If you’ve ever worked for a bad manager or in a company that made you miserable, you’ve probably wondered how to ensure you avoid that in your next job. It can feel impossible to tell from the outside whether a job will become a nightmare once you’re in it, but if you pay attention, there are red flags during the interview process that can warn you about danger.
Here are some signs that can indicate you’re about to walk into a dysfunctional job or onto a team led by a bad boss.
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The hiring process is chaotic. If interviews are rescheduled multiple times, no one knows who you’re supposed to meet with, everyone you talk to has a different description of what the job entails and you’re generally subjected to disorganization and chaos, assume that you’re learning something valuable about what it might be like to work there. This isn’t always the case — certainly everyone has bad days, and the team you’d be working with might not be the same people coordinating the hiring process — but it’s certainly a flag to take a closer look.
The interview is really short. Hiring is serious work, and good companies invest real time in ensuring they’re hiring the right person. If you get a job offer after a single short interview — for example, 30 minutes of conversation — that’s a real danger sign that the company doesn’t know how to build a strong staff. That means you might end up in a role you’re not well matched for, and you’re likely to be working with other people who aren’t great at their jobs.
The manager tells you “we’re like a family here.” While this might sound nice on the surface, it’s often a flag for a dysfunctional work environment. Workplaces can certainly be places where people have warm, supportive relationships and genuinely care about each other, but they’re not families. Employers who frame themselves as “families” often (not always, but often) violate boundaries and expect inappropriate amounts of commitment from employees, even when it’s not in an employee’s self-interest.
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The hiring manager seems very impressed with herself. Every interviewer I’ve ever seen brag about being a good manager has in fact not been a good manager. Good managers tend to be hyper-aware of their weaknesses and can tell you a dozen ways they’d like to do better. Beware of managers who speak glowingly about their own management skills without acknowledging any ways they could improve.
No one seems to stay there very long. Sometimes an organization might have a run of bad luck, with several people in a position not working out in quick succession or multiple people on a team leaving around the same time. But if you look around and see that few people have been on staff for longer than a year or two (and the organization is more than a few years old), there’s a reason people are fleeing.
People look miserable or sound cynical when you talk to them. If everyone you pass on your way to your interviewer’s office is silent and miserable-looking, don’t write that off. And if the people you speak with seem cynical about the company or their work, take that as a big red flag. A bit of cynicism isn’t itself a terrible thing, but if people are showing it to job candidates, you’re probably only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
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The hiring manager can’t tell you how the success of the person in the job will be measured. Before you accept a job, you need to know what doing it successfully will look like, so that you can decide if you’re willing and able to meet those expectations. You also need to be aware of how you and your manager will each know whether you are or aren’t succeeding in the role. A manager who can’t articulate what good performance in the role looks like is one whose expectations of you may be all over the map and ultimately may be impossible to meet.
The hiring manager isn’t interested in having a real dialogue with you or answering your questions so that you can figure out if the job is right for you. Bad hiring managers tend to assume all candidates should want the job, and don’t recognize that good hiring is a two-way street and that they need to try to win over good candidates.
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How to Recognize a Bad Workplace … Before You Take the Job originally appeared on usnews.com
