Unsolicited Advice: How to find a job you actually want (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Frances: So Francis, I feel like I should say Happy New Year. I, this is our new year, the academic calendar, which I think should be everyone's new year.

Anne: I have been thinking about this. I do think it should be everyone's New Year. I. For a number of reasons. One, it, it's such a better season to take massive action.

Frances: Oh my gosh. You don't have to wear like a coat and boots. You can just, you can just go and do it.

Anne: Oh, January one. We're just trying to survive out here. Survive and after the holidays. It's a lot. It's a lot. That time of year, no, September the season, it works out there. There's still light. Everybody's refreshed.

It's the time of optimism. It's, I'm gonna. Spare you this, this in this. Thank you in advance, whatever you're sparing me. I'm just grateful. In this season of renewal, I'm gonna spare you the goal setting exercise I typically force you through at this moment. Oh my gosh, you love a good goal to set, set. I love a good goal setting exercise, and you just, you pretend you only do it annually.

Frances: You do it so often.

Anne: Any excuse? Yeah. Including September. But this fall, you're off the hook, baby. Thank you.

Frances: Is that because you've set my goals

Anne: for me? Yeah, I've already, I've already taken care of it. All right. Well, welcome back to Fixable everyone. I'm your host, Anne Morris, and I'm your co-host Francis Fry, and today we are back with.

Our favorite type of episode, another installment of unsolicited advice. Our occasional segment, although it's gonna be increasing for, I hope there's room for anything else. The pace is picking up. These are our episodes where we just tell people who. Haven't asked for it exactly what we think it

Frances: is just like a time, it's the time of my life because I have it in my head.

Yeah. And I'm holding it back. Yeah. All the time. You have a lot to share. I and I so, so rarely get to share it. We're,

Anne: we're, we're taking the guard rails off today. Let's, today, let's do it. Uh, in the past couple episodes we've done like this. They've been directed at specific companies like Boeing and Starbucks.

But today we wanna impose our point of view on a much larger swath of the population, which is job seekers.

Frances: Oh, and I think there's a lot of job seekers right now.

Anne: There are a lot of job seekers right now, according to the New York Federal Reserve. It's about 30% of Americans, which is the highest they've seen.

Since March of 2014, which is just about a decade ago. And specifically it's a sharp increase from last year when that number was closer to 20%. It sounds like it's

Frances: only a 10% increase, but that's actually a 50% increase to go from 20% to 30%.

Anne: Yeah, and we've, we've seen some sources estimate that number at close to half of Americans or even more.

Oh my gosh. Either looking for a job actively or thinking seriously about doing it. That's incredible. Yeah. So there are a lot of people looking for new opportunities and the market. It's not what it used to be in our, in our recent memory. So what the data is telling us now is that the economy is adding fewer jobs than it has in the past and fewer jobs than we've expected over the summer job opening slump to their lowest level and more than three years, which the labor department confirmed this month.

Unemployment is still historically low, but it's on the rise. Interest rates remain high. All the, you know, all the formal economists out there whose job is to make predictions and make us feel better, they're still talking about a potential recession. We're not out of the woods on that yet. Which is all to say there's a lot of uncertainty out there, and as we know, human beings and the organizations we build in our image do not like uncertainty.

Frances: Yeah. I think when it's got this much uncertainty, you can sort of bifurcate organizations. Some are gonna seize the day, like it's a, it's just a wonderful thing, but others are gonna seize up. Yeah. They're, and um, yeah, I think that's a great contrast. It's usually one or. The other. And so hopefully we can be helpful, um, and maybe giving a bit of a roadmap for how to seize the day.

But I will say that our natural instinct to your point is to seize up. And so we gotta, we gotta give some guidance on, on how to, how to really take advantage of the, of the opportunity.

Anne: Great. So Francis, here's where we're going. We're gonna start with mindset, which as you know, I feel very strongly about.

And then we're gonna get into some tactical applications and some things you should consider when you're deciding how to invest your time and energy here. And then we'll save some time at the end, Francis, for you to talk about. The company perspective, what hiring managers can do right now to, to source the, the talent that is really gonna thrive in their own workplace.

