Month: April 2020

My brand and the first impression I present to employers is my confidence, dedication in all that I do, personable communication skills, and that I’m a team player who knows when to have fun and be productive. Additions to my strengths feature working in teams, quick learning and adapting abilities, reliability, public speaking, and leadership. Some of my weaknesses are wanting to control things that I cannot control, needing immediate gratification, and being very blunt. By communicating significant life experiences that I’ve been through, with humor also intertwined in the seriousness, I can tell a story about my brand and why I have these qualities today. 

To communicate this information through a form of a situation wanted ad and story of myself, I can use resources like LinkedIn and Handshake on the internet to promote my own career desiring profile (my story) with my brand, to be geared a certain way towards a given job role and my strengths. These websites are very visible to prospective organizations. Also, handing out resumes and cover letters can be another way to put my story out there in the hands of organizations for given roles I would be suited for and for those looking for someone like myself. 

The last job I had was my internship with Target as a Executive Team Leader Management Intern. To be honest, I remember the first job description I saw for the internship was when I applied for it through Oregon State University’s Handshake portal, and the description was very vague and more on what Target is about. The reason I applied for it was because Handshake said that my profile matched with all of the Target internship’s preferences for the job. So really, initially I didn’t pay much attention to the job description before I applied as I was keeping an open mind to all my internship options, but also thought I would never really end up working at a retail store. 

Once I continued interview after interview with Target, I decided that the internship and working for the large corporation would be a great experience in management training for me. I learned more about what the job entailed during the recruiting process, but not really with any paper job description aside from what I first saw on Handshake. When I got to orientation for the internship was when I was given a formal handout of job description expectations, but I already knew what the expectations were for the job from the interviews before I accepted. I will say that the descriptions I was given later in the recruiting and on-boarding process did somewhat align with what I actually did during the internship. 

The description made it seem like I was going to be doing a lot of the tasks I learned independently, but that never really happened. I was always alongside another Executive Team Leader that was training me, not really doing tasks alone because I was new to retail – so that did make sense. The descriptions did align with what they promised and what I was able to do for leadership experience and managing multiple teams, sales, giving input in ETL meetings, and more. As the internship progressed, I was able to run a given ETL’s department on my own, with some help from the Store Director, while the ETL was on vacation. I will say the job description was helpful and accurate, but definitely glamorized to attract candidates. Giving the internship a shot and getting into retail without much of an initial job description was a gamble that ended up working out in my favor and I loved the internship! 

I do not have a copy of the job description.  

If one of my favorite companies was accused of widespread discrimination against individuals throughout the company, of any discrimination grounds, I most definitely would no longer support them or want to work for a company like that. We live in a time where discrimination of any case is just not acceptable anymore as maybe the past had once allowed. Why would I want to backtrack on how far we’ve come from history is ridding of discrimination more and more over the years, by working for a company that continues to promote it? Working for a company that is not diverse or does not open up their company to many different people with different backgrounds would sound miserable to me. Diversity is key for a company to have growth in ideas and innovation as different walks of life give different views and new ideas from their own experiences and their own upbringing. 

It is one thing for a company to make a disparate impact on their employees, but another for a company to have widespread discrimination throughout the entire company that is disparate treatment. More purposeful widespread discrimination is where I draw the line – and at companies not willing to move on from the past and create more diverse and inclusive work spaces that society promotes today. 

Although, I will say that I wouldn’t mind being hired on as an HR person or consultant for such a company, ONLY IF I knew these discrimination cases were finally coming to the surface and my job being hired on was to work in ridding the discrimination within said company and creating a new equitable work environment. I would only potentially apply to work for a place where discrimination came to light if I knew I was being hired on to make a change and fix those mistakes in their business and rid of any discrimination.