Committing to the Search
I had returned from taking a long break from work and was seeking to find a new exciting role. I didn’t have to have a job right away, but I knew that I wanted one. The big question I asked myself was how am I going to navigate finding a new role? It had been a long time since I did a proper job search so I was starting from a new place. I began by calling up people in my network and having a semi structured approach (to finding a role), which ended up going fairly well, but messy and not as well as I wanted. My goal here is to articulate what I find to be useful to do in finding a new role. I’ve done a few searches since then and have gotten much better and have captured the learnings, which I want to share.
The decision of how to spend our days is one of the big questions each of us gets to grapple with and it benefits everyone to take it seriously. You are the only person truly responsible for how you spend your days. Where we choose to work takes up just under half of your waking hours and will have a significant impact on the whole picture of who you are and how fulfilling your life ends up being. Are your days fulfilling and engaging or are you just punching the time clock? No one else is going to care as much about your experience working as you. Take ownership of it and author your path forward to best serve yourself.
Before I start looking at roles, I start by thinking of what my non-negotiable, foundational needs and wants are. This ends up requiring some fairly deep introspection to stress test what is truly required vs what is just a nice-to-have. You may have certain medical needs or the requirement to not be on call at night. Maybe you want a certain cash flow to support the lifestyle that you want to maintain. Whatever it is, make sure you note this down as a prerequisite for talking to companies as you need to be clear on what the ‘must haves’ are. This will allow you to run a search with your particular needs in mind. This may seem obvious, but I see many people skip over this phase which can cause them to feel compromised in their new role. Make sure that your non-negotiables, really are non-negotiable. Don’t fall into the trap of putting ‘wants’ into the ‘must have’ category as this may prevent you from seeing the true opportunities which are open to you.
Once I’ve sorted out my ‘must haves’, I move on to thinking about the personal path in my life. What is it that I want to do more broadly? This includes the personal, social, emotional and physical goals to be achieved. Self authoring is a tool I’ve personally found incredibly useful in organizing my thoughts. The Self Authoring framework helps you make sense of your past and to chart a path forward from the best of yourself. Approaching life holistically will allow you to pick where you want to go and ensure work supports your journey and goals, as opposed to being a drain that leaves only a life lived in the slivers of time that are outside of work. You may not know exactly where you want to be, but you can certainly set up your life to point in the right direction and aim for improvement over time.
By now you should have a sense of what matters in your life and where you want to be going. Congratulations, you’ve made a solid foundation to starting a job search and should be in a far better place to judge what opportunities make sense for you. The time you spent self-authoring has allowed you to clearly articulate to others what you are wanting thus making the journey and goals far more likely. This however, is where things can get tricky. The process of finding a role and how it fits, can vary greatly from person to person. That said, there are definitely some approaches I have discovered that can make a big difference in helping to find what you are looking for.
Network:
This is the best way I know to find a new role. Talk to people that you know personally and professionally about opportunities that might be coming up. Often I’ve found that people can do a great job of translating what you are looking for into their own insights about what opportunities are out there. It also helps to have some connection to the companies that you want to work at through someone who believes in you and wants to help. If you feel that you don’t have a network, start developing it! Get to know your colleagues (or coworkers), go to events, email people you’d like to get to know better and ask for advice! If you are curious to find new strategies to building a network, check out Will Larson’s excellent article about meeting people.
Crunchbase:
Yes you’ll most likely be spending a lot of time on Crunchbase. They have been the goto source about startups for quite some time now. Information about who the founders are, the investors, how long the business has been around etc is all there… It’s the fastest way I’ve found to get a sense of what company x, y or z is about. You can also invert this search and use it to find new companies that you might be interested in. Pairing Crunchbase with LinkedIn is definitely going to help you find the connections within the businesses you are interested in.
VCs:
If you’ve been in startups for a little while, it is likely you know some VCs out there. If you have been able to make a big impact in one of their financially backed companies, it may make sense to take a look at their portfolio and see what companies are interesting to you. Many VCs will focus on a particular segment of the market, which will help you identify businesses that seem viable and are likely in a growth phase.
News media:
Toward the bottom of my list are the news outlets. You can find businesses on TechCrunch, Hacker News, Venture Beat etc… A lot of the time it is difficult to get a strong signal of how a business is really doing. Most of these publications focus on gaining readers and drawing people in, as opposed to giving businesses a fair shake.
If you’ve done the work I mentioned above and looked at your network to get connected, again, congratulations you’ve done a fantastic job of preparing to have future conversations with companies. Take the time to celebrate this milestone since you’ll be building off this strong foundation. Make sure to catch my next post about running a job search.