So if we're gonna start with mindset, where do we begin? Francis? As you know, I've navigated a lot of transitions in my life. Part of it is my own taste for novelty and change. I've also coached a lot of people through their own transitions, which may be more relevant here, and so I have a lot to say on this topic.

I think our relationship with work is really loaded, like it is loaded up with. Our identities, our role as a protector and a provider. Our core stories about ourselves and our own. Worthiness and nobody is spared in the process of a job search from being pushed on this stuff as they go. Yeah. No one is spared being nicked and bruised at a minimum.

By the indignities in this process, by the unanswered emails, the, the rejection that is inevitable even when the, the job search is wildly successful. There, there's, there are moments that are really tough for all of us and. In my experience with this, the whole game, and I don't think I'm overstating this, although, check me on this, the whole game is about refusing to attach meaning to so much of this experience.

Frances: Oh, how do you not take it?

So personally, it feels like people are doing the indignities to us on purpose. I

Anne: mean, you, you know, you're like, it's like the ultimate vulnerability and then. You know, we're giving so much power away in terms of how we feel, and really the whole game is not letting our brains and egos just do their thing unchecked.

Frances: Yeah. So if I could make contagious my reaction to people saying no, I would. Which is when somebody says no to me, I don't hear No. That is, I don't hear rejection. I just hear not now. And that has served me very well. So I may have shared on this podcast before, but Harvard said no to me five times. I applied out of high school.

I applied outta college. I applied to get my PhD. First time gonna for faculty. I mean, I just, I just kept applying at all these different times. No, no, no, no, no. But there's not a single No. That stops me from trying again, like a No. I literally don't take no, personally, I just think that there are mortals on the other side that are doing their own calculus.

Maybe I could have presented myself better, but certainly I can come back. At another time. So give them more information. I can give them more information. I can pretty it up more. Maybe it isn't the right time for this, but it is this, this notion that someone else saying no is at all a reflection of me.

I just don't think people have enough information for me to, to do that. So it, I do think that that lets me go through the world in a lighter way. Um, particularly a world world where you have to get a lot of Nos where you have to knock on a lot of doors and that's like getting a job. Oh my gosh, you have to knock on a lot of doors.

Imagine if you took any of the nose personally, it would be exhausting. So like me or probabilistically,

Anne: take all of the nose personally, which is, I think what we're, oh yeah, we're really wired to do. I would really like to fix that.

Alright, let's take a quick break and when we come back we'll talk about how to reclaim your power and take on the job hunt like a Francis Fry.

So the goal. Of this first phase is to get in touch with your own agency in this process and your own value, because we tend to underestimate them both of those things along the way. In a job search, it feels like the fate of our lives is in someone else's hands. Which is a lie.

It's not.

That we don't want to get seduced into believing, and so here's an exercise that I often recommend to people as they're gearing up for this.

Write a list of the things that you love to do. Like what are the things that are deeply energizing to you? What are the things that light you up and bring you to life? Yeah, so really think about it. Yeah. And then the next step is to look at that list and reflect on the question of where you could be really competitive.

Like, okay, now bring the rest of the world into this conversation. Think about yourself. Think about the rest of the world. Which of these things on this list could, like, could you be a contender in. Yep. And where I really like to push people because it's provocative and it often sparks thing, is where could you be world class, like best of the best?

Like where could you really compete and what it can uncover is that there might be something here that you haven't given yourself permission to really incorporate, and there's no better time than right now. And in our experience of working with world class talent, one of the patterns that we have seen is that there is.

A point in every journey to that elite level where someone just makes a decision to pursue that level of performance. And it's not about outcomes per se, it's about the decision to pursue it. I happen to believe that everyone on the planet has that option about something.

Frances: I'm digging it. And when you ask people to do this, do they have an empty list?

Like what's the, what do you typically, what typically happens when you give this assignment?

Anne: Well, people are often surprised 'cause they, they haven't given themself permission to do it before. So they're often surprised and, and, and they, they're surprised at how long the list is. They're surprised at what's on the list.

They're surprised at what's on the

Frances: list. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's, I mean,

Anne: some people have, have struggled with that as a starting point.

Frances: Yeah.

