Cory speaks to entrepreneur and author Kathryn Minshew, the founder and CEO of The Muse. The Muse is the fastest growing career discovery platform for 50+ million professionals a year and helps over 700 companies looking to hire talent and grow. Kathryn is also the co-author of “The New Rules of Work: The Modern Playbook for Navigating Your Career,” available on Amazon and other retailers.
[00:01:08] Cory Levy: Thank you, Kathryn, for joining me on the show today.
[00:01:10] Kathryn Minshew: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
[00:01:13] Cory: I’d like to start by asking; you graduated from Duke University and then you worked at McKinsey after college. How did you get involved in technology?
[00:01:20] Kathryn: It’s funny because I never thought I would end up in the career that I have now but I totally love it. When I was younger technology was really far from my mind. I went to a public school that had a science and technology focus, but I was all history all English all the time. I kept thinking like science and technology…that was the thing that the school talked a lot about but it wasn’t my personal passion. It’s funny because I actually was required to take computer science and coding classes.
They taught us in C++ which now is a language obviously that’s not as useful anymore or most people don’t use it, but I really I enjoyed it, but I had such a bad bias against going into science and technology careers in my mind even though I took a couple of years of campsite and really enjoyed it, I just dismissed that as a possible career path. I ended up deciding I was going to major in international relations. I got fascinated by Foreign Service international aid and development and kind of set my sights on that as a career.
It was luckily after studying in college having several internships I finally landed an internship at the US Embassy in Nicosia Cyprus which is in the middle of the Mediterranean and working in the regional security office. It was totally fascinating but it made me realize that the idea I had in my head of what a career in Foreign Service was like didn’t really match the reality. When I came back to the US I started investigating alternative careers alternative jobs.
I took the role at McKinsey because they were great at recruiting me and I knew that I would learn a lot there, but as I started to get to know people who worked in the startup sector who were building businesses from scratch, I just fell in love. I started my first company in 2010 which was an online community for professional women and that led me to a lot of the ideas that then led to me starting the Muse which is the company that I work today.
[00:03:09] Cory: How big is the Muse today?
[00:03:10] Kathryn: Yes, we serve about 50 million people every year. That’s five-plus million people a month that come to the Muse.com. They are from every age range, every gender, every background, primarily US focused but we also have people from over 100 countries that will visit in a given month and slightly more women than men although again several million of both. Then from a business model perspective, we don’t disclose revenues but we have about 700 employers that are customers.
It’s a hiring and Employer Branding product that we offer to help companies really articulate, what is it like to work there what’s special what’s unique about them and help them find employees that are going to be the right fit. We work with Facebook, Slack, Goldman Sachs, Johnson and Johnson, Capital One — a ton of great businesses. Then we’ve got about 120–125 full-time employees mostly based here in New York City.
[00:04:04] Cory: What surprised you most about sharing the Muse?
[00:04:06] Kathryn: It’s a great question. It’s just, you have to constantly learn if you want to build a company from scratch because the minute you think you’ve mastered a challenge or you figure out how to do something, the company changes and you’ve got to get onto the next challenge, the next thing you have to learn. I have absolutely loved it, but I think it surprised me how much I’ve had to learn about topics that I didn’t know anything about.
I’ve gone deep into sales, pipeline development, lead generation like all of that and the kind of total of other business I’ve raised capital now almost $28 million for the company. I know a ton about term sheets and all sorts of venture capital negotiation techniques that I never thought I would need to know but I love the novelty of learning new things so I’d say it’s totally been fascinating.
[00:04:53] Cory: Is there anything that surprised you about a user base? A book, you wrote about the new rules for finding the right path for advancing your career. I know a lot of young people are listening to this. I’d like to talk a little bit about what do the new rules mean to you and if there’s someone listening and they probably don’t know the old rules, I’d like to tell them a little bit about that.
[00:05:15] Kathryn: Yes, the book is called The New Rules of Work, and I’m so proud of it because my co-founder and business partner and I decided to really take the lessons learned from years of running The Muse and giving career advice to these millions of people across the country and distill it into the corny rules of work. I will say one other thing that was the most surprising for me is the part of the book that people resonated with the most was this idea of starting with your values.
