At least three or four times a week, I personally, have a discussion with a potential candidate who has been self-employed or been the president of or managed their own business. Most everyone of them is astounded and, in many cases, downright mad when I explaine to them that they’re going to have a very hard time finding someone to hire them.
Their reasoning is illogical. They figure that if they’ve been successful in running a company or running their own business, they are going to make a stellar employee and just about any company would love to have them. They are blown away when I explained the facts… that most companies don’t to hire someone who has been in their on business because:1. they don’t want someone working for them who is even going to think saying, “wow, when I ran my own business we did it this way…” 2. They don’t want to always been the boss and it is not “reported” to anyone…3. They don’t want to hire someone who’ll might wake up one morning and decide they don’t like the job and go back into business for themselves.
Every candidate has a number of “risk factors.” These are factors or experiences in their background that pose “risks” to an employer. Things like short stints on the resume… being out of work for a long period of time, being fired etc. are all risk factors. Most hiring authorities are trying to eliminate as many of the risk factors in each candidate as they can. Put another way, they want to hire the candidate with the fewest risk factors. What candidates have to understand is that having owned or run your own business is a risk factor in them that the hiring authority may not have with other candidates. In other words the candidate who is owned or run their own business in competing with other candidates with one more risk factor than most of the other candidates. Since the hiring authority wants to minimize “risk factors” he or she simply passes over the person who is owned or run their own business. It’s that simple!
I’m not going to say that people who have run their own business never get hired by other people, because it does happen. But this factor will is very difficult to deal with and overcome. Next week, I’ll share with you the best way to deal with this concern that the hiring authority will have.
