Job-Hunting while Employed: the other perspective

In the PF-blogging world, they tell you never to let an employer know you have another job offer/possibility unless you’re serious about leaving. This is because you’ll essentially be telling your employers you’re hunting and they’ll assume you’re not that committed to your current position. Makes sense, right? I’ve planned to follow this advice, should the situation every come up where I needed to.

But something I haven’t read a lot about in PF blogs, and something that I’ve not planned a response for, is the flip side of this circumstance: what it’s like to be the manager who finds out your employee is hunting.

Remember my employee-survey idea and how it gave me clues as to what my employees were thinking? As a result, I fought hard to get someone promoted, and my employee was thrilled to take our offer.

So you can imagine my surprise, then, when this same employee told me last week, just days before the transition to full-time (and its accompanying pay increase) took effect, that there was another job possibility now on the table–a job possibility that would be better than ours.

This isn’t an issue of pay, or of work responsibilities, or work environment, or anything that I can control. In fact, it’s a simple issue of the-other-job-is-more-line-with-desires. Less money, but different perks, potentially more prestigious ones.

I’m glad when someone pursues his or her dreams, but I have to admit it’s hard not to resent the way this has panned out. Now, we’re understaffed for the next few weeks until I can find another part-timer to fill in the hours my newly FTer would have been working. Plus, I have a only-somewhat-committed staffer who could up-and-leave at any point.

Times like these, I remind myself that these are the growing pains of experience. There’s a lot you can plan and prepare for, a lot you can do to motivate and encourage. But when push comes to shove, you’re not in control of other people or their motivations/desires.

You do the best you can, and you come out wiser for it. For now, I’m preparing for the worst, hoping for the best, hiring again (ugh) and making new plans, albeit penciled ones. I think that’s all you can do.

Filed under 9-5, job-hunting |