I Don't Want to Become the Office Secretary

and welcome to the show. Today. I have lots of interesting questions to answer. The first question today is from someone who's worried that she's inadvertently becoming the office secretary, even though that's not her job. Hello. I work at a larger educational institution and have a job that directly served and basis students. I love my job. When I started, we had a part time front office person who basically managed the office, ordered all the supplies, handled block in traffic,

et cetera. We had an additional agreement with most of our office staff about to beating up the more menial task so that one person has never sattled with all the dishes cleaning the conference room vacuuming, etcetera. Our front office person left in early April of this year, so I've been covering this position for almost a year now. I normally wouldn't mind, but it's starting to if I

try to see my job. I took this position thinking it was a step up with higher pay, more responsibility from a previous front office position I had, and specifically took it because I knew I wouldn't be the front office person a k secretary. However, the dynamics have changed in the absence of a front office person. Menial things are starting to take up my time. More and more. Coworkers may comments and requested me now that are much different. Um like asking me if I can fix the vacuum.

You'd be so proud of me. I fixed a copy jam by myself. Our water tower seems gross. Can we get a new one? I wouldn't mind, but it's starting to affect my confidence at work. I'm all for helping out around the office, but I'm getting sort of bitter that I'm now to go to for me neo tasks and not to go to like before, for more technical tasks. Are questions instead of being asked to me coffee. Our main supervisor will now cry into his mug like a

baby until I notice and ask if you'd like coffee? Folks, who I startuple motion for a pen instead of asking me for a pen? I know these things seem small, but it's starting to feel a little bit dehumanizing. And then I'm only there to be a secretary and not value for the more technical skills and background I was

hired for. I've been trying to track it up as a temporary situation, but by boss needs to think we don't need to rehire that position because it's just an issue with office coverage, something I've tried to bring up multiple times again. I'm all over begining around the office. But what options do I have here to get back into loving my job? Should I stuck it up and

grin and bear it? Thanks so much? Oh do not suck it up and grin and bear it, because if you do, it's very likely that the will become your job and it will get so ingrained that you won't be able to change it after a while. In fact, I am worried that that may have already started to happen because you have been a good sport about it. For so long. The fact that people are motioning to you to get them pens rather than getting their own pens,

for example, worries me. It's a small thing, but you would never do that to appear who wasn't in charge of pens. They think you're in charge of pens now. So yeah, you've got a short circuit this and get it changed now. You said you've brought up with your boss multiple times that the front office needs more coverage, and he doesn't think he needs to rehire for it. I think instead, you should tackle it from a different angle.

I mean, it's up to him if he rehires or not, but you want to step out of the role that you had stepped into temporarily to help out. I would sit down with him and say something like, I want to talk to you about my role here. I was happy to help out with front office coverage when Jane left, but I've been doing it or months now, and I'm concerned that doing it any longer will mean a permanent

shift in my role. I actually took this job in part because it wasn't the front office person, and it's important to me to be able to focus on the technical skills that I was hired to use, and which are the reason that I took the job. Make sure that you use that language that stuff about the reason that I took this job, because that is emphasizing that the job is evolving into something that you didn't and

wouldn't have signed on for. And then say, you know, I stepped up to help cover that work because I wanted to be helpful and I figured it would be temporary. But admin work is starting to take up more and more of my time, and I'm seeing people just assume that it's my job, doing things like asking me to fix the vacuum or handle the water tower or bring

them pens or coffee. And again, I was willing to help out in a pinch, but at this point, I'm concerned that it's really overshadowing the work that I came on board to do, and I want to return to focusing on that. If you don't plan to rehire for the front office work for a while, can someone else take over most of this coverage so that I can get back to the work that I came on to do. So something like that. So the thing that you're pushing is not you need to hire to fill that role.

It's that you're going to step back from doing so much of it. Again, you volunteered, so just d volunteer yourself, un volunteered, whatever the word might be. Also, if there is a mix of genders in your office, if there are some guys in there too, I would also say, I don't want to fall into a trap where people are turning to me to do this work because I'm a woman. It's really important to me to have your support in making sure that that doesn't happen, because that

is very much a thing that does happen. Women step in to fill this kind of vacuum far more often than men do, and you don't want to get pulled into that. And sometimes when you're talking to your boss, that can help to make that very explicit. Especially well, I was gonna say especially as a man, but but actually it's helpful to point it out to women too. Sometimes people just don't realize that that gender dynamic is playing out, and when you name it, they realize, oh okay,

and they're more willing to help you out with that. Also, to some extent, it sounds like you may be sort of enabling your coworkers dependence on you for the admin work. You know, if someone is whining about not having coffee, even if it's your boss, you absolutely do not need to volunteer to solve that. It's not your job, and there is a danger that people will start thinking that it's your job if you keep doing it. So don't do it, not at all, not even one more time.

