Will students find your career advice off-key -- or off the charts?

Earlier this week, I heard a fascinating presentation by two new colleagues at LinkedIn: Kayla Moutry and Meg Shriber . They’ve been here less than six months, but that’s not a problem. In fact, it’s a source of expertise.

Last spring, Moutry was finishing her studies at the University of Tulsa ; Shriber was doing the same at the University of California, Berkeley . Now they’re part of our big rotational training program for recent grads. And they’ve just completed an analysis of the ways college students think about career readiness.

I can’t share their specific ideas about what LinkedIn should do next, except to say that we’ve always had a strong interest in the student market. What I do want to highlight in this article, though, is a recent-grad insight from Moutry and Shriber that’s valuable to anyone providing career advice to the next generation.

“As Gen Zers and as students, we’re very big on being authentic,” Moutry told us, early in her briefing.

That means making room for excitement and curiosity. It means finding a cadence that’s often more like TikTok than a textbook.? And it means bringing your whole personality to the workplace – or your social media presence – rather than code-shifting into the buttoned-up norms of someone else’s world.

Where else does the importance of being authentic take us? As Moutry and Shriber explained to us, it’s a reminder to make room for life’s quirks and stumbles when we give advice (or offer up supposedly inspiring examples).

All of us advice-givers risk undermining ourselves if we try too hard to make each lesson as uplifting and perfect as possible. Nothing wrong with taking pride in jobs well done. But when try to package up stories and advice too earnestly, we stop being persuasive. In fact, we can become exhausting – or intimidating.?

It feels counter-intuitive, but being approachable and humble tends to work better than constantly trying to be awesome.

I learned that lesson a few years ago, while researching this book about the college to career pathway. One slice of my reporting led me to a state school where political science majors were hoping to make a career in government service, but didn’t know how to get started.

If you were one of those students, would you rather hear from a long-ago alum who eventually became ambassador to France? Or would you learn more from a recent grad who spent two years trying to land anything he could at the State Department, even though he lacked the fancy internships and family connections of better-off applicants?

I’ve stacked the choice for a reason. Plenty of former diplomats like to return to their old campuses and reminisce about life at the top. But such visits can backfire. (How am I ever going to do anything like that?) By contrast, recent grads’? job-hunt odysseys tend to be full of gasps, groans – and valuable takeaways.?

So, in the book, I made a lot of room for Kevin Greer’s story – starting with his summer jobs as a toll collector. He was never the most glittering job candidate, but he kept applying for jobs, chatting up administrative assistants along the way. Eventually, someone randomly pitched him for a six-week stint on the State Department’s Cuba desk – even though he didn’t speak Spanish. With that lucky break, Greer’s career finally got rolling.

The takeaway: sometimes life’s zigzags and minor comedies are just as important as the Big Lessons that we might want to convey. Supporting career readiness doesn’t need to be as methodical and serious as an organic chemistry class.

As Shriber says, we’re all trying to “build communities of authentic voices to help people with their networks and to grow their skills.”?

If you’re a student who’s found a refreshing way to get career advice – on or off LinkedIn – it’d be great to hear about your experience in the comments section below. And if you’re someone with wisdom to share, this is the right time to step forward and talk about how you make that happen.