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Loyalty is now frowned upon?
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Loyalty is now frowned upon?
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http://www.sjmercury.com/business/top/016537.htm
Posted at 11:09 p.m. PDT Monday, July 17, 2000
`You're not too old, you've just stayed at one company too long'
BY MARGARET STEEN
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Forums » Topic Forums » Recruiting & Staffing » Loyalty is now frowned upon?
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Loyalty is now frowned upon?
posted at 7/18/2000 7:11 PM EDT
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Posts: 37
First: 6/15/1999 Last: 1/5/2001 |
http://www.sjmercury.com/business/top/016537.htm
Posted at 11:09 p.m. PDT Monday, July 17, 2000 `You're not too old, you've just stayed at one company too long' BY MARGARET STEEN Mercury News When an older worker is turned down for a job because he or she is ``not a good fit,'' is it age discrimination or a legitimate hiring decision? Hiring managers have a strong interest in making sure the person they choose will work well with the people who are already there. But because this judgment is so subjective, what appears to one person to be a reasonable decision may seem like discrimination to someone else. Most people would agree, for example, that if a job requires Java programming experience, an employer is justified in choosing a worker who has worked as a Java programmer over one who hasn't, even if the rejected candidate could learn to do the job. Although this can certainly be frustrating for a worker who is trying to move into a new area, few people would view it as discrimination. But things get a lot murkier when it comes to issues such as attitude and ``fit.'' In response to a recent article on age discrimination in the Silicon Valley job market, I heard from some executives at a small company that has a more experienced management team than many start-ups. These executives said that in their experience, what some people call age discrimination may actually be the result of employers' legitimate concerns about how well applicants will fit in. ``If there is discrimination going on, I would suspect in Silicon Valley it has less to do with the person's age and more to do with how well someone interviewing them feels they would fit into a fast-paced environment,'' said Gary Law, vice president of marketing and business development at the company, a Sunnyvale optical switching outfit called BrightLink Networks Inc. ``Could they make the transition from a large company, where everything was well-defined, into a world of chaos, which is what a start-up is?'' Law said that if an employer has these concerns about some older workers, it's probably due not to their age but rather to their work history or skills. ``Some of the people this impacts happen to be older, but I don't think that has anything to do with their age,'' Law said. ``The conclusion is drawn that it's because of age. People are leaping to the wrong cause.'' BrightLink CEO Harry Quackenboss said employers are right to be concerned about whether someone who has spent years at one large company will be able to switch gears. At one time, he said, he would have been suspicious of someone who switched companies every few years. ``Today, if somebody has stayed with a company for 10 years, my attitude is, doesn't this person have any initiative?'' For job-hunters who are trying to leave a large company after many years, this can be a frustrating sentiment to hear -- and it may sound unfair to older workers. After all, only older workers have been in the workplace long enough to have spent 25 or 30 years with one company. And until recently, sticking with one company was considered a smart career path. Now the rules have changed, and some of the workers who were following the old rules feel left behind. As one job-hunter told me after several unsuccessful interviews in his quest to move from the finance department of a large, non-high-tech company into a similar position with a high-tech company: ``It's like a revolution: Everything is so hot and so fresh; e-commerce is getting started, and I'd like to be part of that.'' Both Law and Quackenboss emphasized that it's not impossible to make the transition from a large company to a smaller one. The key is to show that you've been taking on new challenges within the company -- learning skills that will be useful to any company, not just one. ``I just hired a guy who spent 30 years at one company, but he had never let himself be just a cog in the machine,'' Law said. Law added that experience can be a virtue; in fact, the experienced management team at BrightLink was one of the reasons he took the job. ``I wanted to go into an environment where you have a strong experience base, people who aren't going to panic,'' he said. ``In a start-up you have no real foundation, so you go from extreme highs to extreme lows based on very little things. I wanted a team of people who had been through that and knew how to handle it.'' This example illustrates how hard it can be to draw the line between legitimate hiring decisions and discrimination. There's no doubt that concerns about hiring people who have worked many years for one company affect older workers more than younger ones. Some would view that as a subtle form of discrimination; others, like Quackenboss and Law, see it as a reasonable hiring criterion, and one that doesn't have to work against older applicants. Demographic changes in the working population may help resolve some of these questions -- or they may exacerbate them. The median age of the working population is projected to rise as the baby boomers grow older; a new law that allows people 65 and over to keep working without losing Social Security benefits is also expected to encourage more older workers to stay in the workforce. The question is whether having more older workers in the workforce will open new doors for them, or raise more tricky questions about discrimination. |
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Loyalty is now frowned upon?
posted at 7/26/2000 7:15 AM EDT
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Posts: 99
First: 6/22/1999 Last: 12/11/2001 |
I'm here in the Silicon Valley and was surprised with the different attitude regarding longetivity. I came from So Cal and found it odd that I wasn't asked about my last two positions during the interview process as I had been laid off from two jobs in two years. It's actually the "norm" up here. In So Cal, that would raise a red flag during an interview. Employees don't expect to be with the same company more than 3, possibly 4 years. My father retired after 50 years at a major aerospace firm a few years ago; that's unheard of here today.
And if you provide cash incentives to retain your employees, ie you'll receive so much cash/tuition fees if you stay for an "x" amount of time but have to pay it back if you leave sooner, the employees don't care. They just figure their next employer will pick up the bill and pay the previous employer the monies owed. It makes for a difficult retention strategy. |
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