I am not job hunting.
You may – or may not- be too.
Having recently returned to my consulting practice, the last thing on my radar is to move back “inside” the corporate world. I had a great 4 1/2 years helping take a company from 3 to 330+ people. It’s my time to go back to my sweet spot of coaching execs and working with startups and leadership teams.
But when the pitch came from Spencer Stuart to look at a Chief Human Resources Officer role with a rising publicly traded biotech company doing great things for underserved populations, I jumped on it for the chance.
Why? A chance to learn more and meet the CEO, someone who I know from a distance as an exec people raved about.
And I also did what’s ethical; I let Spencer Stuart know I wasn’t looking, it was unlikely I’d take an inside role but that I’d also love to meet the CEO and take a meeting.
And whether you’re doing work you love, or work you hate, you’re usually one step away from significant change. How? Your company gets bought, your company buys someone, your boss changes, business tanks, etc. All things that may mean the job you have goes away.
Doing well in your career means being dedicated to your work but also not blind to nurturing a network of interesting people and opportunities outside of your current work – stuff that will help you if things change.
So here are my tips on managing this returning recruiters calls and interviewing stuff as someone working in the field for over 30 years:
- If there’s a chance you’d be interested in the role, learning about the company or meeting the would-be-supervisor, take a call when someone approaches you with a recruiting cap on their head.
- A chance to meet a hiring manager for a role that might have interest? Meet them. It might not be a fit now, but downstream they might want to hire you, or you might want to hire them.
- Develop an authentic sustaining work network outside of your job workplace. This is not the transactional sort of stuff most people engage in (e.g those with thousands of LinkedIn contacts they don’t know and can’t recall) but building real relationships with people you can carry over time. Read Reid Hoffman’s The Startup of You if you want specific ideas on what having a real network looks like.
- Not interested in role, company or hiring manager? Return the call or email with a thanks, not interested at this time. Don’t waste folks time – including yours – if you have no interest.
- Unless your interest is seriously piqued, don’t go beyond that initial interview with a recruiter and a hiring manager. It’s a waste of people’s – your time again too – to interview for something for which you have no interest. It’s also pretty lousy press if it’s clear you’re interviewing without any real interest in the role.
- Keep outside interviews to yourself; it causes weird things to happen internally if folks think you are shopping. At this point you’re not; you’re nurturing a network, meeting people, and learning.
The value of building an authentic network which includes meeting people through interviews is that it creates an ecosystem of people you know and trust. This is not the transactional, get-as-many-people-on-LinkedIn approach that many take. That approach, similar to speed dating, is mostly worthless.
Read Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha’s The Startup of You if you’re not clear on what it takes to build and maintain a real reciprocal work network. It’s fundamentally a small world – take the opportunity to meet the many interesting people that are out there.
And that CHRO role? Still unlikely and the CEO was better than advertised. Hope and hunch is we’ll figure out a way to work together in some form or the other.
I am a San Francisco-based executive, leadership and startup team coach More about my 30+ years of work in the field can be found at the “About J. Mike Smith and Back West, Inc.” sidebar at the Back West blog. Now welcoming new and known clients.