Tereza's MGMT 448 Blog

Overall, I feel like this class had a lot of great and applicable concepts. It is always great to learn more which we can apply to the real world and outside of the classroom.

One of the most important thing that I have learned was during week 8 when the lecture talked about job interviews. Interviews are intimidating and especially for a young graduate like myself. I have had few jobs throughout my life but they were either at the university or with my dad’s company, therefore I feel like I have never got the real sense of an interview for a position in the business world. I also believe that the more you practice and the more you are prepared for interview (or really anything) the more confident you are and even if it is intimidating, it can take a lot of the stress away because it is just a muscle memory.

There are different styles of interviews, such as one-on-one, panel interview, serial interview etc. There are also different mediums that the company can use which can be through video conferences, in person and others.

Lastly we have learned about structured and unstructured interviews.This was particularly important because no matter of which side of the interview you are on (interviewer/interviewee) it is important to know and they can tell you a lot about the company’s culture as well. We learned about the eight key limitations for the unstructured interviews and what are the advantages and disadvantages are. We also learned about the advantages of structured interviews such better predictive validity, better legally defensible and picking up on things that tests can not.

I hope that in the future I will be able to use all of these information for my advantage and do better in interview process.

I definitely think that this is a great suggestion. For the past year or so I have been trying to keep up more and more with a journey and write things down that I was thinking during the day, that has somewhat left an impact on me or just very simple things that happened throughout the day or week. I do want to implement these questions into my routine as well.

1. What am I good at?
I definitely think that I am good with people. I like to network, I make sure that people in a group feel included. I like to connect friends with other friends of mine that I think would have things in common.

2. What do I value?
Things I value are friendships and well-being. I think it is important to focus on yourself and really understand what kind of a person you are. I value honesty and optimism.

3. How did I get here?
I got to Oregon State kind of randomly because I did grew up in another country and there were different events that lead me to applying to OSU and wanted to come here because I wanted a different experience. I think that is what really got me here.

4. Where am I going?
I am struggling with this question right now because it has definitely shifted quite a bit due to current circumstances. I have had to switch my plans around and adapt but right now it looks like I am going to go to graduate school once I graduate from OSU.

It was definitely interesting to think about all of these questions and especially now when there is a lot of big changes coming up in my life. I am excited to reflect on these in the future.

I took the regular longer version of the test and was little bit surprised how many questions there were. It was also hard at first to get used to answering it because I would sometimes feel indecisive. For extraversion I scored high which is true for me because I do like to be around people. It also says that I am outgoing, energetic and lively. Agreeableness was in a mid point of the scale which means that is average and sometimes I might not want to put other first. I was slightly surprised with this results because I feel like I do often put others at first and do not do things I need to get done for myself first.
Conscientiousness was average which tells about me that I am reasonably reliable and organized. For neuroticism I scored average which is very common for most of the population. Stressful situations are somewhat upsetting to me but I can deal with them. Openness to Experience was low for me which means that I am down-to-earth, practical and conservative. I do agree with that somewhat except the conservative because I feel like I am more liberal. I also believe that I am open to new things just as an example of going to live abroad for my college degree.

Potential employee when looking at this might see that I am somewhat an average person/worker. They may also see that some of my strengths are working with other people and being excited. Extraversion would particularly help me as a strength in most sales fields. As a strength they would also see that I can keep being organized and reliable when it comes to work duties. I think this test also says about me that I am able to deal with stressful situations and be able to get out of them. Some weaknesses that the potential employer may see in these results that my agreeableness is lower and therefore I would not put others at first and that may be issue in a group project environment. Another weakness would be the openness to new experiences which may be an issue if the work culture is very liberal and the employer things that because of the test result I would not fit into to environment or I would have a hard time adapting.

Overall, I believe that there are some things that are true about myself when looking at this test and there are other things when I am not really sure that they are necessarily true about my personality and who I am as a person and a potential employee.

Choosing from two great candidates that have very different working ethics is difficult. After reading the scenarios few times and weighting my options I have decided that I would go with Avery. Although Jaimes is more punctual and consistent with her job, Avery might bring more fresh ideas into the company. There is also a possibility that a manager or someone else from the company can work with him on not slacking with his work and better manage his time.

Another reason I chose Avery over Jaime is because I am not sure for what type of a job I am hiring him. I think that for tech jobs Avery would be a great candidate or for jobs such as a start up company, marketing and other highly creative jobs. For some of these jobs, Avery’s slack would not be considered as bad if he was coming up with new and creative ideas. In this since, Avery is more valuable to whatever company over Jaime, as Jaime may be great at her work, consistent but not really creative and contributing with new ideas to the job. I believe that those type of jobs are more office jobs, for example accounting and finance where there is already a system that works for people and the employees need to follow that. For jobs like those Jaime is definitely more valuable employee than Avery is because the job is done more efficiently, on time and constantly. I think that for all types of workers there are different types of employees and as we have been discussing in class, it is important to find the right fit.

