Open Thread: The American Job Search
I’ve been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn lately because I’m looking for work. I’m grateful for my coaching clients and for the community that we’re building here, dear readers. But I’m exploring industry roles to give those ventures more time to grow.
LinkedIn has been good for me. I’m meeting new people, building a network, trying to embrace the advice I’ve been given by many academics who have preceded me in pivoting to industry. Don’t leap to the resume and the cover letter. Give yourself time to talk to people, learn about their projects, and see what feels like a good fit for you. Try to find someone who can give you a referral or connect you to someone else who can. The consensus seems to be that a meaningful discovery phase takes at least a few months. So I’m trying to be patient, make a little headway each day, and arm myself with the knowledge I’ll need to start defining my search more narrowly, developing my application materials and skills, and delivering results.
I have some measurable benchmarks of progress. After posting regularly on LinkedIn for just three months, I’ve seen three posts reach more than 20,000 readers. Here, here, and here. It’s heartwarming to know that my interview series is providing a service to others in transition. And I like being able to shift the focus from myself to the stories others have to tell. It’s more consistent with my approach to teaching: less “sage on the stage” and more “guide on the side.”
But nearly every day I also see a plaintive message on LinkedIn from someone with deep industry experience who has applied to many jobs over the past six months to no avail. After faking optimism for so long, some people just strip away the pretense.
The Jobs section of LinkedIn brims with limitless possibility. But often the space feels as hollow as a shopping mall. Job seekers might adapt Stephen Crane’s classic poem to capture the mood:
I said to the marketplace:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the marketplace,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
Take, for instance, this bone-chilling post. Keeton expresses the real human pain that capitalism so often ignores.
As you know from my earlier piece on bright-siding in academe, I hew more to the Barbara Ehrenreich school of vigilant realism than to the Joel Osteen camp of dreaming your destiny into being. I can grind with the best of them. Most mornings you’ll find me running the backroads before sunrise or pumping iron with other early birds. I don’t need a Peloton trainer to tell me You can do hard things. In fact, being kind to myself is often harder than embracing the burn. But there is a difference between grinding blindly and leaning into work with confidence that you’ll see a return on your effort. The story that Ehrenreich tells in Bait and Switch, where she goes undercover in a futile attempt to land a white-collar job, is still alive and well.
Most of us know that it’s networking, not blanketing the web with applications, that really opens doors in industry. What I’ve learned from mentors like Gertrude Nonterah, Joe Stubenrauch, Elissa Gurman, Aditya Mahara, and Larry McGrath is that building relationships, even in virtual spaces, can make more difference than skill acquisition or a perfectly polished resume. I appreciate that kind of advice because it feels honest. There are no guarantees, but there is an actual playbook to follow for a first-generation professional like me, who has no favors to call in from anyone in industry. I remain hopeful that more focused efforts, informed by their guidance, will bear fruit.
But there is still something phantasmic about these jobs that keep appearing in my alerts. I know that the only way behind the curtain is through actual people, and yet I can’t say that I feel any differently about my prospects in industry than I did about my chances on the academic job market in 2005, when the odds were routinely 200:1. Those odds are so dismal for newly minted PhDs now that most Assistant Professors reject the notion that they earned their position. The honest ones admit what everyone knows: they won the lottery.
Americans desperately want to believe in the meritocratic ideal. We want to earn what we have, and we’re more than happy to absorb pain to make gains if we feel the goal is within reach. But if a great many jobs in business come from knowing someone who can either open the gate for you or connect you to someone who can, then it might not matter how hard you grind without an “in.” A project manager I spoke to recently said he only hires people he knows — the one time he hired a stranger who looked perfect on paper, it was a flop, and he won’t make that mistake again. That’s discouraging on some level. But while you’re still standing outside the gates of the working world looking in, sometimes you really appreciate honesty about your odds.
It’s hard to reconcile the reports about jobs with reports about layoffs. A lot of these reports conflate many industries, so a breakdown like this one from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is perhaps a better reference. But the more nuanced story is not more reassuring. There were 1,694 openings in Professional and Business Services in June, 2023, and 1,135 hires. But there were 1,143 layoffs in the same month, which means more people freshly out of work than those newly hired. My takeaway: it’s a tough time to be looking for work, especially without industry experience. One way I find resilience is by showing myself compassion — acknowledging that this is really hard.
Questions:
What story do you see in the reports about job creation, hires, and layoffs? For those of you who weathered the 2008 recession or the upheaval in 2020, how does the 2023 job market compare?
If you are looking for work right now, how are you going about it? What are your strategies for standing out in the crowd? How do you keep your hopes up for six months to a year?
Do you think the meritocratic ideal is still true of the American workplace, that if you just keep at it, keep grinding away, your efforts will come to something? Or is the lottery metaphor more apt?
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Outside the gates of the working world... I can so relate to this, Josh. I have been there. I often think of it as the "professional wilderness." You're outside the gates of the city, in a place that many others are afraid to visit. But their fear does not have to be your fear. Your integrity brought you here, and your integrity will guide you on. Although pragmatism says you should get back on the payroll as soon as possible, try not to rush back to the city. The wilderness offers more possibility. "It's opener here in the wide open air, where things can happen and frequently do, to people as brainy and footsy as you" (Dr. Seuss, surely misquoted).
On a more practical note, I offer that if getting a job depends on networking, and networking depends on relationships, and relationships must develop naturally, then networking can't be forced. It can't be a meetup or a mixer. It has to be kickball or sewing club or something like that. Let other people see you doing something you love. You at your best. I think you're already doing that by sharing your writing. The rest is in time's hands
It feels wrong to me that a job should be a "prize" -- it feels to me like a destructively misleading mixing of metaphors. A job may be something you compete for, but it's not a reward, it's a contract to work for remuneration. A job application is a "bid," and an interview is a demonstration, getting the job is always contingent on performing the job, and the job can be done perfectly but the contract still canceled because of external factors. No one should tie their sense of self up in this uncontrollable game, even if one chooses to play. Humans have been hustling and pivoting and exploiting for as long as we've existed. Rather than getting hung up on tethering by contract to an institution with the idea that the institution will protect and relieve the stress of life -- even if that means moving 1900 miles away, or bolting yourself to a laptop for hours a day -- we should look at the ground we're standing on and see what needs to be done or made or sold here. My kids are great at this: they have no concept of working for a company and don't want to move away. They want to breed expensive dogs and raise alpacas and sell eggs and mow lawns. If they follow these instincts I suspect they'll be happy. Anyway, just a counter-thought to add to the mix. :)