Preface

My new year's resolution for 2016 is to be more giving. Two months in, it appears that the most help I've provided is to people on their job hunts. So I'm writing here to generalize the thoughts I give.

If you're someone I know and you and I are talking careers, I'm not writing this to replace the contact I have with you. I'm just hoping it helps more people, too.

This will be a short series of posts. This is the first one, and it's because I encourage you to have the correct mindset about your job search.

The default way of thinking about "getting a job" harms you.

When we're young, it seems like "getting a job" or "getting a job I like" is a destination we'll reach by using little more than luck and a resume free of typos. It's often characterized as an audition process. We talk about making it past the current round of interviews and into the next one. We're all but sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring. 

I've learned that this is a toxic mindset. It harms your ability to get jobs, and the ones you do get will be lower quality for challenge, leadership, and compensation.

There is Supply and Demand. You provide the Supply, not Demand.

These two economic concepts are tightly related:

1. Supply and Demand
2. The Labor Market

The labor market, being one of many kinds of markets out there, is characterized by supply and demand. That's the definition of a market: a place where buyers (demand) and sellers (supply) come together to buy and sell.

Consider who's handing money to who in this transaction. Companies, which use money to buy your labor, are the demand. You, as an individual willing to sell your labor, are the supply.

• Most companies buy an unbelievable amount of labor. A company of 2,000 employees, averaging $150,000 of costs to them a year after salary, taxes and benefits, means the company spends $300 million a year on its employees. 
• An extra $5-10k in your salary is a drop in a $300 million ocean.
• Suppose the typical tenure at that company is 3 years. Using back-of-the-envelope math, that's 700 employees coming/going in a given year, which means two heads turn over every day counting Sundays. That's 10-15 hires (not interviews, but actual signed/sealed/delivered hires) a week just filling in gaps, before accounting for growth of the company. HR drones see the mundane routine of this hiring transaction, yawn, and to quote patio11, think "I wonder if the cafeteria has carrot cake today?"

In light of these figures, I think it's safe if we relieve ourselves of all the heart-pounding moments of interviews and calls and replace them with something a little more pragmatic and lower in blood pressure. And cold-blooded. We'll get to that process in additional posts, but while we're focused on the mindset...

If there's something you want, you have to find the right buyer for your skills

There are consequences to the new mindset that you're selling and the company is buying. Importantly, it stops you from believing a few falsehoods about your job search:

Falsehood #1: You can get that job in a highly competitive city if you just make it through the process.

I have too many friends who want to move to a cool city (take for example San Francisco) without taking into account what SF companies deal with.

Suppose you're a generic marketer. Companies in SF don't need to hire you and bring you out to SF. The area is already lousy with marketers. This is true for pretty much any role that isn't "software engineer from a top university." 

From the company's perspective, you are added expense and trouble. 

The expense is straightforward: those already in SF don't need relocation assistance. 

The trouble is because companies are risk-averse. If you were offered a job and relocated, then something went wrong during relocation or you bailed right around your start date, then not only is the company on the hook for some expense or liability, but then Mike the hiring manager and Sam over in HR have to explain to their managers why they chose you over the litany of local candidates for whom these things wouldn't have been an issue and wouldn't have cost the company 1-2 months of time in filling the gap on Mike's team.

Mike and Sam are aware of this. Why should they stick their necks out just because you like San Francisco's latest food trend?

It is possible to get a job in a city where you are not residing. It's also possible to get relocation assistance. But it requires that you not be generic. You have to be a specialist possessing skills which are needed in your field (or at a specific company) but are not already available on the local labor market. 

Falsehood #2: You can win a career shift on the back of your prior (unrelated) experience.

Suppose you're an artist by education and by career. You have a degree from a known university, specializing in graphic design, and you've worked in graphic design since graduation. You've had some exposure to websites, so you start applying to web engineering jobs. From the company's perspective, they fear you being a hanger-on, dragging down the productivity of existing engineers by requiring all kinds of hand-holding. Not to mention, there are probably engineers already applying to this job. It's possible to close this gap, but not immediately. I'll discuss how to do that in a later post.

Falsehood #3: Your desire for a company's [environment/perks/culture] mean you can work there.

We all have preferences in terms of working environment, company size, hours, travel, the balance of pay vs perks, team size, competitiveness, location, and many more things. And it's great to want those things. If we decide that one company is the right set of characteristics for us, that's great, but it means nothing until that's true and the company decides they want to buy your labor.

From the company's perspective, your desire means nothing (in the best case). The company's concern is filling in the hole left by Dave when he quit without warning, which makes Mike's life much more inconvenient since there is one person's work to be done. 

I previously mentioned the best case. I mean this. In the best, case your desire to work for a company is disregarded by the company. In less-than-best cases, less-than-scrupulous employers will use your desire against you in negotiation. Commonly this equates to lowball salaries, poor benefits, no relocation assistance, and other hallmarks of an employer that does not respect you as a skilled professional. I would encourage you to avoid these situations.

Don't be driven by demand

I believe that these falsehoods are driven by the mistaken belief that we're on the demand side, that we're choosing The One Job and then throwing ourselves at it. When we think of ourselves as the demand, and phrase things in terms of "I want ...", it drives us toward places where we can't sell our labor effectively. That ends up somewhere between unemployment, a lowball salary being accepted, or dissatisfaction on the job.

Coming soon

I'll write more posts about isolating your skills, creating a resume that shows momentum, and keeping interviews short and sweet without breaking a sweat.

I'd like to hear what you think. Tweet at me: @blakerson