Anne: Okay. Great. And then the third step is to bring in this question. Okay, so first of all, you're, you're by yourself now. You're bringing in the rest of the world you're competing with, and now you're thinking about who out there might.

Value that skillset, like the, the, the ones that you Oh, now it's

Frances: a treasure hunt. Yeah.

Anne: And, and, and then who might pay you for it?

Frances: Yeah. I like doing it that way. As opposed to trying to reverse engineer what people need and then turning ourselves into a pretzel to try to become it. Yeah. And we're just not gonna be very good at that.

Yeah.

Anne: And there's an, it's impossible to do this exercise without, without starting to get in touch with your value and power and agency here. I love, I love that. Okay, so that's part one. Mm-hmm. And then part two are, here are some questions to think about as you get into decisions you wanna make about which roles to pursue.

So reflecting on what you care most about in your career and really interrogating that, is it learning? Is it security? Is it flexibility? If you can name the things that are. Most valuable to you and, and then really put them in order of value. It allows you to get to the point where you can understand the trade-offs.

Frances: Even just those three, that's gonna really help narrow the jobs you're not gonna apply for, which I have to imagine would be a really helpful thing.

Anne: Yeah, and I mean, this is the same question that we ask. Companies about their own strategy. What would you be willing to give up? What would your customers be willing to give up in order to get the things they value most?

Yeah, because we live in a world where gravity applies, right? And so there are these very, very powerful trade offs. So moving through this process with deep clarity about that is also a very empowering. Step that you can take. I, I love it. Another thing that I often push people to reflect on is what do you need to be wildly successful?

Not just successful, but what do you need to be wildly successful? What are the features of the environments where you have really thrived in the past? And then what are some tells for those environments? Because this is very helpful information. Yeah. When you're evaluating whether you're gonna be a good fit with an organization or a role or a team or a manager.

Frances: So if we think about that question, um, this is what I need in order for me to, to perform in a wildly successful way, I need these things. I'm curious what kinds of things are on that list. 'cause if I think for myself, well, I need to be able to nap intraday. For me to be wildly successful. Yes. So I have to have a couch that, and I gotta tell you, it, it is a big deal.

Anne: 'cause I need a, it's a, that is a narrowing requirement, Francis. We're not gonna, you're not gonna be a bus driver. Right. If you need to take sporadic naps.

Frances: Yeah. So now, so, so that's what, how I would enter it. But again, from your asking so many people this, what are the types of things that are on this list?

Anne: Learning is often. A big one, um, culture requirements like this, you know, uh, is this an environment that gives people the benefit of the doubt? Uh, do I, is trust gonna be given to me? Do I have to earn it? Like, do I have to put in my time before I'm given the ball? Is this, uh, is this a FaceTime culture?

Where people need the reassurance of seeing me in order to build a relationship with me or, or is the workforce distributed? Okay. So that I have a freedom fetish. I, I'm, I'm almost not employable at this point, so you have to, I'll hold my requirements back 'cause I don't think they're gonna be useful to most people.

Um,

Frances: uh, let me test another one to see if this is, but I'm, what I'm hearing is that most of these are cultural. Even my neck, that's like an artifact of a culture. Yes. Couches. I need there to be couches with, with a locked door. Yeah. Yeah.

Anne: Okay, super helpful. Um, and we've gotten into this on a, on, on a bunch of fixable episodes, but if you take responsibility for identifying this environment, that it also kind of gets you back in touch with your power in this situation.

And it also might raise the question. Okay, well if you can't find it, could you create it? That's nice. Right? Is, is freelancing an option for you? Is the gig economy an option for you? Is starting your own company an option for you? Like if you can't find it, could you build it yourself? Which is what in some way you've done?

I think yes, because of the extremity of my knees, um, I couldn't find them. So you just start companies? Yeah. Um, so, uh, a couple other. Tactics on this for some people back to where we started this conversation. It can be helpful to be very deliberate in trying to lower the identity stakes of this moment and.

Make this whole fucking thing a game. Yeah. And when I've coached some people through this, this has been a very helpful way to shift mindset. So your job is to get to the next level of this video game called Job Search. Right? So you gotta, you know, every time you get an send, an email inquiry and you get it, and it answered.

