When we seek a job, we are looking for someone to hire us. But maybe that’s backward. Perhaps we should view it as hiring our next job.
“When you decide to work somewhere, you are hiring your employer, consciously or not. You are choosing how and where to spend your precious time and what compensation you’ll accept for it. You are choosing the work you’ll do and with whom you’ll do it,” Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein, Harvard Graduate School of Education teacher Michael B. Horn and innovation consultant Bob Moesta write in Job Moves.
You will have to make trade-offs, of course, between the various things you are seeking and what the organizations you are hovering around are offering. There is no magical, perfect job, they stress. But the system they have pioneered is based on the notion that you are steering the ship that is your job search, not letting the waves of happenstance and other people’s needs determine your final location.
That journey will revolve around one or more of the four quests they have found common in job searches:
- Get out: You need to flee your current work situation. That may be because the way you are managed has worn you down, you feel stuck in a dead-end job or there are seemingly unsurmountable obstacles preventing you from putting your capabilities to good use.
- Regain control: You feel overwhelmed – at work or at home, or both. You may like what you are doing but your current circumstances – how the job makes use of your time or how you do your work – leave you unable to handle everything.
- Regain alignment: You don’t feel respected at work, your skill set not seeming to be valued. You often feel bored in your role and unable to see a place to grow.
- Take the next step: You have reached a milestone in your career or life, be it achieving a development goal or becoming an empty nester, and want to take the next step in your career. You need something new.
Those first two quests involve being pushed to get out of your current job and the final two represent something pulling you to head elsewhere. The first step in hiring your next job is to understand your current situation and seek the proper remedy.
As you think ahead, you need to answer two questions: How do you want your next job to motivate or energize you and how do you want it to make use of your capabilities? Instead of considering what you will be next – what title, post or role – you need to decide what you want to actually do on a day-to-day basis. Instead of thinking of the array of features the next job offers – the usual way we job hunt, focused in particular on titles and money – you need to focus on what you will experience in it and how that will help you progress from your current struggle.
It also helps to look back at your past roles – your resume is a good place to start – and determine what drives and what drains your energy. Identify patterns, ideally five to 10 tasks or situations that were recurring energy drivers and drains in your past roles. It can help to then reverse the drains and turn them into drivers; if you were drained by a job where you were too busy to think that indicates time to think is an energy driver. Next, determine which items on this list matter most at this point in your life.
This helps to build a foundation for a search in which you will have more control because you understand yourself and your needs. As you develop this understanding, the authors recommend reaching out to mentors and others who know you, to be sure you are on track, and then you can return to them to see what jobs they are aware of that might fit your needs, since so many openings never are advertised. Along with scouting advertised positions, you are in a better position to hire your next job.
Quick hits
- Angela Galle Sylvester, a career coach with Korn Ferry Advance, advises her job-hunting clients to spend 80 per cent of their time networking and 20 per cent applying. This fits with studies showing 60 per cent of jobs are found through networking.
- Treat your teammates like customers and always ask them if there is more you could do for them, says Canmore, Alta. consultant Michael Kerr. Try to anticipate their needs.
- With every big project you’re working on, entrepreneur Tim Duggan recommends you cut to the core by describing it in one page, then one paragraph and then one sentence. This simplicity will help you and others.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.