How do you know when your high expectations are too high?
March 22, 2010 | Filed under Career
I find hiring people really challenging. I’m not going to lie. I was trained as a journalist, not as a manager; and as such a small company run by mostly young people, we learn as we go. And that’s awesome!
But I find the whole process awkward, kind of like dating or interacting with babies or old people (yes, I’m one of those people).
I’m never quite sure how to act. If I play good cop, I feel like I’m being too nice and basically begging them to work for me even though I’m not entirely sure I want them to work for me. If I play bad cop, it’s even more awkward because I’m waiting for the moment when they say, “This is bullshit!” and walk out of the interview.
I’ve made the mistake of hiring someone who turned out to be completely different than they came across in their interview in the past, so this time around, I feel like I can’t trust my own good judgment. I’ve asked a few people for advice IRL and I’ve gotten some good feedback which I’m eager to employ as I start interviewing candidates this week or next, but I’m still a bit worried.
Because I’m really, really picky. If things aren’t done right, I go all OCD and have to fix them on my own time. After a few times of someone not picking up on the fact that they’re not meeting my standards, I tend to assume they’re incompetent. If they can’t spell or form a sentence that makes sense: incompetent. If they run into a problem and assume it can’t be done instead of figuring it out by, oh…I don’t know, Googling it: incompetent.
I discussed all this with some family and friends over the weekend, and many of them told me my expectations are too high; that not being grammatically correct is the way the world works now; that hiring young people means they’ll need a bit of hand-holding; that I’m setting myself up for failure because I’m never going to find that one perfect candidate.
But why would I hire someone onto my team who isn’t exactly what I’m looking for? Maybe large corporations can get by with slackers and illiterates, but fast-paced “small businesses” (my boss hates it when we’re referred to as a “small business,” but I can’t think of what else to call us) can fall apart within a very short period of time if one person isn’t carrying their weight. Businesses like ours thrive on superstar-ness, and I think everyone on the team right now is just that.
If you’re not a superstar, I don’t want you. Is that discrimination?
I know, I know…not the best “manager” here. But I’m working on it. Maybe. The truth is I want to be one of those terrifying editors who make people cry and realize their own incompetence by way of my overwhelming meanness.
OK. For real. How do you detect superstar-ness? I know a lot of you out there are superstars, so maybe you know the secret that I just haven’t been able to figure out yet?
P.S. I know this is my first blog post in ages, but I’m now trying the whole “write about anything and see what happens” strategy.
Photo credit: Shooting Stars by stefanvds
Tags: career path, TalentEgg, whining, workaholic
Why I still don’t have Internet access at home four months later
January 5, 2010 | Filed under Health, Issues
Addicted by nataliej from Flickr
It’s been four months since I moved back to Toronto for work after a four-month stint living at my dad’s after graduating university and breaking up with a boyfriend.
Until four months ago, I’d had Internet access wherever I was living nearly continuously for over 10 years, maybe more. I feel like I’ve had the Internet for my entire life (or at least the half that I actually remember) and it’s been an important tool throughout my life.
If I hadn’t been so involved online over the last 10 years, I highly doubt I would be capable enough to do my current job.
But over the last year, I noticed the Internet becoming an addiction and a crutch.
I love consuming information and I could probably spend every waking hour of my life reading blogs, watching videos, listening to podcasts, checking out photos, etc. I know this is a good thing, but it’s also a dangerous thing if anyone actually does it because then you stop participating in all the other really great things about life.
And as my last year of university came to a close, and simultaneously so did my last relationship, I found comfort in focusing my attention on the computer because it meant I didn’t have to think about all the crappy stuff going on in my life at the time. It was a distraction and it became an instant wall between my ex-boyfriend and I when we lived together.
I didn’t want to talk, fight, clean up after him, open the mail, cook or do anything else that was an extension of our relationship. I wanted to ignore it all, so I did.
When I arrived at my dad’s last April, I didn’t really like anything about my life there either – I had grown distant from my family after four years away from school, my dad’s girlfriend had moved in, there was nothing to do in that town and none of my friends were there anymore – so, once again, I ignored all that in favour of the Internet. I sometimes worked all day and night. I read dozens of blog articles every day. I watched hours of TV online. Sure, I got out now and then, but not enough.
So, I finally realized that I had left one unhealthy situation for another and I needed to get out. Financially, I probably wasn’t ready, but I knew I could get by, so I moved to Toronto Sept. 1.
Four months later, I still don’t have Internet access at my apartment. I’ve found many reasons to justify it – Canadian telecom providers suck, I’m on the Internet at work anyway, I don’t want to be stuck on a computer all night after I’ve been sitting at one all day, etc. – but it’s starting to creep up on me. Sure, I have email and Internet access on my BlackBerry, but it’s not the same.
Sometimes I don’t leave work until 7 or 8 p.m. because there are things I still want to do. I’ve marked as read countless undoubtedly interesting blog articles in my Google Reader because I can’t spend my workdays catching up. I mostly forget about Twitter and Facebook in the evenings and on weekends. Until recently when I finally got a TV again, I’d mostly replaced TV shows and movies with podcasts I download at work and listen to at home.