Most career advice; it has you start with what do you think you want to do or what are you good at? We said, of course, that’s important but before that, what do you value? Is it flexibility, is it creativity and autonomy, is it compensation or prestige. There’s so many different things that a career can give you. What is it that you want and that changes right? Not only from person to person but it changes at different parts of your career what you want straight out of college might be different than what we what you want five or 10 years later and that’s okay.
That’s why I think a career is so personal, it’s not something that your parents or your friends can choose for you. Once you then start with your values, we laid out a process called the Muse Grid where we actually help people assess different potential career options against their values through all sorts of different research informational interviews and really help you get to a better understanding of what your life might be like in these different career paths.
Once then obviously not summarizing the entire book. If people are interested it’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and major bookseller. The entire first section of the book the first third is about how you find your path. How do you understand what you want to do? Then we go into the middle part or second part of the book which is all right great, you know what you want, how do you get there? We talk through the new rules for job search for putting together our cover letter and a resume for interviewing.
I guess a couple of years ago it was much less common to have sort of a barrage of different interview types, phone interviews, video interviews, group interviews, presentation around. We wanted to talk through the different types of interviews and how to be prepared for each one. Then of course as you get to the end of the book we also cover negotiating your offer when and how can you negotiate for salary? What else can you negotiate for others that’s not salary.
Then once you get that role, how do you really show up in a great way when your new to a job; new to a company and kind of translate that into being seen as someone that is really deserving of more responsibility, more opportunity, and eventually promotion over time.
[00:07:42] Cory: Let’s chat a little bit about the first thing you mentioned about finding the right path. What do you think are some ways one can figure out what he or she values or what he or she is good at to find that right path?
[00:07:52] Kathryn: Yes, that’s a great question. This is hard. I would say there’s three tips that are really helpful when you’re thinking about finding the right path. First, pay attention to what you don’t like. It can be very demoralizing sometimes to take a job or internship or even just a class in college and realize that something about that role or position or something that doesn’t interest you, but that’s a very powerful and important thing.
For example, when I was working in diplomacy, it was infuriating to me how slowly everything moved how many sign-offs you needed to get. That was a great signal that I loved careers that are very action oriented where I can really see the impact of my work and kind of careers that would move at a very fast pace. I think the more you can really pay attention to things that frustrate you or things that you don’t like — that can help you start to uncover what is it that you’re looking for a new role? What are some of the career paths that you might not have considered?
Secondly, in order to really understand what’s out there, you kind of learn about different career paths. I think it’s really important and again it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to take jobs in all these fields. I think it’s really important to do a little bit of research that can be Googling different career right paths and different companies that can be using a site like The Muse to see inside different companies. We also, for people who don’t know The Muse, have thousands of videos interviewing people from all different career paths and all different companies that can be a really interesting way of understanding more about what that’s specific career is like. I also am a huge fan of informational interviews which is where you reach out to someone you set up time and you actually learn more about what their career has been like.
By the way, just a quick tip on informational interviews, if you are going to spend time with someone and learn more about their career field it’s helpful to ask questions about what sort of person would not be happy in this role or in this career or what is your least favorite thing, because that move than the stuff that’s good and exciting can help you decide if that’s a career that you would actually be willing to do because again, every career has good and bad. It’s just a question of what’s the right fit for you.
Then third, I would say you have to allow yourself to change your mind. It can be very tempting to fall into a trap of thinking you have to know what you want to do by 18 or 19 or 20 and that’s the thing for the rest of your life but the reality is the world doesn’t necessarily work that way anymore for most people. It’s much more important to focus on the skills that you’re acquiring the things that you’re learning how to do and whether that will set you up for the type of work you want to do in the future because it’s inevitable that you will try something and it may not be the right thing but having the courage to admit when you’re on a path that’s not the right one. To go out and change it I think that ultimately is what’s the most powerful thing.
