The Job Rating Game

Try Before You Buy

Soren Kaplan had done plenty of due diligence on HP. He'd had several long conversations with Stu Winby. He'd spent lots of time visiting the company. He was pretty sure that he wanted to work there - but he wanted to be certain. Winby felt the same way. The solution? Kaplan agreed to test-drive the job -- to take it for a spin around the block before he inked the deal. "Stu's group was small, and they wanted to make sure I'd be a good fit," Kaplan says. "I was concerned about fit too. So I took some freelance assignments to get a feel for the job and the environment. I worked that way for more than three months."

The experience gave Kaplan time to kick the tires -- and it gave him confidence in his final decision. "Soren hung out with us, went to staff meetings, got on planes with people," says Winby. "He had an in-depth scan of the opportunities. He was able to say, 'For me to join you, I want to be able to work with this particular person and get this kind of experience.' And he knew what he was talking about."

Most people don't have the opportunity to test-drive their job so thoroughly. But there are other ways to make your choice. Consider Patrick Coulson, 28, a software developer who left his job at Silicon Graphics to pursue a project of his own -- a computer system that would help managers recruit college students. He vowed to create a database manager that would set the industry standard.

Then Coulson got a call from Michael McNeal, director of corporate employment for Cisco Systems Inc. McNeal was looking for someone to run Cisco's university-recruitment program. He made an offer that Coulson couldn't refuse. "Mike told me that I could keep working on my own project while I was at Cisco, and that I could use Cisco's name to help bring it to market," Coulson says. "I wasn't looking for a job. I had left Silicon Graphics to start my own company. But I realized that joining Cisco might be the best way to make my product successful."

It was a radical offer that required some time to sink in. So McNeal and Coulson compared notes for 12 weeks. McNeal invited Coulson out on his boat. Coulson kept McNeal updated on the renovations he was making on a friend's condo. (The two had discovered that they shared an interest in carpentry.) One day, McNeal brought Coulson into his office and showed him a brand-new reciprocating tiger saw. "If you sign today, you can have this," McNeal said. "You can start your own 'Yankee Workshop,' if you like."

It was a small gesture with a big message. "I knew a saw wasn't going to make or break Patrick's decision," McNeal explains. "But I wanted him to see that I understood who he was. I wanted him to realize what I was willing to do to bring him into the company." Coulson got the message: "It was a joke, but it was symbolic of the time and trouble he had taken to get to know me. I didn't sign that day, but I kept the saw. Soon afterward, I became manager for university relations."

Take Your Signals from the Top

When it comes to choosing a job, nothing beats spending time in the trenches -- with the people you'll be working with, at the office you'll be working in. But don't forget to check the view from above. A good job in a company run by bad leaders probably isn't such a good job after all. "You go to the top because you want to find out everything you can about the culture and politics of a company before you take a job there," says Duke's Belliveau.

When Tien Tzuo, 30, was deciding which job was best, he went straight to the top. He had spent six years at Oracle, then went to Stanford Business School. Upon graduation, he had enticing offers from half a dozen world-class companies. "I wanted the chance to build my own mini-business inside the company," he says. "I needed to know that management was willing to offer that opportunity."

As he evaluated offers, Tzuo tried to talk to as many senior executives as he could. "Anytime you have a chance to get access to the CEO, you should jump at it," he says. Tzuo eliminated one of his favorite companies because he didn't click with the CEO: "I got the same marketing pitch that a customer would get. There's always a certain amount of hype when you talk to a company. But I figured the higher up in the management chain I got, the more candid people would be. That wasn't the case here. So I crossed the company off my list."

Tzuo wound up accepting an offer to become director of telecommunications marketing at CrossWorlds Software Inc., based in Burlingame, California. Why CrossWorlds? In part because Tzuo was so impressed by its CEO, Katrina Garnett: "Her strategy is to build independent teams within the company. It was the attitude I was looking for." Michael Donaldson, vice president of technical marketing at CrossWorlds, says Garnett is a real weapon in the company's recruiting battles: "There's usually a correlation between the character of a company and the character of who's in charge."