How to Find Community During Your Job Search

Job hunting can lead to self-doubt and loneliness —?especially after facing rejections or silence from employers. Everyone needs a community where you can be vulnerable and talk about your insecurities and fears regarding the job search. Yet, just showing up to networking events can be intimidating for many people. So, what's another solution?

Phyl Terry, who is the author of Never Search Alone: The Job Seeker's Playbook, helps people search for jobs at the intersection of their dreams and market realities. They chat with LinkedIn News Editor Andrew Seaman on the latest episode of the Get Hired podcast to explain how to find, build and nurture a community during good and bad times in your career. The two also discuss why it’s important to figure out your candidate market fit and figure out your core talent.

You can listen to the episode above and find a transcript of the conversation below.

TRANSCRIPT: How to Find Community During Your Job Search

Andrew Seaman: You may feel a bit lonely when you run into tough times during your job search and career. One way to overcome that is to consciously build community. How? Well, we're talking all about it on today's episode.

From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn Senior Managing Editor for Jobs and Career Development, bringing you conversations with experts who, like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

So many people feel shame when they're looking for work, especially after a layoff or firing, or when they're struggling in their current jobs. As a result, they tend to isolate and that can make them feel lonely on top of everything else. One way to help prevent and overcome those feelings is to build and lean on community. Unfortunately, a lot of us aren't great at doing that. I'm certainly not. So how do you find and build and nurture a community during a job search or a bumpy time in your career? Well, today we're talking with Phyl Terry, who is the founder at Collaborative Gain and the author of Never Search Alone, the Job Seekers Playbook. Here's Phyl.

Phyl Terry: I have to give credit to my mother. She grew up without a lot of resources. And she went to college, she made her way through, she paid her way through college and she was so proud to be a teacher. She said, "Okay, we got to get everyone off campus, all the teachers so we can ask for help and support each other in a council." She ran that for 50 years until she passed away. And so she taught me this growing up.

But I got into college and I put together a council of all the progressive student groups and I saw how powerful it was. And then in business school I did the same thing. Then I got involved in the internet world. I ran a company called Creative Good. We were like pioneers in customer experience, working with Apple and Microsoft and Facebook later. But after the dotcom bubble burst, it was a great depression in our world and I realized, holy moly, we should bring people together.

So with Marissa Mayer, then at Google, and Maryam Mohitand Amazon, and Elizabeth Peaslee at Travelocity, I created this community for people in jobs, and that's what I've been doing ever since. But along the way, they lost or left their jobs, and the traditional job search didn't work. It was so lonely and I would see them make bad decisions because of fear and insecurity. And the big insight over 20 years is that no matter who you are, you could be the CEO of a public company, right, with a great reputation, but when you start looking for a job, you feel insecure and fearful.

So we run this free program where anyone in the world can go to phyl.org and sign up for a free job search council and have a team of volunteers that'll match them.

I was running this orientation yesterday, we had about a hundred people, and what I love about the orientations is that it brings everyone together. This community is so broad. It's like from college students to CEOs. Everyone, we're humans. Everyone needs a separate space where you can be real and talk about your insecurities and fears, and where you can just be human beings together. And that gives you then the confidence and the hope to then go out and be your best self in the interviews on LinkedIn, whatever you're doing.

Andrew: And I guess that is the importance of community where you can have that safe space and realizing that other people are facing the same obstacles.

Phyl: Yes. And when it comes to important human moments like the job search or a promotion, these key moments, we all need an emotional environment to be everything we can be.

There's sort of three major mistakes I've seen people make in the job search. The first is they search alone, and that amplifies fear and increases risk of making suboptimal decisions. Just take a job just to quell the anxiety. And I see people get stuck in sort of this loop of rebound jobs that don't end up helping them move forward.

The second mistake is people spray and pray, and forget that in the job search, they're the product, their skills and experience are the product they're offering to the market. Really important, you got to think about what you want, but you also have to understand the market. What's the market opportunity? And you got to figure out your candidate market fit. You got to go do research. You are the product here, and that's nerve-wracking but powerful.

