Your Best Opportunities Come From the People Who Know You

Here is the next article in a regular series about my two professional passions, (1) bold management and (2) inspired product experiences. Purposefully short and contrarian, the posts won’t tell you what you already know; rather I will challenge you based on my reflections and my professional experiences. Feedback is a gift, so comments and disagreement are invited.

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Let’s begin with the today’s contrarian idea: the best opportunities will come from the people who know you. Chew on this as you post your resume on indeed.com, or you send an email to a recruiter or a hiring manager you have never met in pursuit of your next big career opportunity.

Certainly there is a place for recruiters, and the resume screening systems that most companies employ, but both vet first for past similar experience and thus tend to find candidates for whom the role will be incremental. The role will be a slight increase in scope, and perhaps you may manage 20 rather than 10 people; you probably will get to add “Sr.” to you current title.

This bias toward incremental makes sense because these systems are geared to avoid “a hiring mistake” where an unqualified candidate proves a poor fit for the culture, sucks up the air for 6 months, and makes everyone miserable. Everyone looks bad if the candidate leaves before the 1st year.

Is there a better way?

Yes. Your best opportunities will come from the people who know you — and in particular, from those people you know who are also trying to stretch into something bigger. It might be your old boss from 5-years ago who has taken a big new role, and needs someone he or she trusts, knows that you work with intense effectiveness, and that you have a complementary style. It might be someone you trained with in your medical residency, in the science lab, or with whom you bonded in your college fraternity. The common theme is that the “person who knows you” can calibrate you — they observed your motivation and how that motivation translated into both effort and success. They can calibrate you far better than someone you just met for an interview, and thus the person who knows you takes a bigger risk on you.

This premise turns conventional job hunting on it’s head — most of us run away (in secret) from these very people who can calibrate us best when we start to look for our next gig.

Ironically, the people who will take the biggest risk on you are those who already have a pretty good idea of your skills, your past successes, limitations and yes, past failures. But if their need is big enough and their firsthand confidence in you large enough, this is where you will see the fastest career progression. In the military they call this a “battlefield promotion.”

How do you put this into practice?

I will cover the practical tips in a follow-on piece but not to leaving you hanging, here are two practical thoughts:

• How you exit a company matters big time
• Brutal honesty: which co-workers regard you super highly and would sing your praises to their boss’s boss? Which peers think you were an average talent, or worse, a bozo?

In planning your exit, consider that peers tend to remember only how you join (e.g. I remember interviewing you) and how you leave (e.g. what happened to Marc? Did he stop showing up?) while forgetting most in the middle. If your exit has drama, and projects fail or engineers work weekends to catch falling pieces of a poor hand-off, those peers won’t want you anywhere near them when they take their big career stretch. In this light, giving only 2 weeks notice in your exit might not be in your best interest.

If my premise intrigues you, to make it actionable, you need to be brutally honest about what those past co-workers and peers think about you. There is a huge difference between those who felt you were an average talent, and those who regarded you so highly that they take personal risk to recommend you to their new boss’s boss or higher.

How do you know where you stack up? People tell you. If they put you in the “top” category they will reply quickly to your emails and phone calls when you ask for help; they will accept appointments for coffee. They will write you kind notes on your exit telling you how you really mattered to them personally. If they are more senior than you, they might ask you to stop by before you leave for a quick chat. They might even say, “I hope we can work together again someday.” Collectively, these people are signaling they believe in you; these are the traits that tell you if you can add someone to your “people who know me” circle.

In summary, each of us has a small circle of peers who fiercely believe in our abilities, motivations and potential. It’s these people who know us best from where our best opportunities will come.