Career Cube Blog

You feel like a double-agent. By day, you’re a loyal, devoted employee. You are completely in line with the company’s principles. You look forward to staff meetings as a chance to share ideas with your equally intelligent, highly motivated and downright inspiring co-workers. Just the thought of spending 4 hours on a beautiful Saturday at a company picnic with people you can barely stand during the week causes you to take a sidelong glance at the raw eggs in your fridge and wonder if a good dose of salmonella poisoning will make you sick enough to miss the picnic, yet not cause you to miss a beach day on Sunday.

You’re looking for a new job.

What separates the men from the boys in this game (or the women from the girls) is the ability to keep that search a secret from your current company.

It’s tricky. It’s not only hiding the physical evidence from your employer-things like not keeping a copy of your resume on your hard drive at work, not following up on with headhunters while at your desk, and not changing your work habits and standard dress code-but also the other job search “remnants” that you may not think of.

For example-Google your name. Just put it in the Google search engine with quotes around it and see what comes up. One time I was doing searches on the name of the company I worked for, and found the resume of our HR Director-OUCH! Good way to keep tabs on that-setup a Google email alert whenever it finds a website with your name on it, or your current company’s name. It’s not foolproof, but it’s helpful.

If you’ve put your current work number on your resume-what happens if a prospective employer calls and you’re on vacation or call in sick? Will your assistant or another staff person check your voicemail? Although you’re out, you might want to call in and check your messages and then funnel them to the appropriate people-as a way of saving the office staff some work (of course).

Have you told anyone at work that you’re looking to leave? The temptation is HUGE! You want everyone to know that you’ve figured out that you’re better than this place and are ready to move on. It’s a big SEE YA SUCKERS! moment for you. But (and I’m not sure you’ve experienced this), people can turn into chatty Cathy’s at the most inopportune time and end up spilling your secret when they’re out with people that THEY trust-but you don’t. Don’t tell people at work.

Some of you may be thinking-well, what if they DO find out-is it REALLY that bad?

Yes. It’s bad.

It shows a lack of loyalty to the company and the position. Companies want to know that you’re giving everything you’ve got to your job to make the company the best it can be. They are unsettled when they find out that someone has been focusing more on themselves than the company and are not in it for the long term. It makes no sense, especially since the very manager you’re hiding your search from may be conducting their own to get out-but that’s the way it goes.

So what to do if you ARE found out? The #1 excuse people use when confronted with evidence that they’re looking for a new job is to say that whatever the evidence was, it was a remnant of the search they conducted to get their current position. A very good HR friend of mine recommended that people instead try to turn it to their advantage. Her reasoning was that you’re busted anyway, so you could try to use it to your advantage. Explain why you were looking-something along the lines of “I was disappointed that I didn’t get that promotion I was hoping for, and couldn’t see any other opportunities for me here. I’d prefer to stay, but would really like to expand my position. Do you think that’s a possibility?” It’s worth a shot, and it’s better than using the standard “it’s from an old search” line.

My best advice to you-assume that you’ll be discovered and have an answer at the ready. Hopefully you won’t have to use it, but in case you do-you have GOT to be prepared.

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