You get a point, you know, and maybe those points have real world like impact. Maybe you get to like take the nap or get the massage or like have the piece of cheesecake, you know, like gamifying. This whole thing can be, that can really energizing, can be fun, can, um, but it can also really deal with these existential questions that, that can sometimes haunt people through this experience and aren't particularly helpful in setting you up for success.

The other, uh, advice I often get is to build a job search team.

Frances: Hmm.

Anne: Because the real enemy in this whole process

Frances: Oh yeah. Would be doing this alone is

Anne: isolation.

Frances: Yeah.

Anne: We need to be connected to each other as humans. Maybe you have a team of people, 3, 4, 5 people who are on this ride with you who great could be accountability partners.

This does not have to be a solo sport.

Frances: Yeah. Great.

Anne: Now I wanna address those job seekers who may be coming to the job hunt after a significant leave. If that's you, I wanna say that it can be very helpful to find something to do, even just pursue a shared mission with a community of adults. This could include maybe becoming a short-term contractor.

Um, but it can also mean volunteering. It can also mean joining the PTA at your kids' school. It really changes your mindset to be showing up in. Again, in a community of adults on a regular basis and contributing value to something bigger than yourself, and you can do that tomorrow. I found my community of people over covid when I had to do that.

Yes. My office hours, I think go online. That's a really awesome example. Yeah. It reminds you of your value. It changes your emotional frequency. It sets you up to talk about something in that interview. There's so many. Kind of strategic and and tactical benefits of that. And you can also consider a transitional job, what I call a transitional job, just to get you back into the game.

Frances: What does that look like?

Anne: I took a significant leave from the workforce when our oldest was diagnosed with a significant medical condition, um, that he's essentially grown out of. We got very lucky. Um, I remember the moment when I realized that I really needed to go back to work 'cause I didn't have a plan and I remember.

Coming home and I was in tears and you were like, oh God, anything,

Frances: anything you want, anything. Whatever it is, whatever. It's,

Anne: and I, I said, I need to, I need to go back to work in some way. And I think this, I dunno, 18 months, two years into this. And it was a point at a point in my life where it was inconceivable that I could interview for a job.

Yeah. Like, I just was so far away from being able to walk into somebody's office and like a stranger's office and PI and pitch myself. Yeah. Yeah. And my value, like, it was so absurd, the whole exercise. And so I, I realized, okay, like we're gonna take a dream job

Frances: off. That's later. Dream job is later. That's later.

Anne: We're gonna take this out of the choice set. I reached out to three. People who I had worked for before who understood my value. And, uh, we wouldn't, there would be no negotiation. I would just, I would just say, you know, I'm, I'm available. I'm available. It was, it was essentially, it was a one lining. I'm available.

I sent three of them. The first person to respond was the great Marcello Escobar. Oh. She was like, come do anything. Do anything you want. Come to the office. And I reminded myself what it meant to go to the office. I reminded myself what it meant to be an adult. Reminded myself what it meant to contribute to a team, to a mission that was bigger than myself.

All those things. Yeah, I needed to do all of that stuff before I could even. Dare to dwell in the possibility of work that was gonna be deeply sustaining and meaningful. Like that was a goal that was so far away from where I was. So if you, if you are in this moment, that's great of finding yourself just stuck in this relationship with work.

Just shake it up. This is another, by any means necessary. Shake it up by any means. That's right. Like take the volunteer job, take the transitional job, get out there, do anything. I love it to just sh just shift the structure of your experience around. I love it. I love this advice. Okay, so that's shifting mindset.

Now you're ready to start applying. So a few pointers for this stage. If a computer is likely to screen your resume, that's fine. Don't fight it.

Frances: Yeah.

Anne: Figure out the rules of that, but then reveal who you are in your submission materials because at some point you're gonna get to a human being. And when you do get to the point, it's very helpful to send signals to your fellow human beings that you're also a member of the human race.

So include this awesome volunteer work that you started do. Oh yeah, Francis, you're now volunteering at the animal shelter. Like put that in, like give us a chance to get to know who you are on the level of a three-dimensional person. Get feedback on these materials before you press send So fi on that team.

