Have you ever been missed out on a job?
Yes, me too.
I met someone who thought she was being passed over; she was watching people go past her on the success ladder – at least that is how she saw it. They were younger and seemed to be less experienced. All this happened to her within her place of work. She wasn’t an outsider. She was known and she had thought, respected. But she wasn’t moving on in her job. She began to wake in the early hours of the morning fretting over this and getting angry.
I asked her to look at her current role. What did she bring to the job with her experience that made her the best person for the role? She came up with an impressive list. How often do we dismiss our own position and wish for something different when we are in the midst of something!
Could it be that she was too vital to be in the position to lose it? Was she the only person who could do the job well at the specific time period?
We talked about the situation. I asked her to step into the interviewing panel’s shoes hoping she might gain some insight from their perspective. So what might the interview panel be looking for?
I encouraged her to write her job description and figure out how she covered the bases. She decided to show her manager the job description she wrote as she saw the job. She negotiated a new wage for herself based on the value she saw herself in the company. She realized her managers used a different value system for movement on the success ladder. She had based hers on time at the company predominantly whereas they valued her in her position with her skill set.
