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How to Find a Job You Don’t Want to Quit

The beginning years in the workforce entail constant trial and error, and that often translates into a lot of turnover. Most young people take the first job that’s offered to them, even if it’s not the best match, because they feel like having a job is more important than having the right job. Sound familiar? Think about it: You probably don’t know many people two years out of school who are in the same job they took right after graduation, and that number dwindles the more years you’ve been in the workforce. According to 2001 unpublished data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median length of time workers in their early twenties stay in one job has shrunk by half since 1983—from 2.2 years then to 1.1 now.¹

Like many young women starting out, Esther, 29, an architect in New York, says she was too eager to jump into her first job. After that experience she discovered the cardinal job-searching principle. “You really have to consider yourself a good enough product to sell. That way, you will look at a lot of places and not just jump at the first offer. With my first job, I sort of jumped the gun and it wasn’t the best experience. With my second job, which I’m a lot happier at, I came to visit the office and had them show me the project they were working on. Doing my due diligence made me a lot more confident about coming in on my first day, and ultimately happier and more productive at my job.”

Making a Match

Finding the right job match is a lot easier said than done. The reality is that most people don’t enjoy what they do. In a 2003 Career Builder survey, nearly one in four workers said they were dissatisfied with their job, a 20 percent increase over 2001. And six in ten workers said they planned to leave their job for other pursuits within two years.² But how do you even know where to start looking? To make the best match possible—and this sounds ridiculously obvious but is often overlooked—it helps to figure out what you are best at. The truism goes something like this: “Your learned skills augment your natural abilities.” Figuring out what you are good at and matching those skills to a specific job are going to make finding a prospect and making a match a lot easier.

Steve Jobs, the founder and president of Apple Computer, Inc., said in his commencement address to Stanford’s class of 2005, “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did…. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”³

The essence of what Jobs says is important. If you don’t find a job that in some capacity makes you tick, you will be miserable or, at the very least, less productive at work. Maybe finding the right match means you will have to start out as a cube monkey at some huge corporation, but then you should make sure it’s a company where you could actually see yourself rising through the ranks. Or maybe it means that you get paid peanuts at a nonprofit, but you believe in the cause and that belief is what gets you up in the morning. Think of it this way—you’ll work for ten thousand days of your life, and that’s too many days to not enjoy what you do.

Bobbi Brown, founder and CEO of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, is successful for a myriad of reasons, but she attributes it largely to the fact that she found a career that’s constantly exciting to her—in other words, a job that gets her up in the morning and motivates her to keep going through all the daily sludge and drudge. Brown’s advice to young women is that you’ve got to find the thing that tickles you.

If you are an accountant and you love fashion, perhaps try working in the accounting department of a fashion company. Marla Goonan, an executive career coach in San Diego, says this is critical to anyone starting out in the workforce. As a young woman, or young person for that matter, it’s important to learn about yourself—what really fires you up and how you want to spend the rest of your life. Goonan says that the question you ask yourself is “What can I do and look back at ninety and feel good about?”

Ask anyone who does something he or she loves and the person will tell you that it’s a lot easier to be effective if you enjoy what you are doing and social science research proves it. Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, University of Chicago economists and best-selling authors of Freakonomics, explored this idea in a 2006 New York Times article:

[Aders] Ericsson’s research suggests…when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love—because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.⁴

Lisa Witter, the general manager of Fenton Communications, says she put in years working for little pay at not-for-profits and knows firsthand how much doing what you love can drive success. “If you are staying late at work, or going to a networking event, you’ll take more pride in what you do if you actually enjoy it. I would say that for the first five years, I was networking all the time. But I wasn’t networking because I read somewhere that you have to network. I was doing it because I loved it.” Witter now, at 32, is running her office.

Landing a job you’ll love is really not all that abstract and mysterious. Like forming any partnership, taking a job is a leap of faith but, if you ask the right questions, you can often ascertain if it’s going to be a good match, and it will feel like less of a leap. Also, although it may seem counterintuitive, you can’t just think about the job search process as a desperate quest for someone, or anyone, to hire you; you’ve got to think about it as if you are also making a hiring decision—that you are the chooser, not the chosen.

Judi Perkins, who has been a job search consultant for twenty-five years and is the founder of findtheperfectjob.com, says the people who are the most successful at finding a job they love realize they have the power of choice. “People who end up in jobs they really like aren’t afraid to walk away from something that isn’t what they want.” Just because you’ve received a job offer doesn’t mean it’s the last job on earth. As women, we need to be particularly careful about falling into the “I’m just so lucky to have even gotten a job offer” mode of thinking. It’s a better approach to think about getting the right job offer.

In terms of practical, applicable things you can do to scope out the situation and make as graceful an entrance as possible, Perkins says there is essential—and sometimes not so obvious information that everyone should find out on a job interview to determine whether or not it’s a good match.⁵

1. Ask about job responsibilities. Job titles often provide no details about responsibilities, so be sure to ask the following questions during your interview:

 What are the priorities that will need to be addressed immediately in the position?

 Are you entering a newly created position?

 If not, was everything left running smoothly by your predecessor?

 Will you be picking up and continuing daily functions as normal, or be part of a new system within the company?

 Is there damage control that needs to be done?

 If so, is there a time line for the repair, and is it an achievable one considering your capabilities?

2. Find out about the past. Find out how long your predecessor had the job, why the person left, and if it was on good terms. This will help provide you with insight into some of the challenges of the position, and red-flag warnings as to internal problems in the corporation. In addition, scope out whether the company or department you are entering was recently restructured. A restructuring certainly doesn’t mean anything bad (it happens all the time with the merging of companies) but it’s part of the organizational landscape that you’ll want to have information about. If you find out there was a recent restructuring, ask why and how that will impact the position you are interviewing for.