And then the third mistake is that people get passive during the interview and negotiations. They sort of rely on the company to know what they're doing. And here's the secret, they don't know what they're doing.

Andrew: Exactly.

Phyl: So you got to boss the process. You have to write your own job description, which can really drive a whole bunch of great questions during the interview. But those are sort of the three mistakes I see people make.

Andrew: Yes, especially the spray and pray method because I think a lot of people, they view the economic reality as I can be everyone's solution to everything. But the reality is that that actually decreases your value in the labor market because first of all, you can't be, and it also means that you're good at a lot of little things. It doesn't mean that you're really, really good at one specific thing.

Phyl: Yes, be a jack of all trades, but a master of one.

Andrew: Yes, exactly.

Phyl: We can be expansive, but we can't be reductive.

Andrew: Yeah. What are the traits of a good job search council? And then also how do you go about actually putting one together?

Phyl: What you want to do is you want to get a group of four to eight people, sort of in that neighborhood, and you want them to be more or less at your peer level, meaning about the same amount of experience, but it's nice to have a mix. You want diversity in gender for sure, and orientation, as well as experience and function and so forth, so product and marketing and engineering. Or a teacher who's looking to transition into the corporate world and someone who's worked in communications and someone who's worked in HR but have around the same level of experience. Because they bring different things to it, and that really creates a wonderful dynamic environment. So that's number one.

Andrew: Yeah, definitely. And once you get your little group together and your council, what do you do then? How does the rubber meet that road?

Phyl: The first meeting, before we start the job search work together, let's get to know each other as human beings. Talk about our lives, talk about what's been hard, let's build some trust and community, and that's super important. And then off of that, the very first exercise is what I call the Mnookin Two-pager. This is named from Alison Mnookin. She was a senior executive at Intuit in Silicon Valley. She and I were working together and she created this Mnookin Two-pager, which is what do you want? And what do you want question is hard for a lot of people, especially earlier career. So I say, start with what you don't want. That's so much easier. If you want to learn how to succeed, figure out first how to fail, and then avoid that. They do this together and it's so bonding in the group. And then they go out and they do their listening tour.

This is the market research where they do at least 15 one-on-one conversations where they're trying to understand how does the market see them, how does the market see their credible for, where's the opportunity, all driving towards this candidate market fit.

Now I'll tell you that people feel really nervous about doing this. They're like, "I'm going to talk to people and ask them what they think about me?" All that fear we were talking about earlier about I'm not wanted comes up. But it's the exact opposite. They feel so loved, and that's really wonderful.

Sometimes you also discover, hey, the market has changed. We had a member, I'll call him Evan, who was an EVP. He had a traditional media company. He had first class plane tickets, corner office in Manhattan, but he decided he wanted to go work for a pure place streamer in the valley.

What he discovers is that to move into a streamer, he was going to have to take a much more junior role than he was used to. And so it was like that's a big ego hit. But he kind of went through this and his job search council like, okay sometimes you need to do a two strategy to get what you want. So for him, he needed to take it several steps down, take that as his first step. And then after several years at one of the big streamers, boy, he had this amazing resume. And sometimes you have to say, "Okay, maybe I need to take a step or two before I get to where I really want to go."

Andrew: And also, I assume that person was able to capitalize basically on their past experience, it's just they needed that little foundation in the streaming world to say, "Okay, now I can pair this with my past experience and really catapult forward."

And also, I just want to emphasize that you say listening tour, because a lot of people, they go into those meetings early on and they all say, "Oh, great, you like your job. Can I have one?"

And so I assume that you stress that this is not about finding a job at the people who you're talking to. This is about learning what they do.

Phyl: That's right. And thank you for bringing that up because this is a challenge. And I say to people, "I'm asking you to do some work here."

Not every conversation is gold, but you start to see a pattern and then that gives you wonderful guidance. So then create your candidate market fit based on that, and then go back to all those people you spoke to in the listening tour and your broader network and publish this on LinkedIn and say, "Okay, this is now what I'm looking for. Could you please keep me in mind if anything comes your way?"