My brand is that I am an outgoing, positive person who works hard. I also think that part of my brand is that I am an international student and I need future employees to support my working visa and all of the paper work that is associated with it. I have lived in three different countries throughout high school and I can speak three different languages. I believe that I am hard working and can adapt and learn on a fast pace.

There are few things that I could do to make myself visible to potential employee in a creative situation wanted ad. From my understanding, I would like to stand out and make sure that I am visible. I would create a website that shows my creativity, as a personal brand portfolio. I believe that I could stand out in to any potential employers by my language skills and also by my cultural experiences. This is definitely something that I would be able to bring to the company and have a diversity perspective. I also think that part of this process, of making myself visible to potential employers would be my linkedIn profile. It is important to have a good brand on such social media because that can tell a lot about a person. If I am going to claim that I am organized and I can stay on top of things but my profile does not look so neat, then it does not really looks good for my personal brand. In a virtual world as today, it is very important to build your brand online and stay true to it even in real life.

The last job I had, had a pretty detailed job description. It was a customer service job at the Student Experience Center on campus. It did influence my decision to apply for this job. The description of all the possible responsibilities and daily tasks were appealing to me. Another deciding factor was that I was looking for a job on campus. Overall, the description was detailed and it was really important for me to read all of that.

As of if the job was matching the description, I believe so. It was customer service job so obviously there were things that arose that I was not really expecting but that comes with every job and especially with a customer service job because you can not predict all the people’s behavior. In summary I would say that the daily tasks of the opening and closing shifts were very accurate to the job description. The things that were sometimes happened throughout the day would split little bit from the job description.

Unfortunately, I do not have the job description. I applied through the Oregon State student jobs website and I did not have the description downloaded. I did not see it on the website now.

I really like the company FabFitFun. This is a subscription program that makes a customized subscription boxes for each weather season. It is very convenient because when you register you fill out a profile about yourself and your preference on makeup, skin care, home decor and few other things. Your box is then shipped straight to your house every three months. I do order these boxes seasonally and if I did find out that this company is discriminating against my particular beliefs or even agains other cultures and ethnicity groups that I do not identify with, it would be very disappointing to hear. I would not like to jump into any conclusions though. I would like to do more research about the case and what happened. There is a possibility that it would influence my support for the company in the long run if I would see that they are not taking any actions towards their behavior. I also think that same goes for applying for a job for the company in the future. I do believe that if a company owns up to their action and is working towards improving their behavior I would definitely keep supporting that company.

In summary, for me personally to keep supporting a company or not based on their discrimination actions all depends on the future actions and how they are working towards fixing their behavior.

I would like to firstly start by saying that I do think that staffing is one of the most important things along with retention through my personal experience. There are few things that comes to my mind when thinking about why companies would allocate more resources towards marketing or product design.
Companies who allocate more resources towards product design are probably high-tech companies who want to focus on designing new products and be the leaders in the tech industry. Putting more money into the technology and not towards the HR may help them develop better product and faster in the short run. Another thing that came to my mind is that clothes companies may want to put more resources towards marketing because it would get more customers to buy their products. Good marketing plans can get attention from large crowds of people and therefore get more revenue.
One of the weaknesses is definitely that you may get stuck with employees who are not as dedicated and who are not fitting the company’s culture. This behavior is also contagious and may spread through the entire company. One of the strengths can be as I mentioned above, developing better technology and selling more products.

The last job that I have applied to was on campus at the Student Experience Center for the Welcome Desk position. From the applicant perspective the description for the job was pretty straight forward. It had clear guidelines of what is expected from me, what documents I need to provide to the employer and how will the process look like. I did not really have a hard time gathering all the documents or understanding the job description.

The first chapter in the book mentioned, how important it is the who you hire because if you do not hire well you may be losing money and time, especially time with your family. From the applicant perspective, personally I would not like to lose time as well. This means that I would want to get hired in a company where I fit and where I can grow personally and career wise. Losing a year or few of my life at a company where I would be miserable would not reflect well on my future career growth or my personal well being.

Throughout the application process I was interested to work there the entire time. This job was appealing to me because I do like to work in customer service and I wanted to get more experience in that field. My impression later on though was that it seemed little bit chaotic. I did hear from them about a week after the application were due but after my interview it took about 2-3 weeks for them to get back to me even though I emailed them after my interview. The wait is little bit disappointing because I was not sure what was going on and if I should keep going to other interviews. I feel like this could drive some great applicants away.

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