Throughout my career, I’ve had 2 instances where I felt tremendous loss for my company’s decision in dismissing talents.
Based on my observation, both instances share a few common traits.
- The talent was hard-working, oftentimes working late and using personal time to learn and improve. In terms of work attitude, there’s nothing to nitpick.
- The talent was a fresh graduate right out of university without any work experience. A lot of common, business world ways of doing things need to be taught. (e.g. email writing)
- There might be a mismatch in terms of the talent’s strengths and what the company needs to accomplish.
- The talent joined the team at a time when there’s tremendous change. The change could be fast business growth, strategy pivot, or other things that make processes quite chaotic.
My personal life philosophy is process + intent > results. So for both scenarios, I do not believe the talent deserve getting dismissed.
On the other hand, it’s also deeply rooted in my entrepreneurial mind that business is business and company executives will do what’s in the best interest of shareholders, not that of a fresh graduate. A business’s obligation is to survive and generate a good ROI for shareholders.
If you’re a fast-learning, highly adaptable talent and you join a chaotic startup where your flexibility and curiosity creates positive results, you will thrive. But if you’re not, you’ll face a hard time in a chaotic work environment because the company will not be able to provide the environment for you to grow into.
I guess this is where the topic of company culture comes in. Does the company value training grassroots talent or does it only care about the bottomline?
I know I’d personally prefer to be acquainted with the former.
