is a good thing and something you can contribute to even if you don’t have strong feelings about it – then maybe this is a job for you. Especially if you hate being all interpersonal with people.
Now, what about the experience section where they say what experience they want you to have? Do they mean that or is it also the opposite?
Good question. It’s kind of both. Your resume will be screened out most likely if you don’t have any manufacturing experience even though really they don’t care that much. But they have to use something to screen people out. So they might use that. Doesn’t mean you can’t apply. Doesn’t even mean you won’t get the job. If your last job title was Team Leader, you might get a look.
If you do have experience in manufacturing, but not experience as a Team Leader and they say they want that – well then just turn something in your resume to team leader. Even if it’s not. I’m not saying to blatantly lie. Just if something can kind of sort of look like leading then word it so that you use that word instead of whatever your company actually called it. Your company may have called it Guidance Provider. Because companies can be really weird that way. Just adjust it.
Does the company really care if you have experience being a team leader?
No, yes, and well sort of. In their conscious minds, previous experience as a team leader is not that big a deal. But in reality, if you have had experience with that same title or it sounds like you do – here’s what they will think. ‘Oh great, we will not have to do any training at all! This person will just come in and do the job! That will be easy! We want easy because we are very tired of hard.’
The more you can make it sound like they will not have to do jack squat if they hire you – the happier they will be to hire you.
And now you know how to decode a job description!
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