
You did your research, tailored your resume, and applied for a great position. You may have even scored an interview, came prepared, and impressed the interviewer. Now it’s just time to play the waiting game, right? Wrong!

All businesses aren’t created equal. What may be normal for a small company could be strange for a large one. But when deciding where to work, those distinctions matter. “There are a number of differences,” says Kathleen Downs, a recruiting manager at Robert Half International. “I wouldn’t say one is better than the other, but they are certainly different.” From culture to job function, here’s a look at ten differences between working for a small firm and its larger brethren.

Today’s job market is unlike any other in recent memory for most of us. Certainly it is for me. As I point out in “’Headhunter’ Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever!,” there are all new “rules” in today’s hiring “game”—and that’s precisely how you must look at getting hired in today’s job market, as a “game”—and what may have worked, say, just a few years ago to land a new job no longer works, in many cases.

Once upon a time, different career paths existed in separate silos, completely independent of each other. If you decided to become a lawyer, you couldn’t change your mind, take a few classes, and become a part-time teacher, and vice versa. No matter what career you chose, you were pretty much stuck there for the long haul.