You Couldn't Make This Up!

You Couldnt Make This UpNancy's husband used to work for a large pharmaceutical.
            
Every few years, they'd do a round of layoffs. Anyway, this one time, literally hours after they'd sent a few hundred employees packing, their IT system went down without warning. The entire organization ground to a halt.
            
And, yes -- you've guessed it:
            
They'd just laid off the only guy who had the skills to fix it!

It took them three days to track him down. When they did, he was seriously p****d, and they had to beg for him to come back to his old job.
            
This guy was what we call a "quiet achiever".
            
Every morning he came in early, put his head down, and kept the company's IT system running. He was no brown nose. He didn't like to brag. He wasn't interested in office politics. He just did his job.
            
And, of course, this meant that middle management had no idea that he was one of the company's most valuable assets.
            
He literally kept the show on the road.
            
It was pure, blind luck that the IT system went down when it did.
            
(Or maybe not -- who knows?)
            
But this very, very, very rarely happens.
            
Usually, when you get laid off by a company who doesn't know or appreciate what you bring to the table, they never realize until it's too late.
            
Great people get laid off all the time.
            
It's an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that, more often than not, the best employees don't like to blow their own trumpet or trawl for brownie points.
            
And so companies don't realize they just threw away a diamond.
            
Chances are, if you're reading this, you're a quiet achiever too. And chances are, your boss (or their boss) doesn't know what you bring to the table.
            
That's why you don't get the recognition and respect you deserve.
            
It's why you're last in line for a raise.
            
And it's why you could, perhaps, be first in line for the next layoff.
            
You can't rely on the kind of luck I told you about above. (And I don't recommend sabotaging the company's IT system either!)
            
You need to show your boss (and their boss) that you're a diamond.
            
You need to be proactive about building yourself a reputation as someone your boss and the company can't live without -- someone they'd never want to lose in a million years, to the extent that they bend over backward to keep you sweet and stop you from being poached.

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Alan Carniol

Alan is the creator of Interview Success Formula, a training program that has helped more than 80,000 job seekers to ace their interviews and land the jobs they deserve. Interviewers love asking curveball questions to weed out job seekers. But the truth is, most of these questions are asking about a few key areas. Learn more about how to outsmart tough interviewers by watching this video.