That job search team that you've built include a friend who adores you and is also willing to give it to you straight, to give you feedback on the version of you that you're putting out in the world. Yeah, and

Frances: you know. All things being equal, just have one English major on the team. Fair enough. That I'm married to one.

Explains my success in the world. Fair enough. Fair enough.

Anne: Yeah. Even if this is the hundredth, you know, resume you've sent out in the industry, really go deep on what the company does before you walk into the proverbial building. The person in front of you wants to feel great about their own choices and they.

I have made the decision to spend a significant part of their own lives at said company. At said company. So reveal your curiosity, reveal your enthusiasm. Don't play it cool to protect yourself, even if that's one of your default strategies. I went through a whole period in my life where I was a terrible interviewer because like I, I chose like sexy indifference as, as my strategy people were like.

What the fuck? It's totally overrated. Like show up and reveal that you actually want the job. I, I, what I would say is, uh,

Frances: prepare as if you were interviewing them. And how much prep you do for interview and you learn about their background. You learn all of those things so you can ask interesting questions that you don't know the answer to.

I think that's the right form of curiosity here.

Anne: Exactly. I love that. We're gonna take another short break here, and then Francis is gonna shift our perspective to the other characters in this story. We're gonna start with the hiring managers.

So Francis, I'd love to travel to the other side of the desk. Yeah. Now, and give us some perspective on what's happening at that hiring manager company level perspective. What should we know right now?

Frances: Well, I, I think there's, there's in general two things to know. One of them is evergreen. It's gonna matter for any moment.

And then I think one of 'em is specific to this particular moment of so much seizing the day or seizing up, like to that, to that level of uncertainty. But if you're on the other side of the desk, you really wanna understand what you are looking for. That is whenever people are saying, my hiring process is to hire the best athlete, it's not, they never do, right?

They just hire someone who reminds them of them. So instead know what it is that you are looking for. Um, so I'll give you a few examples. Southwest Airlines, which was the best performing airline for decades, they knew when they were hiring flight attendants that they were looking for empathy. And so they've used a very clever mechanism to test for empathy.

So they didn't look for the best athlete of all the people that were hiring. They would've, you know, but they knew we wanna get empathy. And so how can we determine whether or not someone has empathy regardless of who's doing the interviewing. So they had to be really clever. So the, and the technique they used, uh, is sounds very unorthodox.

What was perfect for what they were doing. So when you would go to an interview at Southwest, you would go into the room with other people being interviewed. So in a, so I, I'm in a room with like my competition. With your competition, okay? You're also in a room with several employees. And you're also in a room with customers.

Oh, and to be one of the customers in that room, you had to be like a very frequent flyer and you had to earn the right to be able to be there because Southwest was such a high performing and such a great culture that, you know, it was like a very valued thing. So it's a big room. Here's what they would do.

They would pick one of the, at random, pick one of the prospective employees and they'd say, please stand up. Describe to us your most embarrassing moment. Whoa. Now, for such like a nice culture, it's, that feels hardcore. It's hardcore, right? It's super aggressive. And so the person would stand up and they would do it.

And when I ask students to be like, what do you think they were doing? They're like, oh, looking, if somebody's good with under pressure, if they're funny, they're not paying a lick of attention to the person who's speaking. They're looking at the other prospective employees and they're looking to see if they exhibit empathy.

Whoa. And you know it when you see it, and it takes about five seconds to exhibit. This was a fail safe way to hire people with empathy. Such a beautiful example. Right? So provocative. So provocative, but that when you have that level of clarity of what you want, then you can have a clever way of doing it.

I'll, I'll use another example along these lines. There was a movie called The Imitation Game. I think that was it with, um, Benedict Cumberbatch and, uh, Kiera Knightley. It was a World War II code breaking and, uh, just up your alley, just up my alley. And for them, back at the time of World War II, and they wanted to figure out who the best code breakers would be.

They didn't go to the elite colleges and ask them, they put in the newspaper a puzzle. And if you were able to solve the puzzle. Call this number and then they invited you in for a harder timed test. It's in the movie how they did this, and Keira Knightley famously finishes this puzzle even faster than Benedict Cumberbatch could right now.

