A few weeks ago, the small college where I work as a marketing director filled its vacancy for a vice president for marketing. If you have read any of my previous columns about my job search, you know that I spent no small amount of time this past year mulling whether to apply myself.
In the end, I didn't. As one of the various directors who would report to the new vice president, I helped interview the four finalists. All four seemed supremely qualified for the role, although they brought widely different skills and experience. Some had backgrounds in online and television advertising, and others in international marketing in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.
Taking the leap that must culminate all searches, our new president made her decision, and the trustees confirmed that choice for vice president for marketing.
All that remained were the usual hiring mysteries: Would the person who got the job fit into my college's peculiar culture? What kind of manager would he or she be? Would the new vice president value the marketing team's previous accomplishments, even while extending its work into new directions?
While I had considered applying for the job, I never felt that the prospect of my actually holding it was very attractive. Maybe I knew too much about what the position would entail.
But it had seemed like the next logical step in my career. As a marketing professional for more than 20 years, nine of them at my current institution, and the last five as a director there, I possess broad marketing and communications experience, my interpersonal skills are strong, and as an African-American who has been very active in diversity initiatives at the college, my commitment to multicultural inclusion is unassailable.
However, even before I saw the job description a few months ago, I had made the decision not to submit my résumé for the opening.
The job description itself was fine. Reading it over, I felt I had enough of the required qualifications to make a respectable bid. I wasn't deterred by the fact that there had been no African-American executive at the college since I had worked there. Nor was I unduly concerned about being an internal candidate. I had reconciled myself to the possibility that I might have to leave if I didn't get the position.
It was something else entirely that convinced me to pass on applying for the vice presidency. After months of indecision, I made up my mind as a result of one of those unanticipated -- and frankly, unwanted -- enlightenments that can strike from unsuspected quarters.
The epiphany came as I was driving to work one morning, listening to American Public Media's popular Marketplace program, which, that day, happened to be about the things people should think about when weighing their value to their employers.
After discussing several scenarios, the expert on the air stated baldly: "If you've been passed over for assignments you feel you deserved, you might not be as valuable to your employer as you think you are. In that case, it could be time for you to leave your organization."
I agreed silently and a little smugly, since I was certain her caution didn't apply to me. After all, my performance reviews were superb, my raises generous. I had received so many compliments on my work that it was embarrassing. I was asked to participate on a host of committees, singled out to welcome new employees to the college, and sought out to make presentations to other departments and to alumni leaders.
But the Marketplace commentator's blunt words somehow had imprinted themselves on me. As I drove home that night, they echoed in my mind like lyrics to a bad song and reasserted themselves while I washed dishes after dinner. "If you've been passed over ... "
An epiphany was on its way, and I was trying to dodge it. I didn't want to have to think of my career at my college as anything less than stellar. But by the time I went to bed, I had had to admit that in recent years, I had been passed over when it came to the professional acknowledgment I felt I deserved.
During my first few years at the college, I had been awarded promotions as regularly as the spring follows winter, but in recent years, I had been stuck in my current role as a director. I had let my manager know that I felt that I had earned a change in title to senior or executive director, or at least a new title that accurately reflected the additional responsibilities I had assumed.
None of those materialized. Nor had I been appointed interim vice president while the college searched for my boss's replacement.
I am almost always offered positions that I have applied for outside of my college, but I can't say the same for opportunities within my institution. Something (or maybe a number of things) has been keeping me back. I doubt if performance can be the obstacle, since my evaluations continue to rate my commitment and initiative, as well as my communication, organizational, managerial, relationship, and problem-solving skills, as superb.
I think it's possible to believe that you meet all the qualifications for a certain role in your institution, but that your manager or others with influence in the administration might be looking for candidates who possess certain characteristics that are difficult to articulate clearly.
I hardly take it personally, since I know from my own experiences on the hiring side of the table that it's possible to be perfectly sincere in outlining the skills and personal traits required for a position, while, at the same time, unconsciously seeking qualities as ethereal as optimism, intuition, judgment, or toughness. It could even be something as simple as a desire for new blood from outside the college at a particular juncture.
Based on my recent past at the college, I feared that those responsible for hiring the vice president for marketing might have longed for unspecified qualities that I don't project or possess.
Ultimately, that's what turned me off from applying for the vice-president's job: the thought of being rejected for a position I wasn't sure I really wanted. I just felt in my gut that I would be passed over.
But, I'm grateful that the process of considering it allowed me to discover a critical wrinkle in my career at the college that I had somehow overlooked.
So while my boss, the new vice president for marketing, is settling in, I've been taking the Marketplace expert's advice by looking for opportunities elsewhere.
