Being a Millennial I have crazy job requirements like wanting to really like my job. Recently I have put alot of though in to how I would boild down what is good or bad about a job and have gotten these 3 categories that I think are most important.
- The Work
- The Company
- The People
1. The Work: This is what I think is the eaiest part of any job to know if you like it. When you interview with a company this is what the interview is about. Likeing the work you are doing is very important and I think most people realise this.
2. The Company: Do you like big companies or little companies? Old companies or new companies? I like small new companies with few rules which encompaces most startups that I have worked for. This is not to hard to interview for but still important. What kind of internet restriction do they have? How long does vacation take to get aproved? Do they match 401k?
3. The People: You spend all day with the people you work with and you should want to spend time with them. If you don't like the people you work with you might as well be working from home. This is hard to interview for. What questions do you ask? How do you know if people are friendly or if they are easy to work with? It seems to amaze me that people are so important to my daily experience but there is no established part of an interview to better get to know the people you might spend 1/3rd of your life.
Give each category full or half point for your past jobs to see what you liked or disliked about them. I think the wholy grail of job hunting is to find a job with a score of 3. This is extreemly hard as I think is easy to know if the work and company will be good but very hard to know if the people will be good.
Since a 3 is so hard, or even impossible, to find what is more important to you? If the work and company were both good would you put up with mean or boring people? Or are people important enough to you that you would work at a bad job to hang out with friends?
Everyone will have an opinion on what is the most important part of a job. But I think there needs to be more time in general focused on letting there interviewee find out if they will like the job instead of just focusing on if you can do the job.