Giving career advice: How to make it truly about them
COVID-19 has created enormous turmoil in the jobs market. On LinkedIn and elsewhere, I’ve seen people respond in different ways: some who find themselves suddenly without jobs are taking a beat to reconsider what they want before diving headlong into a job search. Others are creating office hours and virtual 1:1s to provide career advice and introductions. This post is aimed at people offering career advice, in the hope of amplifying its value. The guidance in this post isn’t specific to the current crisis, but as thousands of laid-off employees begin their journeys (hopefully) into new roles, it’s as important now as ever. At the same time, I recognize this guidance is most relevant to job-seekers with the luxury of time and/or choice in selecting their “next thing”, which is a privilege at any time, and especially now.
Earlier this year, I received a text message from a friend asking if I had a couple of minutes to chat. She was evaluating two job offers: one at a law firm in Australia, the other at a financial services company in New York City. Different countries, different industries, different functions; and she was struggling to decide which to choose.
One person she’d spoken with thought she should take the law firm role because it had a more structured training program. Another thought she should take the financial services company because it had a bigger global brand. After 5–10 conversations with friends, family and mentors, she had a mile-long list of pros and cons. And it wasn’t helping her make the decision.
We jumped on a call and she asked me the question I’ve heard so many times before: “what do you think I should do?”
I responded the way I always do: “what do you want?”
In my experience, the most useful career advice starts with the question: “what do you want?” Your role, in giving career advice, is to help the person figure out if a role is right for them. Expressing an opinion on what you think they should do (or sharing what you would do) is as likely to confuse as it is to be helpful. My friend Roy has observed, and I agree, that “most advice is autobiographical”. To borrow his language, the best career advice is truly biographical.
I decided to write this post after having flavors of the same conversation with three different friends. “I feel like half my network is Team Company A and the other half is Team Company B,” said a friend recently. Better if they had all been “Team helping her figure out what she wanted”.
Some beliefs about careers
My perspective on career advice is grounded in two foundational beliefs about careers.
Every role is somebody’s dream job. It may or may not be yours
We all optimize for different things in our careers. There’s no single “right” way to build a career; the wrong way to build it is to satisfy someone else’s definition of “success”. Most roles, in most industries, are someone’s dream job; they’re also someone’s worst nightmare. Not every trial lawyer wants to be a Supreme Court judge, and not all Googlers want to be the CEO of Google.
The truth is, a smart person can come up with a robust list of pros and cons for any role. What matters is how a role lines up with what a specific person is optimizing for.
If you’re happy and engaged at work, it’s hard not to perform. And performance gates everything else
I think both sides of the happiness/performance equation hold true: to perform in a role long term, you need to feel motivated and engaged. And, if you feel motivated and engaged, it’s hard not to perform. Performance in a role is everything.
Tactics: How to give the most useful career advice
If you agree with these principles, you’ll probably agree that in giving career advice, you have three roles — none of which is to tell the person what they should do.
- Help them articulate a clear, prioritized set of evaluation criteria (let’s call these “career happiness criteria”)
- Help them evaluate how various roles stack up against those criteria
- Hold them to their career happiness criteria
Role 1: Help the job-seeker develop “career happiness criteria” that are specific, but also generalizable across roles and companies
I generally tell people to aim for 4–5 prioritized “career happiness criteria”.
Career happiness criteria should be specific, but also generalizable across roles and companies.
Too broad: I want to work with smart people.
Better: I want a manager I can learn from, who is recognized as an expert in marketing and who has experience running large organizations. I am less worried about the team I’ll be leading, since I’ll have the opportunity to develop them, and/or to manage them into new roles if necessary.
Too broad: I like working cross-functionally.
Better: I want a role where I will be directly responsible for leading large cross-functional initiatives, such as new product or market launches.
Other examples of “specific but generalizable” career happiness criteria:
I want the role to be within a 30-minute commute of my home.
I want a role that gives me regular exposure to customers.
I want a role that gives me opportunity for “zero to one” invention, vs. running a system that has already been largely figured out.
I want to be executing an existing system, vs. building a team or a system from scratch.
I want a role that gives me the opportunity to develop managers.
I don’t mind working long days, but I need to be able to completely unplug on the weekend.
I find meetings draining; I want a role with as few meetings as possible.
I want a role that I know I can hit out of the park and looks similar to something I’ve done before, but in a new industry.
I want to be working on the product or function that drives a majority of the company’s revenue.
I want to have my own sales and account management teams, or at least have dedicated sales and account management teams that dotted-line to me.
I want to be working on a set of problems with an online/offline component.
I want to be running a business unit, vs. a functional team.
I want to work at a company with at least one board member from an underrepresented background.
I want to be the first Product hire at a small company and build the team from scratch.
Some career happiness criteria are evergreen; others apply to a specific job search, e.g. I’ve spent the last 5 years working on enterprise sales and I want my next role to be in consumer sales.
Criteria should be realistic and, as the advice-giver, you may need to play a role in setting the job seeker’s expectations.
How to help someone come up with their career happiness criteria
One of the best ways to help someone figure out their career happiness criteria is to ask them about the 3–5 times in their career they’ve felt most engaged at work. Why? What did those experiences have in common? Ask them also about the 3–5 times in their career they most dreaded going to work. Why? What did those experiences have in common?
In most cases, especially if you ask the “five whys” to get at the heart of what it was that gave or sapped the person’s energy, their career happiness criteria will emerge.
Feel free to share your own career happiness criteria and how you’ve seen them play out (or not) in different roles.
If the person is still stuck, ask them a series of questions, both about the type of company they’re looking for, and the type of role.
Some examples may include:
Company
Large or small? Ideal number of employees?
Early or later stage?
B2B or B2C?
What types of industries get you excited?
Role
IC or manager?
Business unit or functional team?
Do you prefer invention or execution?
Role 2: Help the job seeker evaluate roles by reference to their own career happiness criteria
Once the job seeker has a clear, prioritized set of career happiness criteria, you can help them evaluate roles against those criteria. Have you worked with the hiring manager? Do you have a perspective on what the role would look like, and what it would lead to? Those are valuable — but only to the extent they help the person evaluate whether a role meets their own career goals.
Suppose you’re consulted about an IC role you think wouldn’t lead to management opportunities. That information is critical to someone who is looking to lead people. It’s somewhat interesting, but also noise, to someone who loves being an IC. Knowing what the person is optimizing for helps you frame information, and avoid piling on “noise”.
Role 3: Holding the job seeker to their own career happiness criteria
A great recruiter or hiring manager can make any role sound compelling. The third part of your role is to hold someone to their own career happiness criteria. If, e.g., a person you’re advising says they need to be in San Francisco, point that out if you find them considering roles in the South Bay.
So, can you tell the person what you would do in their situation?
Job seekers almost always ask this question. Career decisions are big and hard, and it’s tempting to try to short-circuit the decision by asking people you respect what they would do.
If you have a clear understanding of your own career happiness criteria, the best way to answer the question is as a case study on how you’d apply them:
I personally wouldn’t take the job, and here’s why: two of the most important things to me in a role are x and y. Based on what you’ve told me, I don’t think this role would give me either x or y.
Otherwise it’s better to resist the question, explaining clearly that your role in the conversation is to help them figure out what they want.
My friend ended up taking the role at the financial services company. In her position, I would have taken the law firm. I didn’t share that on our call, and my hope is reading this article is the first time she’ll hear it. The financial services company was the right move for her.
Thanks to Roy Bahat, Anthony Goldbloom & Faryl Ury for their feedback on an earlier version of this post.
