Some interesting work news from last week
Positive result for 4-day work-week, exec hiring is tougher, creating your career summary
4-day work week experiment in Iceland shows promising results
Shorter work week has not adversely affected productivity as reflected in GDP
More than half (59%) of workers were offered reduced working hours.
Focusing on those who have seen their hours reduced in the last two years, 62% of workers report being more satisfied with their working time.
Hubspot CEO on exec hiring
Exec hiring is tough.
Exec Hiring Success Rates Are Lower Than You Think: If I look at all of our executive hires over time, I’d guess that 18 months after that senior hire happens, around 60% of them have “stuck” and we end up churning about 40%. This is similar across most of the CEOs of companies I coach. Senior level hire candidates are very good at interviewing. Interviewers of senior level hires, including myself, overestimate their skill in interviewing. My advice would be to reduce your interview panel and hire the folks who have great strengths (4/4s) and maybe some weaknesses (2/4s) while avoiding the candidates who are all “good” (3/4s). In other words, hire for strengths, rather than for a lack of weakness.
Read the full post here.
A good framework for ‘walk me through your resume’ question.
A useful framework for a common interview question.
Write down your career theme in one sentence.
List 2-3 pivotal experiences in your career.
Identify your unique value proposition.
Draft a brief statement about your future direction.
Combine these elements into a 30-second story.
Practice delivering your story aloud and time yourself.
Refine and iterate based on how it sounds and feels.
Before applying the framework: “My career is in two stages - the first was a dozen years working for startups, three of which I founded. And then Act II was as a product manager, working at scale (Google, Meta) and Credit Karma, going through hypergrowth. In all of these companies, I've always been a hands-on entrepreneur. Focused on the product and driving new products, either for the first time, in the case of startups. Or expanding an existing product line, as I did in my last three settings.”
After: “The first stage of my career focused on startups where I joined a startup, co-founded a dot.com that imploded, and then was founding CEO for two companies. One was bought by IBM and the other by Google. Act II began when I joined Google as a product manager. I helped launch Hangouts as the lead PM and then organized the PM team for today's Google Photos. I left Google to try my hand at hypergrowth, joining Credit Karma to transform their product from a free credit score website to the "money button on the phone". As the company transitioned to Intuit, I left and joined Meta to lead several core products including Video and Groups for Facebook. In my heart, I'm an entrepreneur. But I've learned you can be an entrepreneur at any stage of company, whether it's expanding product lines with Google, Meta, and Credit Karma or getting companies off the ground as I did with my startups.”
Read the full post here.