How I Found my Dream Job

Ever since I graduated from college in 2004, I have been searching for the mythical dream job. You know… that whole “I’m-a-millennial-and-I-need-purpose” whiny riff made famous by the character Princeton in the Broadway musical Avenue Q and reiterated by a generation of my peers? Yep. Well, am happy to report that earlier this year, I found that elusive job and I am now working in my dream role at LinkedIn.

The character of Princeton, from the musical Avenue Q (Image from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/AvenueQ)

But if you think that finding my calling was an overnight realization or a fortuitous accident, you would be sorely mistaken. It was a journey of thirteen years, across which I succeeded and failed at a wide variety of things, learned about the things that brought me joy and incited anger, and ultimately found (by chance) a job that employed my skills and desires. 

To understand the story, you'll need to know the three parts of my journey. Much like the holy trinity, my posts usually come in threes:

1. The Discovery (2004-2013): in which I began to explore the working world
2. Learning What I Loved to Do (2013-2016): in which I discovered which professional topics I was most passionate about, and
3. Putting it All Together (2016-present): in which I finally discovered the intersection of what I liked doing and what I was good at, built into a job that incorporated those skills and desires.

The Discovery (2004-2013)

My first five years out of undergrad were spent trying to convince myself that I was in love with the world of finance. I graduated with a business degree and managed to get myself a job as a financial advisor with no deep finance experience (only a summer internship in marketing and several years of teaching tennis). During my first year at Merrill Lynch, I got tapped to run a training course on a proprietary wealth management software system that had not seen a lot of use in my office. I discovered that I loved creating courses and teaching people. The company even flew me out to Hawaii to spend a week training our financial advisors, which to this day, still ranks as one of the best work trips ever!

But selling wealth management products did not feel like a calling and the financial crisis of 2008 gave me a sign that it was time to make a change. A nonprofit that I had volunteered for was looking for a full-time director of strategy and when the offer came, I jumped on it. The organization built leadership development programs for Asian professionals in corporate America, and because I had come to love my time as a volunteer, I thought I could bring the same passion to the job. Fortunately, this was the case. I loved working there, since it allowed me to network with people across industries, learn from senior leaders, and organize wildly successful conferences and events. But it also paid me the commensurate nonprofit salary and living in Manhattan on said salary was not going to be sustainable in the long term for me. So I gathered my resolve, applied to business school, and moved to Nashville, TN for two years to attend the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University.

I'd love to tell you that while at Vandy, I found the job I was meant to do and I'm still in it. But that would be a heinous lie. Although I studied the things that fueled my passions, there was a ton of pressure about taking an internship as soon as possible. And when I got an offer in banking, I took it because I didn't want to be left without a dance partner come the summer. This was a profound mistake that I would pay for later on as I veered away from topics that I enjoyed in exchange for a retreat to the familiar world of finance. I won't bore you with the details, but I had a great summer internship that resulted in an offer and eventually I accepted that offer. But people around me - mentors, professors, and friends - all expressed their bewilderment of why I chose to go back to banking when I clearly preferred talking about organizational behavior, talent management, and human capital management. I tried to justify my decision with a bunch of false truths -- that I could do well in finance or that I really loved investing. In retrospect, this led to a major revelation in my life. Within six months of starting my job at Credit Suisse, I knew in my heart that I had made a terrible mistake. I had gone to school to change paths - not go back down old ones. So I did what any recent MBA graduate would do in their job search. I built up a coalition of mentors and allies, applied for a job at Deloitte Consulting, and by some miracle (namely the intervention of an influential Vanderbilt alum) I got an offer and took it! But little did I realize how much more soul searching I would have to do to find my place.

Learning About What I Love and Hate to Do (2013-2016)

I spent the next few years working in management consulting and the experiences I had were eye-opening. The kind of projects I worked on ranged from slow moving and boring to constant action and exhaustion. I witnessed M&A deals, built training programs, helped a government entity protect children, and survived even brutal 6:30 AM workouts at a particularly famous fitness company (hint…it was Beachbody, the maker of P90X). But in all of the projects I did, I never had one client/assignment where I was in that state of "flow" - the positive psychology concept “in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.” (click here for the Wikipedia insights).

That is, except for one project in which I helped a company assess its talent brand and how its talent acquisition team could recruit better. It was a short project but I found the subject material enthralling - reviewing their Glassdoor reviews, understanding how their brand was being projected to the world, and trying to understand the story of why people would want to work there. While I was on the road, I engaged an executive coach to help me figure out some of the reasons of why I felt so unfulfilled by the work at Deloitte. She helped me realize what I had known all along - that I was at my best when I was teaching people, recruiting people, or trying to simplify complex concepts into smaller bits. These were elements that I was missing in my project work. Through conversations with industry colleagues, I learned that projects related to recruiting and talent strategy were infrequent for consultants -- to do this kind of work, I would have to work within an industry client, instead of consulting from the outside.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a road warrior consultant in the film "Up in the Air" (Image from https://variety.com/2015/film/news/george-clooney-up-in-the-air-revolution-1201617909/)

Eventually the road warrior lifestyle of a traveling consultant (and the awesome fact that I had started seriously dating my then girlfriend/now wife) meant I needed to get off the road. Armed with some of these new revelations, I joined a smaller consulting firm famous for its local model and good culture so I didn't have to be on a plane each week. From August 2015 until I found my dream job, I worked on two wildly different projects which each got me closer to where I needed to be. The first was consulting for a large utility, helping them develop the communications plan required to keep stakeholders informed and engaged while the organization went through a compliance program called NERC CIP. The details of this work aren't as relevant to this story, but the short of it is that this project was slow moving, bogged down by challenges from the organization, and dealt with a topic which didn't captivate my interests.