He can get his own coffee, or if he doesn't want to, he can hire someone who has that in their job description. But it's not your responsibility. Stop volunteering to get him coffee. The same thing with the pens

and the vacuum and so forth. If someone motions to you to get them a pen from now on you have no idea what they're gesturing for, give them a weird look, and if necessary, you can say the pencer in the supply closet or or wherever they are, or give them the same response that they would get if they did that to the dude in your office who

has no idea where the pens are. Along the same lines, if someone asks you to like fix the vacuum, your answer can just be huh, I don't know how to do that anymore than you do, and I'm right in the middle of something. Sorry, I can't help if someone asks you to do other things that aren't your job, same thing, you know, Sorry, I just don't have time to do that right now. I know that you want to be helpful, but you are going to train people to think that you are the admin and you're not.

If you want to do the job you're hired to do, you're going to have to put up boundaries and focus on doing that. Don't worry about fixing a problem that is not yours to fix. It's your boss's problem to fix, and if he wants to fix it, he will look around at all of your coworkers who have decided it's

not their problem and take your cues from them. I know that you want to be helpful, and that's a lovely trait, but by making it your problem to solve, you're making it really easy for your boss to avoid doing anything else about it. So from here on forward, you are not the front office coverage anymore. We're gonna take a short break here and then come back with a question from someone who was getting ready to make

a job offer and then found the candidates Instagram. Hi Allison, I work for a very conservative nonprofit organization and we are currently hiring for a high level position. We have narrowed it down to two candidates, and there was one candidate who um clearly was more qualified and ready for the job. So UM we were about to make an offer and I did some Internet flu thing and noticed that on his Instagram page he is following some very

inappropriate accounts. So not to get too detailed here, but the accounts are I guess what you would call Instagram models, but um barely closed and in latex type clothing, often showing um much skin. And he follows about you know, these um different accounts. So I don't know if that is a reason that we would not hire him based on that one piece of information alone. So would love to hear any advice you have. Thank you. You know,

this is tricky in general. I am a big believer that people get to have a private life and it shouldn't really have any bearing and whether you hire them. But Instagram isn't exactly a private life. It's public enough that you can see what he's doing there, and he's knowingly putting out a certain image, or if not knowingly, then he's certainly not maybe displaying the type of savvy that you would want for someone that you're hiring for

a high level position at a conservative organization. Now, if this were a lower level position, I'd be more inclined to say not really your business. But you said the jobs high level job, and he said the organization is a very conservative one. So I don't think it's entirely off base to think about this. At least, it's hard to say exactly how you should navigate it without more

information about the job that you're considering him for. There are some jobs where it really shouldn't matter, and there are other jobs where it would, especially if it's high profile. I think what I would ask is, if your staff or your donor saw what you saw, would that cause issues? Like, for example, if he would be in a position where he's going to be managing women or evaluating women, is that going to give those women some pause about how he will treat them and if he is fair and

if he's someone they feel comfortable with. If, for example, he would be working in HR and he would be handling sexual harassment complaints, are women going to feel comfortable bringing harassment complaints to him? And I don't know, um I mean that that sounds I feel like that sounds like I'm sort of pre judging the answer, But I don't know. I think it really depends on your context

and the job you're hiring him for. And also if you are working for like a gender equality group or an anti porn group and he'd be a spokesperson, is that going to look off? So I think you've got to think about the specific job that he'll be doing and how he'll be interacting with people on your staff, and decide from there if it would affect his ability to do the job with credibility. And again, I'm not

pre judging it. I feel like I'm sort of leading you to the answer of yes, it would be a problem, but I genuinely don't know. It really does depend on those details. One other possibility is if you do decide that it's something you're concerned about, you could try raising

it with him directly. You could say something like, we think you're a strong candidate, but I've got to be honest, we're a conservative organization and this is a high level position, and this is a thing we noticed, and we're wondering how it would play with our staff and with our donors. And then see what he says. Who knows, I mean, maybe you'll hear it's an abandoned account and it's been taken over by spammers, which is a thing that can happen.