You need that candidate market fit to be really clear, focused and narrow. Because if you do that, then those listening posts will activate.

Andrew: Yeah, definitely. When you get specific about what you want, people can be specific about the help they can provide. Because when you go out into the world and say, "I need a job," someone will say, "What kind of job?"

But if you get specific and say, "Listen, I want to be a forensic accountant who's mid-range," they can say, "Oh, you know what? My cousin works at Ernst and Young," and connect with them so they could be more specific about the help that they could provide. So I really like having that candidate profile, publishing it, and also just spreading it around so people know what you actually need.

Phyl: Yeah. First of all, people often don't know exactly what they want and they're afraid to even own what they want. And then they're afraid that if they really own that, all they can think of is all the things they're shutting out. They're not realizing, oh my gosh, they're opening all these doors.

Andrew: And in fact, yeah, I was just talking to someone today that a lot of people, they view the destination as sort of the final landing spot, but really it's just a new beginning because you're going to keep evolving and you're going to keep wanting to move forward.

Phyl: Yes. And the market evolves.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Phyl: It's dynamic. When I went to business school, I thought I wanted to be a CEO of a big company. Of course, everybody thinks that at business school. I do not want that job. I really learned that.

Andrew: Exactly. And it's okay not to want that job too. And something that I wanted to ask too is because obviously when you go through these steps, and the steps that you outlined are going to increase your odds of getting a new job. You're going to likely do it at maybe a faster pace than if you were to do it alone. But not everyone will be hired at the same time. So if you have four people in a council and you're meeting weekly or biweekly, or one person might get hired, another person may get hired and then the other person was in the hiring process, but you're still not, how does that get handled? And also how should people process that? Because that can also deepen that, ooh, I'm not wanted.

Phyl: Well, I'm happy to tell you that it doesn't deepen that. Because of the small group dynamic, what we've seen is that people are just so excited for the success of others. And the people who get jobs also will often stay involved.

When you form a council, I ask you to create a charter. And in that charter, one of the decisions you make is, hey, are we going to stay together until everyone gets a job? Or how do we want to process that? Sometimes people say, "I'll stay here." And then they start a new job, and it's so overwhelming as we know new jobs can be, that it becomes hard. So what we'll do, and even if you create your own job search council, you can merge with another group if yours has gotten small. Or if you're part of our community, we'll do that for you.

Andrew: We'll be right back with Phyl after this break.

Andrew: And we're back talking about how to find a solid community while job searching, with Phyl Terry, founder of Collaborative Gain and author of Never Search Alone, the Job Seekers Playbook.

Also, what I want to pick up on too is something that you mentioned is that a lot of people, they find themselves out of work and they'll say, "Oh, I haven't been networking and I'm starting from scratch."

You're not really starting from scratch because you have your family, you have your former colleagues, you have friends from college, things like that. So even if they don't feel like a professional network, they are in a way.

Phyl: Yeah. And I sell something people always get surprised by. I'm not a networker. I'm a community builder. And that involves bringing people together, but we can build relationships, and then those relationships in this council can help you network. Because you do need to network in the job search, you do need to be able to do that, and having a home base and a support group. And as you say, no matter who you are, you have some already. And you can come to this community, you can come to your community, that you can join communities where you're going to get more support. And there's so much out there.

Andrew: Honestly, some of the best messages I've received over the years when I used to do live programming on LinkedIn, and I still do it from time to time, is I would get messages from people that said, "Hey, I met these people in the comments and we're going to have a Zoom call together."

And I always love that because it's already showing how brave they are, that they want to reach out and form that community.

Phyl: Oh, I love that.

Andrew: And before I let you go, the other question I have for you is for people out there who maybe they're in the middle of their job search and they've been interviewing, obviously they can still go to your website, which is P-H-Y-L.org, right?

Phyl: That's right.