So many interesting things about that. But when they knew they wanted fast creative problem solvers. They gave everyone problems to solve. So that's, I think, know what you want and then be fearless about who it is that you are considering for doing that and realize our temptation is always, always, always to go.

We really like people who are really like us. We're gonna stack the decks. In the favor of people who are like us. So just be aware of it and, and look for the Keira Knightley out there when you're doing it. I love that. And then I would also say, give people a chance to not show up for the interview. So make sure you have made it clear.

What your culture is, so to your earlier point, so people know, oh, this one doesn't fit all of those beautiful lists that you had them doing. Mm-hmm. So at HBS, we care disproportionately about teaching. It doesn't make us better or worse than any other schools, but we just care disproportionately. So at HBS, you can't buy your way out of teaching.

Mm. At. Every one of our peer schools, if you get research grants, you use them to apply them to buy out some of your teaching so that you can spend more time on research. You can do that at every school on the planet except HBS, because we don't want anyone who wants to buy their way out of teaching. We want people who are energized by teaching.

Give people, uh, the ability to not show up. It's gonna make your job so much easier. Let them self-select out, but you gotta give them, you know, a creative way of self-selecting out. Agree. That's great. Now, for this moment, for this moment of tension, I would say higher at the pace that you can retain.

Mm-hmm. So it is tempting to have feast and famine. Oh, I can hire a lot and then I'll just lay off and then I can hire a lot and I can lay off. And that wildly underestimates the destructive cost of layoffs. Yeah. And it's bad for the humanity of everyone. So I wanna code this for all of the people that hire out there.

When your organization goes through layoffs, you have failed. I'm not saying one strike and you're out, but I want you to treat it as a failure. You failed to understand the external context. You failed to predict, you failed. You failed. You failed. So code it as a failure and make sure, do not feast in famine.

Don't hire so much now. So the one of the reasons back to Southwest that they were the highest performing airline is because they never had layoffs. They didn't overhire, which every other airline did, and then they would make up for it with layoffs. The externalities that will come to you mm-hmm. From not having layoffs, I think are enormous.

So if I look today, ServiceNow is a wonderful organization for so many reasons, but one of them is all of the layoffs that have happened in recent years in tech. And every people are like, oh, everyone laid people off, not ServiceNow. Why? Because they were predicting what was gonna happen in the future, and they slowed the hiring down so that they didn't have to do layoffs.

They didn't fall into the trap that everyone else did. So in this moment, when you do get all of it right, and you're hiring the people, hire at a pace you can retain because chances are your organization is underestimating the cost of layoffs. Beautiful.

Anne: All right, Francis, we've covered a lot of territory and I wanna just close by underlining a few of the big ideas here.

I think one is that this is hard and you have to design for hard. You have to design for emotionally hard, so don't do this alone. Set yourself up for success. Get in touch with your value, but also how much agency you have at every point along the way, because it's very easy to get seduced into thinking that the fate of your.

Life. Your destiny on this planet is in somebody else's hands right now, and it's not.

Frances: Yeah. Love that. I love it.

Anne: Uh, what's the big idea if

Frances: I'm an employer right now? If you're an employer, know what you're looking for and then use a clever design to find those people.

Anne: Yeah. I love this. It, it's impossible not to.

Think about a marriage metaphor for this, like we gotta get two people down the aisle, and if we really want this marriage to last, there's actually quite a lot of self-reflection and self-awareness that is required by both parties here.

Frances: I wonder what it means about me that. When you said it's impossible not to think about a marriage, it would be impossible for me to have thought about a marriage at the end of this.

Anne: Alright, well we're gonna, we're gonna pick this up in a another episode.

All right everyone. Thank you for listening. That's our show. If you wanna explore some kind of topic like this to death with us here at Fixable. Send us a message, email [email protected]. Call or text us at two three four fixable 2 3 4 3 4 9 2 2 5 3 or find us on LinkedIn. We're a, we're actually quite public on LinkedIn and, uh, if you track us down in the comments, that's another way to, to get in touch and start a conversation about anything including coming on the show, which we would love and we'd be delighted to talk with you about it.

Fixable is brought to you by the Ted Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Ann Morris and me Francis Fry. Our team includes Izzy Carter, Constanza, Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash. This episode was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.

Frances: If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.