The five months I spent on this project were draining and difficult. People were content to stay in their silos and did not welcome outsiders or new folks to approach them. It made the workplace a tough place to be. The client's office was dark and dreary. It was devoid of natural light with tall office partitions that made seeing people challenging. It was during this time that I realized the importance of the physical workspace in which I spend most of my day. It became clear that I needed to be physically comfortable and stimulated wherever I worked (i.e. the foundational two levels of Maslow's hierarchy).

 Image from https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

When that project wrapped up, I was given a golden opportunity. Another project was beckoning - this time at a large technology company that you'd recognize - which involved helping them transform the manner and the system in which they recruited across the world. For someone who had loved the idea of connecting with people and wanted to make recruiting better, this was a dream project. I leapt at it. For 15 months, I learned the ways this company represented itself in the talent marketplace. I saw how my clients used technology and how things could be done more easily or efficiently. I spent a lot of my time on this client helping them to understand the rigor of and need for organizational change. Through working with these folks, I discovered how much I enjoyed working with recruiters and organizing complex information into easy-to-digest chunks. People kept telling me how valuable that latter piece was in business and that there would be a lot of demand for this skill. It became clear that I needed to solve complex problems in order to be fully satisfied (that whole “esteem” concept in Maslow’s hierarchy).

I decided to spend six months in the fall of 2016 working as a contract recruiter on the side in order to help a friend of a friend fill some sales requisitions for a growing technology startup. And even on tough days, I would still find myself pouring through literature on the field. Reading Lou Adler's The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired was a revelation that provided a different lens on how to get the right people into an organization. My mentor, Erika, who has tirelessly worked to support me in the seven years we have known one another, repeated (for what felt like the millionth time) that I needed to be connected to recruiting, be it as a headhunter or in a consulting capacity. It became clear I needed to be in the recruiting and talent acquisition world (that whole “self-actualization” deal from Mr. Maslow).

Putting it All Together (2016-Present)

That project at a large tech company that I mentioned earlier was an incredible learning experience. It was also located in Sunnyvale, which is an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. I don’t own a car so I took the company bus down there and back every day – a 2 hour one-way journey, which added up to 16 hours of commuting per week. This time commitment ground me down and eventually I realized how my health was suffering from not working out enough, sitting on a bus for four hours a day, and not eating particularly healthy. (for more thoughts on long term commuting, see my post from February 2017 entitled "What I've learned while commuting to Silicon Valley for the past year.")

Knowing I needed to get closer to the talent world, I decided to reconnect with a recruiter at LinkedIn about a Customer Success role that was open and looked like a great fit. Going to the LinkedIn office in San Francisco was like wandering into a play land. Modern technology in every conference room, delicious food and coffee available, and bright light illuminated the spirits of all whom I met there. The work sounded great, too - helping companies recruit the best talent in the world. I interviewed with the hiring manager, met the entire team, and was fortunate to land an offer. We negotiated on all of the usual things (compensation, day to day expectations, etc.), but eventually we came to an impasse. They needed to hire someone within two weeks – but I needed to give my company and my client more time to find a suitable replacement. So in one of the most difficult moments in my career, I turned down the offer. It became clear that timing is everything when it comes to matching talent to organizations. 

But my disappointment was short lived. On the day I informed the recruiter and the hiring manager that I would not be able to join, a friend of mine recommended me for a role on a different team at LinkedIn. This would not be on the customer success team, but instead supporting LinkedIn salespeople by providing thoughtful talent strategy solutions for their clients' talent acquisition challenges. The role sounded ideal. It would allow me to leverage my consulting experience to tackle fascinating problems. In addition, my friend's fiancée was on that team - she would be partnering with whomever got this role. So with her advocacy and support, I interviewed again. I met my future team. I spoke to the hiring manager. And at each stage, I used my LinkedIn network to determine whom we knew and what we had in common. For example, I discovered the hiring manager was from Vancouver, where I had lived and worked for a year, and we immediately discovered a shared fondness for British Columbia. It became clear how LinkedIn had played a role in helping me find my dream job (ironically at LinkedIn).

I got my job offer on a Monday in March 2017 and within a few days, I knew I had an amazing opportunity to make a change. Here I am, a little over two months into the new job and I can safely say I have never been happier. A friend of a friend recently asked me how I was enjoying it and I let it slip that this was my dream job. I immediately backtracked and told her that it was too early to say such things and be taken seriously. But then I told her about all of the lessons I had learned (as stated above in bold) and how my job incorporated all of those:

• I told her about the fact that I can dedicate an hour a day to working out and feel the benefits from living a healthier life, along with an improved diet. And that the office is designed in a way that always keeps me exposed to light and feeling physically comfortable.
• I talked about the variety of challenges I face each day and how I get to talk to people about how they recruit the best talent in the world for the coolest companies. Like…all the time.
• I told her about the sheer luck of talking to someone and finding a role that fit my skills and interests. Which just happened to be open. And the fact that one of the hiring managers was good friends with my ex-manager.
• And I told her that each day, I wake up excited to go to work and occasionally feel bad leaving at the end of the day.

After explaining those reasons, it made sense to both her and me.

So while it's still early, I can confidently state that yes, I have found my dream job. It only took me 13 years, a master's degree, three executive coaches, a mistaken foray into banking after business school, and a lot of difficult work days.

But now when someone asks me how I am enjoying my new job, I tell them “I have my dream job.” LinkedIn helped me find it. And it can help you find yours. The only question left is…whom will you meet or what will you learn on LinkedIn today?

Go find out.

Me, on vacation in Amsterdam recently

#linkedinlife