Caleb Founds on Jobster

I love Jobster and this post is not a slam on them.  But I suppose this kind of honesty was inevitable given Jobster's ever-improving functionality:  Check out the Jobster page of Caleb Founds of Lutheran Social Services.  Would you want to work at LSS after reading Caleb's comments?  Possibly not.  Are the comments true?  Who knows.

And that's what's troubling here.

If I were a company and Caleb applied for a job, I'd think carefully about hiring him.  Imagine if you were Caleb's would-be boss.  Would you be concerned that he might write something about you?  Caleb, if you're reading this -- I'm not saying that you would, but I am saying that you have sowed this fear with your comments.

And if I were a jobseeker considering a position at LSS, I'd think carefully about working there after reading Caleb's post.  Lose / Lose.  Should Jobster remove the page?  Well, if they did, it might undermine the whole idea of being able to read exactly what it's like to work at any given company.

Again, I'm not knocking any of the parties to this webpage -- just observing.  Maybe we're headed in the direction of some sort of neutral, third party system where employees and employers rate each other.  Privacy issues aside, this might be something like a credit score.  What do you think?

How might such a system change the nature of work?

Comments

[Caleb Founds]

Being Caleb Founds myself, I would agree more with Mr. Steele than with the writer of this column. While based on an honest evaluation of the shortcomings of Lutheran Social Services, the comments were meant as much as parody as they were complaint.

Is LSS a bad company for whom to work? Perhaps not for everyone there. However, I did not feel I fit well with the environment in the branch office in which I work, or with the organization in general. There is little appreciation for creativity or humor in the company, and if those are the foundations of one's personality, others can hardly judge an individual for feeling alienated in the environment. As the youngest member of the staff there (75% of my coworkers are over 45 years of age), I find very little in the way of understanding or shared worldview within the organization, and my opinions and ideas are normally met with a look of "well isn't that a crazy way to think," a chuckle, and a return to more staid (and, so far, failing) methods of operation.

Is it wise to "burn bridges in this way"? From a corporate hiring perspective, no, it isn't. However, while I value my employment and my ability to pay rent and buy bread, I value my ability to lucidly and candidly observe the world around me far more. We live in a culture with pretensions of outrageous personal freedom; however this is perpetually tempered by the a cringeing, childish guilt over making honest, well-spoken commentary, lest The Boss find out what we really think. Such an attitude will certainly serve your wallet well. It will not lead to personal fulfillment.

[my Linked-In profile]

great comment. very valuable insight -- and I appreciate jobster weighing in. on second thought, my concept of a standardized score is tragically flawed: it simply couldn't account for all of the subjective things that make for a "five-star" employee / employer relationship.

maybe something like linkedin has with it's endorsements makes the most sense -- where people can shoose whether or not they post an endorsement about them, but they cannot alter the actual endorsement. this maintains the integrity of the endorsement while observing the "if you can't say something nice ..." rule.

again, I'm just taking stabs at this. I wish I had the solution.

[Alan Steele]

A recent experience here at Jobster reminded me once again why free-form text comments beat out scores and ratings every time. We conducted one of our periodic internal employee surveys that contained a couple dozen "ratings" questions (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree) and then 3 free-form comments sections at the end. You know the punchline already: the averages of ratings, even when broken down by department, told us virtually nothing - I summarized the entire numerical portion of the survey as "people are generally happy" at Jobster.

Then we got to the free-form comments - wow! It was a treasure trove of information, obviously biased by each individual submitter, but when read as a whole gave an incredibly interesting picture of the company. (Before you ask, yes that picture did contrast in some interesting ways with the picture you get from the Jobster page on Jobster - further proof that employees tend to censor themselves when they know they are posting in a public place.)

I think the same applies to the content on Jobster.com, or for that matter, to the comments on this blog. Yes, you could ask each reader to "rate" this post on a scale of 1 to 5 - you could even get a randomly selected panel to score each entry - or you can just enable comments.

The concept of having a score created by a neutral party ignores the fact that not everyone wants the same culture at work. I have known employees who, no matter how many Dilbert cartoons they post on their walls, genuinely prefer the pace and style of more bureaucratic organizations. As I often say when recruiting employees, "not everyone wants to work at a startup".

Which brings me to Caleb: his comments on Jobster actually make me want to hire the guy. They demonstrate: 1) that he has quite a sense of humor ("Outside, you may step on a rusted nail or get your head bashed in by a mental patient carrying an aluminum baseball bat." - surely, nobody could possibly take this 100% seriously.) ; 2) that he can express himself clearly, concisely and eloquently in the English language, a valuable skill indeed these days; and 3) that he understood the implied rules of conduct on Jobster by limiting his comments to generalities ("nagging supervisors") versus libelous comments directed at individuals. I would venture to guess that in spite of his comments on Jobster, Caleb probably does a fine job at work and knows the rules better than most.

But why did I say his comments make me want to hire the guy? Because he might well be a culture fit with the Jobster product development team. The funny/cynical attitude of his posts is a pretty close match to an aspect of our engineering culture that one employee memorably described as "pessimistic snarkyism". The banter on our internal email lists often has quite a bit in common with the tone of Caleb's remarks. A thread of cynical humor runs throughout, and it never gets personal. It probably wouldn't work for most other companies, but in a high growth, high expectations, crazy pace, startup environment, a little bit of a dark humor goes a long way to keeping us all sane.

Alan Steele
VP, Product Development
Jobster, Inc.

[Harry Joiner]

I agree totally. Like I said, I was just observing the situation. I think what Jobster's doing is very noble -- especially given that a company's culture is such a driver of its growth. And yes, Caleb did have an ax to grind, which is why I think some sort of standardized rating currency is in order.

[Ben]

"...it might undermine the whole idea of being able to read exactly what it's like to work at any given company."

The problem is with that statement is that we don't really know that what Caleb described is what is 'exactly' what it was like to work at LSS. He clearly had an ax to grind, and his descriptons could very well be exaggerated.

Could this be libelous then? 'Inappropriate' maybe?

I don't think that what Jobster is doing with 'AT' will end up providing a true, honest picture into people's experiences with different companies. Their are controls in place to prevent slanderous and inappropriate posts, and you have to take some of what people say (like what Caleb said) with a grain of salt due to their tone and personal point-of-view.

One things for sure, neither people like Caleb who burn their bridges in this way, nor organizations like LSS, benefit from this.