Section 3.5 Be Mindful of Your Desired Career Culture

Suppose you have a successful engineering firm and that you need to hire an accountant to help balance your books and do your taxes. You get two offers from people who have similar educational background, similar experience, and quote you similar prices. They are both excellent candidates in your opinion. You check their consulting company websites and they have the following pictures in their "About Me" section. Besides the different style of each person’s picture, the two people are equal in every other way. Which of the two would you hire?

Checkpoint 3.5.2. Judge a Book by its Cover.

Which of the two candidates would you pick for the accountant job? What were some of the factors that led to your decision?

Think about why you favored one woman over the other. What worked in favor of the woman you chose? What worked against the woman you rejected?

Please make sure you answer the preceding question before reading the rest of this section.

What factors did you consider when making your decision? What factors might someone else make in their decision? There isn’t one correct answer!

A possible piece of important information: what is the culture like at your very successful engineering firm? Is it located in the Front Range of Northern Colorado serving clientele who spend half of their time hiking and climbing 14ers? Or is your firm located in the the heart of Manhattan, NY, with clientele coming from wealthy hotel financiers? Perhaps you have an acoustics engineering firm that caters specifically to sound experts and musicians. The soul of your firm, its culture, should dictate the type of employee you hire when all other qualifications being held equal. I, personally, would hire the guitarist; the same might not be true of you and your firm, however, and it is important to think about this when choosing a proper fit for your first entry-level position out of college and beyond.

A common idiom is "don’t judge a book by its cover." In seeking one’s career fit, whether you seek to hire the ideal candidate or are seeking employment yourself, be mindful of the expected culture. Different engineering firms would choose different people from the photos above based on the firm’s culture. Different engineering firms would choose different people from the photos above based on the firm’s culture, and dress codes often go hand-in-hand with the culture. Use this to your advantage.

Figure 3.5.3. Don’t judge a book by its cover is a good thing to try and live by but no one actually does that. In any case, these books have amazing covers.

Why do we judge people by what they look like? Humans assess information quickly and we are predominately visual animals. Plus, a lot of the time it can be useful to understand patterns and make quick judgments. To illustrate this, try the following problem which is probably the easiest problem you will ever have in college.

Checkpoint 3.5.4. Who do you see?

Or for another example, think about the last time you looked up companies online. It is easy to get caught up in the marketing and fancy visuals of their website and to attribute those qualities to mean that the company must have high quality even though a fancy website has nothing to do with how the company actually performs. The list goes on and on, but the fact is that we judge books by their cover. If you are interested in reading more about this, here is a nice, short little blog post discussing this from a psychological perspective.

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