[00:10:33] Cory: What do you wish you had started doing or done more of much earlier in your career, specifically actions or activities with compounding effects?
[00:10:43] Kathryn: Oh, that’s a great question. I think I had blinders on to some extent because I spent so long thinking that I was going to go into the Foreign Service or International Diplomacy or aid. I didn’t really explore as many careers outside of the ones that were on my radar. I wish I had allowed myself to do more informational interviews with people outside of the area that I was most interested in. I wish I had found a way to shadow people at their offices, it was much more difficult when I was going through the early phases in my career and my studies particular, 10 to 15 years ago.
It was not much, much more difficult to get some of this information online. Job postings were still filled with jargon and at every career site there were just stock photos if there was a photo at all. I would have loved to have had access to some of the rich resources that are available, but I think ultimately, the more you can talk to people, whether it’s face to face or watch video, read content about different career paths, the more you’ll be exposed to all that’s out there.
The more also that if you do decide to move in a certain direction, you’ll have access to the words, the vernacular, the day-to-day lingo of that career field, which is also really helpful in getting hired within it.
[00:11:56] Cory: I think what you just said about shadowing people at their offices, is such a great idea. What would be your advice for somebody listening right now to take action on that and what would you say to them if they were trying to shadow someone in that office, how would they go about doing that?
[00:12:10] Kathryn: I would say firstly that it’s a good thing to ask. It’s okay if someone says no or they don’t respond to you, that’s part of it, that’s okay. I would identify two to three people that perhaps are in a position where you’d be interested in learning more, and then I would craft a personalized email to each one. We have some really good templates on the muse.com, but at a high level it would be something like, “Dear so and so, I wanted to write you today because I know that your an X, Y, Z manager at Acme Corporation, and I’m very interested in starting my career in marketing. I was hoping that there might be an opportunity to shadow you at work for an hour or two or learn more about what careers in marketing are like at your company.”
Then having a sense of joy about yourself, “I’m a student at XYZ, or “I have this background, this is why I care.” The more you can show somebody that you’re willing to put in the time and the effort, and most people do want to help, but in many cases they have been burned in the past because they’ve helped people who have not necessarily valued the time that they’ve given or they’re simply very, very busy.
If you can really show them why specifically you’re asking them and why it is that you will really benefit from this opportunity. Again, some people are never going to say yes, that’s okay, that’s why I recommend asking more than one person, but ultimately you often will find that people are really willing to go out on a limb and help you out.
[00:13:31] Cory: Have you let people shadow you?
[00:13:33] Kathryn: I have.
[00:13:34] Cory: What made you say yes?
[00:13:35] Kathryn: For me it was someone who had built a relationship with me over some time, it wasn’t just the first act, although I think earlier in my career I could have been open to someone who had made it as their first act. In this case it was an individual who had reached out to me for advice on several occasions, she’d been incredibly thoughtful about the questions she asked, she was always respectful of my time and she always made me feel like she was immediately able to learn and grow and implement some of the things that I had suggested in the past.
After we established that relationship, when she asked to come in and shadow me in the office, it felt like an okay next step to say yes to.
[00:14:14] Cory: How often are you personally giving career advice to people? I know obviously, The Muse helps millions of people, but how often are you one-on-one helping people?
[00:14:25] Kathryn: Funny you ask that. I didn’t start The Muse because I have all the answers, I started it because I needed them. To some extent I never wanted to be the person sitting behind the desk and I’m giving people advice, in fact, unless somebody is interested in entrepreneurship, which is a topic that I know a lot about, I often suggest that they speak to one of our career coaches or they read content on the Muse because we deliberately source from some of the best experts in the world on all of these different topics.
I will say I do end up giving a fair amount of career advice regardless, but it’s often in the context of, I mentor a number of up and coming entrepreneurs. I particularly try and dedicate my time to entrepreneurs from diverse background if I can. It’s just helping open doors for all sorts of different types of people, which I really believe that the technology space is going to benefit from more diversity and more inclusion. Then obviously within the company, I will always make time if somebody who works at the Muse wants to chat, but again I think that also somewhat difficult because your career is so personal. I never feel like I can tell somebody what they must or should do, just like it’s hard for someone else to tell me what we should do.