Maybe you'll get some other real sin that will make you think, oh, okay, this is not going to be an issue. And there is certainly a school of thought that if you are going to rule someone out because of something like this, it's better to give them the chance to respond to it. You don't have to, but if he's an otherwise great candidate who you are excited about, it could be worth doing. Okay, here is our next letter. H I've been working for a small nonprofit for a

few years. I've recently been given a new position. It's a sideways move rather than a promotion, but involves managing a small team, whereas before I didn't have direct reports. The person who used to head up this team just left and management decided to restructure rather than recruit directly

to replace them. However, I've heard from others that the person who was second in command and the old team was very disappointed on hearing this news, as I think he expected for his boss's position to be open and that he could throw his hat in the ring for what it's worth. He is great at his job, but younger and a little less experience than me. Again, on well with him, and I think he likes and respects me. But we've not worked closely together before, and he will

now be my direct report. Any advice on how to deal with this? Should I acknowledge the elephant in the room and get that out of the way, or just skip over it? Thanks, I would definitely talk with him. I probably wouldn't start out with a really blunt hey, I realized that you may have wanted the opportunity to apply for this job. I think I would ease more into talking about his work and how you think he's great at his job, and kind of see how that

conversation goes. Tell him you're impressed by his work, you're excited to work with him, and then, depending on how that's going, you could say something like I know you were second in command on the old team and might have been interested in this job, so I want to tell you that I'm really committed to working with you to give you more responsibility if you want it, and development opportunities and helping you get really well positioned for

that kind of promotion if it's something you're interested in in the future. So it's not hey, you must be feeling weird, because that's pretty likely to make him feel weird if he's not already. It's more, I recognize that you're great at what you do and that you might have ambitions to move up, and I'm all about helping

you do that if you want me to. The thing is in his position, he might be worried about what this restructure means for him and whether it will be in some ways a demotion for him, especially if he was second command in the old structure but isn't now, and he might be wondering, do you recognize what he brings to the table or is he going to be

sort of unrecognized and unappreciated. So one of the best things that you can do early on is to make it clear that you do recognize what he brings and that you value and appreciate him, and that's likely to help the situation. Now, there are sometimes situations where the person who has passed over is resentful and handles it badly, but it doesn't sound like you're seeing signs of that in this case. So far. If that happens, of course

you would have to deal with that head on. But you know, if he's just a bit disappointed, that's okay. I mean, it makes sense that he might be, and we can understand that as long as you're really underscoring to him that you appreciate the value that he brings and that you're not overlooking that, it's pretty likely that that will give you a good foundation to start building

a working relationship with him. Okay. The next question we have is from someone whose boss sort of traps her in her office and rambles at her and she can't escape. I work overnights, and by the time I come in, my boss's schedules to just finish up his daily tasks and head out. Sometimes this takes a while, but he tends to make it even longer, like coming into our room it's connected to his office, and he'll ramble on and on about something, usually political, of which I have

a strong opposing view. I can't argue too much because he determines whether or not I have the job, and because that will only extend his day in the office. Since he's a very my way of the highway type, and that makes him have to take more time to finish his daily work. I've tried turning my back to him while still giving like little uh huh and other minor engagements to show I'm not being rude and ignoring him. But what can I do about my rambling, ranting boss?

That is annoying because you are sort of his captive audience because of the power dynamics, and he's using you as kind of a captive outlet for his ranting. A long time ago, I worked with someone who would always do this at the end of the day too, and it was not fun. Often with this kind of thing, where you don't feel like you can just directly say, hey, stop talking to me, the best thing to do is to have almost physical barriers to the person doing it

to you. So, for example, if you have to make phone calls for your job, I wonder if you could save some of them for the time of day when he tends to come by on his way out. If you're on the phone when he comes by, it's going to head off him rambling it you. You could also just be about to get up and leave your desk to get coffee or to go to the bathroom. Obviously, you don't want to stand up and leave every time your boss enters your office, but you can do it

some of the time. And you can also do it after he has rambled for five minutes, so you can say I'm dying of thirst, I'll be right back, and sometimes that's going to be enough to break up whatever monologue he's delivering. You can also just say sorry, I've got to get this report done, so I better not

get too involved in this conversation. What I would do is a mix of these different ones on different days, and also except that sometimes you'll have to just let him ramble too, but you can probably get it down to just being stuck listening to the rambling maybe once

or twice a week rather than every day. Now, if you had a different type of boss, in that case, I might say no, just be direct about it, because with some types of bosses you could say, hey, I've noticed I get pulled into chatting with you when you're leaving every day, and I love talking to you, but I'm realizing it's making me get behind on my work on those days and then I have to rush to catch up. So I'm going to try to pull back

on our five PM chats. But you said this guy is very my way or the highway, So with him, I'm guessing that maybe more subtle methods of avoidance might work better, or at least they might feel more comfortable to you to use them. Let's take a break here, and when we come back, we have a question from someone who can't seem to get hired. I'm recent college grad well, if you can count two years out of school recent, and I can't seem to land a full

time job to remedy my situation. While I'm working two part time jobs. I've sent in applications probably over a hundred and fifty to full time jobs across the country for the last two years. I consistently get good feedback on my performance at work and on my application materials. But I'm really worried I'm doing something wrong navigating the work world, and one is telling me what can I

do differently to land a full time job. So it's really hard to say with confidence what isn't working without seeing your resume and your cover letter and seeing you interview.

