Page 227 - Marky Stein - Get a Great Job When You Don't Have a Job-McGraw-Hill (2009)
P. 227

Get a Great Job When You Don’t Have a Job


                 • Work ethic and work hours
                 • Frequency and ease of promotions
                 • “Unwritten” behavior required for social acceptance
                 • Tolerance of differences
                 • Demands for conformity
                 • Fun or recreational time allowed during working hours
                 • Multicultural, sexual preference, and gender sensitivity
                 • Openness or secretiveness of management


             It may include perks like free food or beverages on site, free dry-
             cleaning pickup, recreation rooms, health club memberships, or
             fitness classes.
                 Company culture information can often be gleaned from a
             company’s Web site. One tech company, for example, uses its
             Web site to describe the company culture in the following way:

                 • All the snacks you can eat
                 • Free gourmet lunches served daily
                 • Free massage therapy
                 • Roller hockey
                 • Game room
                 • Gym


             Now I bet half of you reading this book would like to pack up and
             work for this company right now! (It must be the roller hockey!)
             But what about those of you who don’t necessarily believe in mix-
             ing work with play and who wouldn’t mind bringing a bag lunch
             to an environment that’s a bit less stressful? (Free food usually
             means long hours.) And maybe you’d prefer to work for a com-
             pany in which the pace was a bit slower instead of high-energy,
             and highly demanding.
                 I wouldn’t suggest that you decline an interview there just
             because of what the Web site says, but it might be one compo-
             nent of your final decision about whether or not to accept a job
             offer from that company (something we’ll discuss in depth in
             Chapter 10).



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