The truth is, this extreme hasn’t felt right either, so now I’m itching to connect again, but I’m kind of scared at the same time. What if there is only one extreme or the other for me? Only being connected all the time or not being connected?
How do you balance staying involved online with staying involved in the rest of life?
P.S. Any testimonials for an excellent Internet service provider in Toronto that isn’t Bell or Rogers?
Tags: Cambridge, emotional breakdown, goals, observations, perfectionism, Toronto, web and tech, workaholic
I think we all know what my New Year’s Resolution is
December 30, 2009 | Filed under Randomness
I think we all know what my New Year’s Resolution is: blog more!
Tags: blogging
My thoughts on The Future of Media: Part 1
November 13, 2009 | Filed under Journalism
When I found out my boss was planning to attend her first Toronto Girl Geek Dinner, I jumped at the chance to join her. I’m a girl and a geek; plus, I figured I could use the networking experience and something fun to do on a Monday night.
I was also very interested in attending because the discussion topic was “The Future of Media.”
As a recent journalism graduate and someone who is now working as an editor in what I’d consider to be on the way to the future of media, I’m really interested to hear what others have to say about this and how other young women (a demographic that seemed to dominate my j-skool classes, but which is sometimes scarce in traditional newsrooms) are shaping the future of media as well.
What Lauren and I found ourselves in was a room full of women who mostly work in the areas of media which are so broken that people speculate every day when the mainstream media’s metaphorical “end of days” will come (or if those days are already upon us). They are: radio, television, print and telecommunications, plus the academics who teach those subjects in our colleges and universities.
And that’s fair enough. Why wouldn’t these successful, technologically engaged, intelligent women want to be at the forefront of a huge shift in their industries?
(As an aside, from what I could see, Lauren and I were the only people who raised our hands to indicate we were both content producers and marketers. I’ll bring this up again in the later parts of this series.)
However, as led by these women, the hot topic of conversation was not “The Future of Media,” but the present of mostly social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Connect, hype, digital literacy, privacy concerns, etc. You can read the list here.
At the end of the night, I felt let down and left the dinner thinking that the women driving these debates completely missed the point: social media is not the media we should be talking about.
We should be talking about the media that we all work in; the media that people who don’t know everything turn to in order to find the information they need to know.
The only aspect of “The Future of Media” that was actually discussed was the CBC’s Angela Misri briefly explaining CBC podcasts and switching the livestreams to mp3 format.
I’m a huge fan of CBC Radio One. I listen to the station live in the mornings while I get ready for work, but some of the best shows air during working hours or later on at night, and I miss the live broadcasts.
I also don’t enjoy scheduling my life around my favourite programs, whether on radio or TV. So I think of the CBC podcasts kind of like TiVo or online streaming video – I can listen to the shows when I want to, skip the interruptions (traffic, weather, hourly news, etc.) and pause when I need to.
Yes, the CBC is doing a great job and is potentially ahead of the curve, but it can’t be the future of commercial media because it’s publicly funded. It doesn’t have to make money. There are no ads, just information. Companies and products are often mentioned, and endorsed, because the CBC thinks they’re of interest to its audience, but no money changes hands because it’s a publicly funded media outlet.
To survive and thrive, media outlets will have to become more like the CBC, but advertisers will actually pay the content producers to turn the advertising into content that is relevant to the outlet’s audience.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series on The Future of Media, in which I will discuss what exactly I mean by this statement, how it will work and why content producers won’t have as much trouble avoid corruption as we think they will.
Tags: bias, newspaper industry, the future of media
No, I haven’t died
November 4, 2009 | Filed under Career
I haven’t written here in two months, and I can’t believe it. I honestly feel like I wrote that last post … last week? Maybe two weeks ago. But not two months.
I still don’t have the Internet at my apartment, and I’m kind of getting used to it because it gives me the freedom and the time to do other things. But it also means I don’t have any time for blogging. And that sucks.
But I’m not going to beat myself up about it too much. I’m just going to post an article of mine that was published yesterday, and move on.
TalentEgg has been providing content for the careers and education section of the new free Toronto evening newspaper t.o.night, which is available in some newspaper boxes at major hubs (such as Union Station), but which is mostly handed out by old school newsies in the downtown financial district. For those of you who have access to t.o.night, our content appears every Tuesday.
I’ve simply edited some of the articles we’ve published in the past and passed it on to the editors at the newspaper, but this week I had the opportunity to report and write a short news story about the Canada’s Top Campus Employers rankings.
It’s the first thing I’ve had published in print since my stint at the National Post (which, dramatically, was almost shut down last week) and although I publish my own writing online through TalentEgg almost every day, there’s just something special about print.
So, here it is. (Somewhat surprisingly, they don’t publish any of their content online, so I’m going old school with a scan.)
Tags: blogging, campus recruitment, Gen Y, newspaper industry, published, TalentEgg, Toronto
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