The best you can do is help give people a sense of what’s possible and what are some of the strategies or tactics they might take to help them achieve their goals.
[00:15:42] Cory: Why do you think career coaching may still be taboo? Obviously, LeBron James has a coach and Roger Federer has a coach. Why shouldn’t everyone else have a coach? Do you think career coaching is still a little bit taboo or people are afraid to talk about that stuff?
[00:15:54] Kathryn: Yes, absolutely. I think that there’s still a lot of things that hold people back from fully leveraging career coaching, and I think it’s too bad. Firstly I’ll say there are a lot of mediocre career coaches out there. Just as there are a lot of phenomenal career coaches. I think one of the challenges has been that as a consumer, coaching of any sort is a non-trivial investment. You want to ensure that somebody’s great before you give them your money.
That’s one of the reasons that we implemented star ratings on the muse.com. As you may know, we have a coaching platform. We actually accept less, I think it’s less than 8% of all of the coaches who’ve applied because it’s important to us to keep the quality high. We’ll actually remove people from the platform if they receive more than one or two low ratings that aren’t — It’s one thing if somebody’s like, “I paid for one session, they wouldn’t give me three sessions for free,” but we dig into any situation and if we find out that the coach is not delivering on a really high-quality experience, then we’ll usually move them off the platform because I think, again, career coaching like any coaching, it’s got to be something that really helps you up your game.
On the flip side, I do think that a lot of people have a mindset shift that would really benefit them. Where, just as you said, every successful athlete has a coach. Just because you’re stuff is great doesn’t mean a coach can’t help make you better.
I believe the same is true for your career. You might be a phenomenal manager but you’re not as strong at negotiating for yourself or negotiating a salary. That’s a great opportunity for a coach. Or perhaps you’re not entirely sure what it is you want to go to next or you’re sending out your resume and you’re not getting a lot of bites. Those are all opportunities where sometimes just having an outside perspective of someone who’s really good at this, and is trained to do it, can be incredibly helpful.
[00:17:42] Cory: What’s a life hack that you use, that very few people know about?
[00:17:46] Kathryn: That’s a great question. One life hack that I love is a tool called Boomerang. You essentially install it in Gmail and you can send emails out of your inbox. Then, send them back to yourself at any time in the future. Let’s say I got an email today, I don’t have time to deal with it right now. I don’t just want to let it sit in my inbox bothering me. I might say, “Boomerang this to 7 PM tomorrow. That’s a great time to deal with it.” Or “Send this back to me tomorrow morning.” I love Boomerang because it gives me a feeling of control over my inbox without having to archive things.
I also really enjoy a tool called Pocket. Pocket’s an app that you can put on your phone. It’s also a browser plug-in that you can put into any browser. I’m a big reader. I love articles. I have so much trouble not clicking on a headline that is about something I’m interested in. Be it international politics, technology news. Pocket actually lets you save all of those articles to your phone so you can read them later when you’re on the subway or you just have downtime. It’s great because it means that instead of having a whole series of tabs of things that I want to read, I’ve got a very orderly list for later on.
[00:18:52] Cory: What are some ineffective things that you see young people doing, messing up with their careers?
[00:18:59] Kathryn: When I think about ineffective things that sometimes young people do, I’ll break it down into the basics and the higher order.
The basics are the basics for a reason. Have a strong handshake. Look people in the eye. Research a company before you show up for an interview. I would say that as much as some of that advice is career 101, I’m constantly amazed by how many people will sometimes put at risk getting a job that they’re otherwise highly qualified for because of something small like that. I would absolutely say, “Even if it’s just 15 minutes, brush up on the basics of applying to a job and interviewing.” I don’t want to go over those here but they’re really important.