But what I can tell you is that the vast, vast majority of resumes and cover letters that I see are not good So the first thing that I always suspect when I hear someone saying something like this is that your resume and cover letter aren't as strong as they could be and are holding you back, because just statistically speaking, that's the case like n percent at the time. And what is interesting is that I will often hear from people who tell me, oh, I know that my

resume and cover letter are fine. They're definitely not the problem. I've gotten feedback on them from people I followed all of your advice and writing them. And then sometimes I say, well, just to make sure, can I take a look at them, and they send them over, and much of the time, even though they were very sure that their material els were good, they're not that good. Even when people tell me that they have followed my advice and writing them, when I actually take a look at them, they haven't

really followed that advice. So the first thing I would look at is that if you go to my website ask a manager dot org, there's a lot of totally free information on how to write a good cover letter and how to write a good resume, and there's samples of both that you can look at. The big thing with resumes that most people don't do is that you really really don't want it to just read like a

job description. You don't want it to be a list of activities that you were responsible for, because as the hiring manager, just knowing that you were assigned task X doesn't tell me anything about how well you did task X. And that's the piece that I care about, and that's the piece that will make you stand out from other candidates. So as much as you can, you want to talk on your resume not about what work you were assigned or what work you were in charge of, but what

outcomes you got by doing it. What were the results that you got, and that is going to make a much stronger resume. And then with your cover letter, you wanted to have personality and to be engaging. The most important thing is that you don't want it to just summarize the contents of your resume, which is what most people do with their cover letters. You know, dear hiring manager, I'm applying for your analyst position. I have ten years of experience doing blah blah and five years of experience

doing blah. That's not a good cover letter. That's just giving me the same info from your resume a second time. Your cover letter is where you talk about why you would excel at the job without just regurgitating what's on your resume. So again, go to ask a Manager dot org. Go to the resume section and the cover letter section and the archives, and you're going to find loads of information about how to do this. Now, you didn't say

if you are getting interviews or not. If you're not, then it's a pretty safe bet that your resume and cover letter are the things to focus on. Or I guess it could be also that you're applying for jobs that you're not qualified for, of course, but I'm assuming here that you're targeting jobs that you're a good match with. But if you are getting a decent number of interviews, then it might be that your materials aren't really the issue at all. In that case, I would be looking

at your interview skills. Do you get really nervous and interviews? Do you prepare ahead of time? How much time do you spend preparing And actually I'm going to send you back to my website because I have a free guide to preparing for an interview that you can download and

it will walk you through what to do step by step. Also, do you go in with specific examples of work situations that you've encountered in the past, and are you able to speak with specificity about times in the past when you've done the sorts of things they're hiring someone to do or something similar to it. Those are the things

I'd be looking at. And also, if you have gotten some interviews, and if you had an interviewer who you particularly seemed to click with or who just seemed like sort of a nice and helpful person, you might contact that person and ask if they would be willing to give you any feedback. Tell them you're having trouble getting hired, and that as a new grad you'd be grateful for any guidance or feedback able to give you. Some people will say no because they're busy, so don't be discouraged

if that happens. But some people will say yes, so it's worth trying the other thing that you can do. I don't always recommend informational interviews because I think they can be a waste of everyone's time, but in your case, it might be helpful to set up a few informational interviews with people in your field and see if you can get feedback on what you need to do to make yourself a stronger candidate. For people who don't know, the idea with informational interviews is that they're not a

job interview. They're a conversation to help you get kind of the insider scoop on the field that you want to work in from people who are already working in it, so you don't go into it hoping that it will turn into a job offer or even the lead on a job, because people can tell when you're doing that and it's annoying. Be really clear upfront that you're struggling to find the type of work you want and that you're looking for advice on what you can do to

be a stronger candidate. And I would really make sure to say that you're a recent grad because a lot of people like helping recent grads, especially if you're humble about it. So that's a lot to think about. But that is where I would start, and I hope that's helpful.

That is our show for today. If you would like to hear your question answered on a future episode, you can record it on the show voicemail at eight five five four to six work That is eight five five four to six nine six seven five, or if you have a longer question where you actually want to come on the show and talk with me about it, email your question to podcast at ask a manager dot org. That's it for today and I will be back next time with more questions. M