3. Determine management style. Succeeding in your new job is often dependent upon how you are managed. By asking your interviewer questions about him/herself, you’ll be able to derive valuable information about the work environment you’ll be entering into.

Before you go into the interview, think about how you are best managed. Do you respond more positively to a hands-on manager, or are you comfortable and more productive when your manager is hands off? If possible, during the interview, determine the management style of your potential boss.

 By asking: “What’s your management style?” you’ll be able to use context clues to determine if your potential boss is a micromanager or a hands-off manager.

 By asking: “How do you bring out the best in your employees?” you’ll be able to determine whether your boss provides guidance to employees in need and if he/she will make a good mentor.

4. Assess the corporate culture. Perkins says it’s important to ask questions that reveal the pervasive culture of the department, or company as a whole. Generally speaking, companies—or departments—tend to be made up of similar types of people that are in harmony with the company culture and philosophy, and it’s smart to make sure you mesh well with that culture.

Therefore, it’s perfectly acceptable (and will probably score you bonus points in the interview) to ask your employer which of the following personality types are a good fit for the company:

 Detail-oriented people

 Self-starting, big-picture thinkers

 People who work well in teams or committees

 People who require specific directions and stronger managerial supervision

Once you’ve gotten this information, you can assess how you’ll fit in. According to Perkins, “An entrepreneurial person won’t function well in a committee environment.” By the same token, a person who needs a lot of structure might not function well in an entrepreneurial environment.

Bottom line: Do some soul-searching about the type of person you are and find a job that fits that. If possible, don’t try to fit yourself into a work environment that doesn’t match with your natural abilities.

5. Look for growth opportunities. Before accepting a job offer, you want to know if you are going to be stuck in assistant hell for the foreseeable future, or if it’s possible to transition out of the position within a year or so. To find out, ask questions like:

 Is there a review after six months?

 How long was the previous person in the position before he/she got a promotion?

Another thing to pay attention to is whether both men and women have grown within the company. If the interviewer only gives you examples of men who have been promoted, you might want to think twice about taking a job there.

Red Flags

During the interview, be alert for potential problem areas about the job. For example, if your future boss comes across as a tyrant during your one-hour interview, just think what it would be like working for him/her forty-plus hours a week. Some other red flags to be on the lookout for:

 Employees are working with their heads down, there is minimal office banter, and the people you pass in the hallways look stressed or angry.

 A dearth of women in positions of power. Are most of the female employees in low-level, administrative roles?

 Your interviewer asks you personal questions, such as “Do you have a boyfriend?” “When do you plan on getting married?” “Do you plan to have children?”

 Your interviewer is taking calls, checking his/her BlackBerry, and paging his/her assistant, all while trying to conduct an interview. If this person can’t make time for you now, it doesn’t bode well for the attention you’ll get once you are hired.

Career Coaches Aren’t Just for People Who’ve Already Had Careers

While many assume that young people will just find their own way when it comes to a career, the reality is that it’s much harder than that. With so many more options, high turnover rates, and fierce competition, your first few jobs can be, in a word, daunting, if not totally demoralizing. It’s why we could all use a little extra help. And although we are supposed to get this “coaching” in college or graduate school, people who have visited their career-counseling centers often feel the way the January 2005 Time magazine article summed it up: “Most colleges are seriously out of step with the real world in getting students ready to become workers in the post college world.”⁶

In this highly competitive job market, it’s harder to get a career-building first job than it is getting into an Ivy League college. The 2004 National Association of Colleges and Employers annual survey says that the number of college graduates increased 12 percent a year in the last two years, but the entry-level job market remains 23 percent below the level for the year 2000. That’s why this might be a good time to invest in some outside help. Profiled in a May 2006 New York Times article, D. A. Hayden and Michael Wilder, cofounders of Hayden-Wilder, a Boston firm whose clients consist primarily of newly minted college graduates, conducted in-depth interviews with fifty hiring executives at companies across the country in the summer of 2005, and were told by all of them that 80 to 85 percent of the job candidates they interviewed were poorly prepared.⁷

To prepare yourself, and give yourself the edge you’ll need, Hayden recommends going beyond the cursory look at the company’s Web site and really take your job search process to the next level. “If you are interviewing in the retail sector, for example, go look at the retail outlet, talk to customers, read analyst reports, read the chairman’s letter.” Essentially, you want to have value-added comments, observations, and perspectives. Even though these are entry-level jobs, you want to show that you’ve given the position some genuine thought. It’s this approach, Hayden says, that lands 98 percent of her clients in career-track jobs.

Her advice to young women for achieving this goal is:

 Find Your Focus—This often takes a very serious examination of your natural skills, personality, and interests. Seeking outside help from a career coach can be useful in assessing these things. Hayden calls the people graduating commencement castaways, because they are left unguided.

 Develop a Network. This is a group of people you can call on to help you throughout this process. Start making a contact sheet of people you know, or would like to know, in your industry. Then start reaching out.

 Do Your Homework. You want to know everything you can about the organization. This means going beyond the Web site and mining every piece of material you can find. Taking it a step further, it means finding trustworthy secondary sources. Think of it as if you are doing the research to write a paper on the company or organization with which you are interviewing.

TAKEAWAYS

 Approach the job search process as if you’re the person doing the hiring.

 Think about how your natural skills will augment your work.

 Find a job that makes you tick.

 Consider seeking career counseling, either through your school, or with a professional career counselor, to help you find your focus.

 Interview the company as much as they interview you in order to determine whether the job is a good fit.

 Do your due diligence, and make sure you have comments, observations, and insights beyond general knowledge about the company.

 Don’t just think about finding “a job,” think about finding a career-track job. Ask yourself, “How will this help me get where I want to be in twenty years?”