When you talk about some of the more interesting stuff, I mentioned about high level researching a company. I think that that really is a skill. How can you learn enough about a company that you can successfully articulate to them why you’re going to be a great hire? Why you fit in with their organizational values? Why you can help them solve their core business problems? Obviously, you don’t want to go so far and leave somebody feeling like you’ve stalked them.
Unless you’re applying for a job that’s in research, think about how you can use that information that you may have learned about the company to inform your cover letter and your interviewing. One mistake is when a cover letter isn’t personalized. When it sounds like you sent the exact same thing to every company. Unfortunately, even though about half of hiring managers don’t look at cover letters anymore, the other half still does. Many of those people really value whether you took the time to personalize your cover letter to their specific company or to their specific role.
I think there’s the classic interview question that, “Tell me about a mistake that you’ve made.” Or “What’s your biggest weakness?” This is a really hard one to answer because if you try and pretend that you’re perfect, you’ve never made a mistake, you don’t have a weakness. You’re like, “Oh, I just work too hard.” That can be read by interviewers as a lack of self-awareness. You’re not really able to be fully honest and open about the areas where you’re improving. Instead, I think it’s really important to think ahead of time how you would answer a question like that. Ideally, choose something, whether it’s public speaking, time management, writing in a certain way that you can really demonstrate, “Here’s an area where I struggled in the past or where I made a mistake, here’s what I did to fix it and here’s how I’m making sure that I don’t do that again”. Those are some pretty important lessons.
[00:21:19] Cory: What are your biggest challenges today?
[00:21:23] Kathryn: There are a number of challenges on my radar today. I would say, one is that as The Muse grows and scales as a company, how do we keep our culture intact, how do we continue to live true to our mission and our values, while also evolving to meet the market, the landscape, to deal with competitors. I’m constantly thinking about that, I’m actively hiring right now for two senior roles on my team, as well as a number of other important roles across the company.
Constantly interviewing, meeting great people. That’s always a challenge because ultimately you want any hire to be the right fit for the company, and the right fit for the individual. That means balancing honesty and authenticity with also recruiting them, and trying to get them excited about the role. I think that certainly can be a challenge.
Finally, work-life balance or work-life fit is always a challenge because when you love what you do, especially when it’s as all-consuming as starting a company can be, it can be really hard to step away from that and find time for your most important relationships, find time for other things in your life. I have an amazing husband, we’ve been talking about getting a dog but there’s questions — how much time will that require? Do we have it?
I think just making sure that you make time for yourself and for your core priorities, in addition to your work, is so important. That’s something that I struggle with as an ongoing challenge.
[00:22:47] Cory: I have two more questions. One, any favorite books or podcasts that you recommend young people listen to?
[00:22:53] Kathryn: Yes. A couple of favorite books, I love the Hard Thing About Hard Things, which is Ben Horowitz. It’s a book about startups that is really fantastic. There is also a fantastic book that I love by a woman named Nilofer Merchant, called The Power of Onlyness. It’s really incredible, her thesis is all about how each of us has our onlyness, the position that we alone have, based on our background our life so far and what we can really bring to the world from that position. I found that a really tremendously good read.
As far as fiction goes, you didn’t necessarily ask but I’m reading a book called The Power by Naomi Alderman. It’s ridiculously good. I actually I’m a few pages away from the finish and I just can’t wait to have other people read it and talk about it with them. That’s been really exciting.
[00:23:41] Cory: Awesome. Is there anyone that you’d like to thank that has helped you in your career?
[00:22:36] Kathryn: So many people. I would say that I never could’ve gotten through those early difficult years without so many people that helped us along. One of our first advisors, Rachel Sklar, who is fantastic. My husband Jeremy put up with a lot in the early days, my business partner Alex is truly phenomenal. She and I are almost two halves of the same hole in many ways.
The list is so much longer than that, but given that I know we have to wrap and I can see my EA looking outside the window, telling me I got to go to my next meeting, I’ll leave with those three.
[00:24:16] Show Close
Listen to every episode of OFF RCRD on iTunes and stay up to date with the show at OFFRCRD.com.
