Good Job or Bad? Green Flags in Your Search for Employment

No one wants to awaken from the euphoria of landing a new job to do a daily slog through a toxic team culture and outlandish expectations.

As we outlined in Part I of Good Job or Bad?, ensuring a more positive outcome for your job search starts with identifying the red flags. Here, we focus on the positive signs–the green flags to look for in your research and interviews that signal a team and an organization that combines positive ethics, values, and management with clearly defined workflows, project goals, and expectations.

Green Flag 1: Clear, Transparent Language

How organizations describe themselves and their open positions can tell you a lot about their values.

The basics. Job listings and an organization’s About Us and Career pages are great sources for green flags, which include:

• Clear, detailed descriptions of the role and its responsibilities, as well as how it fits within a team and the larger organization.
• Up-to-date technologies, methods, and tools.
• A focus on career opportunities and growing the company from within.
• Emphasis on benefits, work/life balance, and community engagement.
• Transparent descriptions of compensation, including pay ranges.

If descriptions about the job or the organization’s overall mission are vague or meandering, and the chosen adjectives imply stress and 24/7 availability, expectations of employees are likely to align accordingly.

Dig deeper. To find out more about an organization’s values, study what company leaders and managers say. Sources for this deeper information include:

• Interviews: This can be a great source for a nuanced understanding of what drives a company and how it values and rewards its people.
• Social media posts: Look for organizations that celebrate employee accomplishments, community outreach, sustainability, and inclusiveness.
• Conference presentations: Target talks that focus on technology, technology roadmap, and implementation experiences, and listen for a clear vision, a focus on teamwork, and recognition of the people who fuel the organization’s success.

Green Flag 2: A Positive Interview Process

Job interviews can be intimidating, especially in today’s market. The more you practice and watch videos to build your interview skills, the more relaxed you’ll be and the better able to identify good signs about an organization.

The basics. Following are some fundamental green flags to watch for in the initial interview process:

• When scheduling interviews, the admins show respect for your time, offering you plenty of lead time and various time slots.
• The interview includes insightful questions about your experiences–not just with technologies and projects, but also with teams, with how you learn, and with the things that excite you about the work you do.
• The interviewer actively listens to your responses, as well as asks—and encourages you to ask—follow-up questions.

Dig deeper. Follow-up interviews allow you more time for questions. Following are a few questions to find out about specific aspects of the organization:

• Expectations and rewards: How is performance measured in this role? What challenges do people in this role typically experience and how are they supported in moving through these challenges?
• Daily life—and hours: What does a typical week look like for someone in this role? How many hours do team members work on average? Is remote work allowed?
• Company culture: What do you like most about this company? What are its key values and how are those values evident in employees’ day-to-day experiences?

For More Insights: Seek Out Employees

In many companies, the quality of the culture can vary from department to department and even team to team, depending on factors such as leadership and turnover.

Given this, identifying good organizations is often best guided by simply talking to—or listening to—the people who work there. The easy option? Check out employee review sites, including Glassdoor, Fairygodboss, Vault, and Comparably.

One way to get more direct employee insights takes a bit more effort yet offers far more rewards: get out and meet people. Doing so can connect you with both good companies and the people who work with them.

To get started, try attending tech meetups, conferences, and local chapter meetings of organizations such as IEEE Computer Society.

IEEE CS also offers volunteer opportunities and other chances to connect and interact with people who work at and lead a variety of organizations and companies. To learn more about IEEE CS’s own vision and culture, our About Us page is a great place to start.