Career News 24/7: The Cynical Girl: 6 Steps to Getting a Raise

Thursday, May 16, 2013

The Cynical Girl: 6 Steps to Getting a Raise

Posted: 15 May 2013 03:45 AM PDT

Everyone wants to know how to get a raise.

Don’t ask at the wrong time. If your company has an annual review process, ask then. If you don’t have an annual review process, try to sync your request with your hire date.
Have the right kind of data. How have you made the company money? How have you saved the organization money? How are you measurably better than some schmuck off the street? Those points matter. You know what doesn’t matter? Salary data from the internet. Nobody cares.
Ask nicely. HR doesn’t negotiate with terrorists or people who are threatening to leave.
Advocate on behalf of other people. Labor costs aren’t fixed even when we say they are fixed. If you see someone who is working hard and isn’t earning a fair wage, say something. Equal pay for equal work benefits everyone in the long run.
Make it hard for them to say no. Be an awesome human being. Have good ideas. Be genuine and helpful. And in a separate conversation that has nothing to do with your raise, provide your leaders with clear ways to save cash and build the business. Ingenuity goes a long way.
Ask the right person. More than likely, your boss cannot give you a raise. It has to go through an approval process. Even though you’re asking your boss for a raise, try to remember that you are really asking the CEO. Figure out what motivates him to say yes.

I still think the best way to get a raise is to quit your job. Unfortunately, it’s easier to quit a job (and avoid internal politics )and bump your salary 10% than stay and fight.

Who has time in life to fight?

Cold Reading: Sylvia Browne, Amanda Berry and Recruiters

Posted: 14 May 2013 03:45 AM PDT

Sylvia Browne claims she is a psychic. She told Amanda Berry’s mother that her daughter was dead back in 2004.

Amanda Berry is alive.

Being a psychic is a full-time job that can pay pretty well. I thought it might be helpful to tell you how Sylvia Browne makes money. Beyond lying and being a total piece of shit, she employs another technique. It’s called cold reading.

Cold reading is a series of techniques used by some mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, mediums and illusionists to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do. Without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by analyzing the person’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.

Psychics size you up. Quickly. And because the human condition isn’t tremendously complex, they often get important things right. Love. Loss. Heartache. Death. Financial struggles.

Recruiters use cold reading, too. If you are lucky enough to actually pass the six-second resume test and meet with a recruiter or HR professional, many will judge you based on the same criteria listed above — even if those judgements are illegal.

I wonder why we have interviews at all. HR professionals could easily do background checks to verify data on a CV. We can do assessments to determine competencies. We can test for values and work ethics. And we could actually meet a candidate via Skype or HireVue before the first day of work.

But no. Recruiters want to see you in the flesh. They want to look you in the eye and make sure you’re likable and you are a good cultural fit.

I get it . . . . but I think it’s a version of cold reading. It seems unreasonable to believe that someone can meet with you for 30 minutes and judge your motivation, aptitude and ability based on a simple conversation. To me, it feels nothing more than an unsophisticated psychic trick. And I think that technology can solve for bias and discrimination in the hiring process.

But my opinion is not widely held among HR and recruiting professionals.

So what can you do to protect yourself from cold reading and have a fighting chance?

I dunno. You can follow the shitty career advice you see out there.