The Fit Factors

Book excerpt: The Fit Factors guides readers through the challenges regarding career decisions, the solution for making smart decisions, and how to proactively manage your career from the job hunt to promotions. An excellent companion to StrengthsFinder 2.0, The Fit Factors will help you build on your strengths to find the best job and build a great career.This book explains:- How to evaluate jobs using The Fit Factors- How companies and job seekers have different goals- How to ensure recruiters look at your resume- What companies are not telling you about their workplace- Why setting goals needs to happen before your interview- Interviewing the interviewer- What to do on your first day at a new job- The best way to develop in your careerFrom the Author:The goal of this book is to level the playing field between you and the companies you'll work for. I want to help you make smart decisions about your next job and your overall career. In doing so, I'll give away some Human Resources strategy secrets used by sophisticated companies. Fortunately, explaining these secrets is a good thing for everyone involved, because everyone wants you to succeed. On the day you are hired, your new manager and company hope that you will be their next "star" - that you'll end up in the right job, performing well, developing at work and helping them grow the business. By becoming familiar with HR strategies, you'll be better equipped to help them get their hiring decisions right and take advantage of the recruiting process they've created.I've been focusing on how to make the right job decisions for over ten years, from three perspectives: as a consultant, an employer, and as a mentor. Most recently, I've spent the last six years advising HR executives at major corporations on their recruitment, employee performance and retention strategies. Through thousands of meetings with executives, I clearly saw the contrast between employer and employee, recruiter and job seeker, executive and their talented workforce. Prospective employees do not understand what is happening "behind the curtain" when it comes to HR strategy - and if they did, they would be embarrassed at how unprepared they are to manage their own careers.Second, as an entrepreneur starting my first venture during the dot-com boom, I wanted to figure out whom to hire and how to help my team members succeed. Around that time, I discovered a variety of self-assessments that we could use to help tailor our responsibilities to our unique abilities. My goal was to determine which activities people were naturally better at than everyone else at the office and give them a chance to build their job and career around those things.Lastly, as a result of my time inside large recruiting organizations and building my own teams, I found many friends and mentees asking me for guidance regarding their own job searches. In those conversations, I tried to learn more about the person's strengths, interests, and goals, with the hope of helping them understand themselves better and search for jobs in a more focused way. Unfortunately, I found that most people did not have a way to figure out what they were good at, what they wanted in a job, and what jobs would best fit them.The frameworks, diagrams, data and quotes in this book that are the result of hundreds of conversations with managers, executives, mentees, job seekers and individuals interested in connecting what they are good at to what they do at work. Many of the pages had their beginnings as quick lists written over coffee with a mentee or as a grid I drew on the whiteboard as I considered who to hire into my team.Great careers don't just happen - that's why I wrote this book.