Andrew: For people who are saying, "I kind of have momentum, I'm trying to move forward," what would you say for them? What is the most impactful thing that they could do?

Phyl: Boss the process. And what I mean by that is forget the job description the company has written. I want you to create, you can go to phyl.org, P-H-Y-L and download the free tools. What it basically is, is you're going to write a job description, but an accountable one, one with objectives and key results, and you're going to write that privately while you're interviewing. And you're going to let that inform your questions, which are going to be sharp and fabulous questions. You've got to really pay attention when you're interviewing. When you're talking to someone, they're telling you all kinds of things about themselves if you are paying attention. Too many times, we want to believe this is a good company, we want to believe it's a fit for us, and we blind to the red flags.

But you write that job mission and then if things start to get serious, but before you get an offer, if you're getting the sense that maybe you're a finalist, I want you to call that hiring manager and set up a meeting. I don't want you to send them an email. I want you to get on the phone or in person, over coffee and say, "Listen, I put some thoughts together about what the job is, and I want to get your impression. Did I understand it correctly?" It will blow them away. They'll be like, "What? You did this? This is fabulous."

Andrew, the big challenge in interviewing for companies is distinguishing between people who can interview well, who are good talkers, and people who are actual doers and who can work well on a team. And when you show them this document, you are showing them you're a good listener, that you are motivated and have self-initiative, and that's so valuable. It blows them away, and it increases the odds of an offer.

And then when you get the offer, you can use this job mission with OKRs to negotiate not just comp, but all four legs of the negotiation stool; budget, resources, support, and of course comp. In other words, what do you need to succeed?

Now, if you're a college student, you're not going to negotiate budget and resources. I get that. But you can negotiate support, training, coaching. And if you're more senior and you're going to have some team or budget, then negotiate budget, negotiate resources. This is your moment of maximum leverage. The moment you say yes to the job, your leverage goes way down.

Andrew: Yeah, and also what I really like about that is there's so many times where people don't realize that a lot of times companies, and you mentioned this at the top of the discussion, it's not necessarily they don't know what they're doing, but they don't know what they want. If they're hiring for maybe a role that's new, you'll go into the interview process and they'll say, "Well, we kind of need someone to do X, Y, and Z, but maybe B."

And if you could go in there and say, "Here's what I could give you," a lot of times you might know better than them. So I think that's really smart. You obviously have to read the room, but I think that's really great. And I know we could probably talk about this forever, but is there anything that maybe I didn't ask that you'd like to add?

Phyl: This is kind of additional and hard work. It's a challenge that comes up. And what I tell people is that on average, I'm asking you to do about 80 hours more work than you would normally think you would do in a job search. And the counterintuitive reality is that you're going to find a job faster this way. But you're going to not feel like that initially. So I'm going to ask you to trust. Because we've tested it with a thousand plus people and now we have nearly 500 of these jobs search councils running, I'm going to ask you to trust. And most importantly, you are worth it. I mean, you're going to spend 90,000 hours in your career. Don't you want to invest 80 hours in finding a job that's going to better position you? That is less than 1% of 1% of 1%.

Andrew: Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much for what you do, and also stopping by to spread what you've learned, which has helped a lot of people. So I really appreciate your time.

Phyl: Well, thank you. What an honor to be here. I hope everybody listening listens to all the episodes. You should.

Andrew: Thank you.

That was Phyl Terry, founder at Collaborative Gain and author of Never Search Alone, the Job Seekers Playbook. Remember, it's up to you to put our advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.

Also, if you liked this episode, please take a moment to leave us a rating on Apple Podcast. It helps people like you find the show. And don't forget to click the follow, subscribe, or whatever other button you find to get our podcast delivered to you every Wednesday. Because we'll be continuing these conversations on the next episode right here, wherever you like to listen.

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. This episode was produced by Alexis Ramdaou. Rafa Farihah is our associate producer. Assaf Gidron engineered our show. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Dave Pond is head of news production. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Courtney Coupe is the head of original programming for LinkedIn. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.