Interview Ecology and Your Job Search

Today’s institutions spend a lot of time assessing environments and  making sure they understand them, so that people will feel comfortable and welcome. We also spend a lot of time struggling with ways to promote sustainability and integrate new technology into our approaches. So let’s crash these concepts together to examine the ecology of the job search, and apply the resulting framework to different aspects of the job search.

(This is one of those moments when I’m going to get a little de-constructionist, so if you are not interested in the theory behind this strategy, come back later this week, as we explore some particular issues and strategies  you might take when working through them and making intelligent career choices. I’ll try to come full circle by ending with some more practical to-dos for those who don’t care about theory.)

Interview Ecology: Definition

One of the great things about mashing up concepts into something new is that you can make up a term to describe the new concept. So I’m going to call this interview ecology: the study of the co-created environment that exists when persons interact with each other during a search process, and the impacts on the shared environment, when new variables are introduced.

Key questions for consideration

• If the job search process is an ecosystem, how could we describe the “natural environment” which exists before we introduce humans, interactions, and other variables?
  
• How will the introduction of a new variable affect the environment and the people in it?
• How could each human player in a given job-search ecosystem control the introduction of new or unexpected variables into the process, and limit any adverse impacts on the environment?
• What new variables might be considered “invasive” (i.e., not present in the “natural environment” of the job search, and creating an imbalance that disrupts or destroys that environment)?
• How should one evaluate the risks and benefits of introducing a new variable into a search process?

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