Tag: career advice

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Be Prepared.

When I interviewed a candidate at BuzzFeed for a role on the newsletter team, I always asked the same first question: Do you subscribe to any of our newsletters?

These were candidates who’d applied specifically for a job on the newsletter team. They’d submitted resumes and cover letters for the role. We’d read through them, picked the candidates we’d liked, and set up a quick phone screener — 20 minutes on the phone to ask a few questions. Each candidate had a few days to prepare for that interview.

And yet: Probably forty percent of the candidates I interviewed immediately said “no” to my simple question: Do you subscribe to any of our newsletters?

I was always astonished by that. How could so many people know absolutely nothing about the types of work we’d done? Signing up for a newsletter was remarkably easy, and free. And yet two out of every five candidates failed to do even that.

In all the interviews I did, I can’t recall a single candidate who answered “no” and got a second interview.

I tell that story now because I’m reading “In the Land of Men,” a memoir by Adrienne Miller about her time working at GQ and Esquire. In it, she tells the story of her first day of work, walking through the office with GQ editor David Granger:

“As Granger and I spoke, it became apparent that I did have one thing going for me: I was able to talk about past issues of GQ. Later, he said that I got the job because I was the one person he’d interviewed who’d actually even bothered to open the magazine.”

“ ‘Never underestimate how unprepared most people are,’ he would later observe, correctly.”

The bar to clear in a first interview is pretty low: Show up on time, have a few questions ready to ask, and make sure you’re knowledgeable about the place you’re interviewing at. That minimum effort won’t get you the job — but it might be enough to get you to the second round of interviews.

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How To Network At Work.

If you want to be successful at a new job, there are only two things you have to do well: Ask great questions, and know lots of people.

Let’s talk about that second requirement for a moment. The people I’ve seen succeed at companies, both big and small, are the ones who can say: I know exactly who we should talk to for this project! At work, it’s not just about what you can do — it’s also about who you know.

So how do you get to know more people? Two strategies have worked well for me:

1) Have lots and lots of coffee — Reach out to colleagues just to say, “I’d love to hear what you’re working on!” Be curious, and learn more about what else is happening around you. Ask your co-workers to introduce you to interesting people that they’re working with. If you’re nervous about reaching out to new people, make it a weekly habit: Every Monday, email a new person to set up a coffee, and by the end of the year, you’ll have made dozens of new connections at your office. (Don’t be nervous that they won’t reply — most people love talking about themselves and their work! They’ll be thrilled that someone is interested and wants to listen.)

2) Congratulate your colleagues — When someone does good work — when they publish a new story or launch a big project — email them to say congrats. It doesn’t have to be a long email — a sentence or two is enough, and often hugely meaningful!

Remember: The more people you know, the more likely you are to know the people who can help you get stuff done around the office. So reach out for those coffees, and send those congratulatory emails. They do make a difference.

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That photo is by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.

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Is There Anything You Can Still Get Out Of This Job?

So let’s say you’ve decided you’re ready to leave your current job. You’re not being challenged in your role. You don’t have the team or resources to do your best work.

Being willing to say that you’re ready is a huge step. But it still might not be time to leave yet.

Here’s something I’ve observed: You typically know that you’re ready to leave a job 4-6 months before your co-workers or bosses realize. Your work is still at the same level, and you’re still showing up with good energy at the office. You’re starting to think about the next opportunity, but you haven’t moved on mentally from the current role.

Could you quit right away? Of course. (If things have gotten toxic or particularly bad, don’t wait!) But I’d also advise you to consider one other thing: Is there anything left for you to try at your current job? Or to put it more bluntly: Is there anything you can still get out of this role? Perhaps there are:

-Opportunities to take on one last big project
-Opportunities for public speaking (in public, the press, or internally)
-Opportunities to learn a new skill from your company’s L&D team

Any of those things might give you an opportunity to expand your skill set. And if that’s the case, it might be worth staying a few more months. Those opportunities for growth could help you get to a better place for your next job — whatever it is.

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Sometimes, I throw in a piece of stock photography just because. This one’s from Dan Cook and Unsplash.

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Before You Apply To A Job, Make Sure You Can Answer This Question.

Here’s a question I’ve been asking friends who say that they’re ready for a new job: What do you see yourself focusing on in the next 3-5 years?

You, too, should have an answer to that question.

This isn’t quite the old “What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?” kind of question. I’m not looking for you to say, “I’m interesting in being a reporter,” or, “I’d like to be a social media editor.” Don’t just give me a job title — tell me what you’re really excited to do, and why you’re passionate about it.

Here’s what you can tell me: Tell me that you’re interested in building new ways for readers to find stories that don’t involve Facebook’s algorithm, and that’s why you’re so interested in working in newsletters. Tell me that you’re excited to start conversations with readers, and that’s why you want to work in social media. Tell me that you’re curious about new formats for telling stories, and that’s why you’re trying to get a job in podcasting. Tell me that you’ve seen how important the relationship between product and edit can be, and that’s why you’re making a career pivot into product management.

Tell me why you want to do something new, and make sure the resume you’re putting out tells the story of someone who’s been working toward a job in just that kind of role.

If you can’t answer the question yet, don’t send in your resume! If you’re blindly sending out resumes, just trying to cast a wide net, you probably won’t even get to the first interview. Instead, start by trying to answer the question: In the next 3-5 years, I’m really interested in….

Yes, the path you plan to take will probably change. Who knows what the industry will look like in a few years! But by choosing a path, you’re starting to construct a narrative for your job search. You want a hiring manager to hear your story and think, “This is a person who’s been working their entire career towards this exact job.”

Answer the question, and you’ll take a big first step towards the job you really want.

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That’s a photo of a path cutting through some incredibly pretty fall foliage in upstate Michigan. It was taken by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.

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Here, Read This.

Every Thanksgiving, I write my Things I Believe post. It’s one of my favorite ways to take stock of who am I, what I stand for, and how I’ve changed over the previous year.

This week, I stumbled upon this: a very Things I Believe-ish list from investor Richard Jenrette, who died in April. There’s a lot of good advice in here. (“Stay in the game. That’s often all you need to do — don’t quit.” “Keep your standards high in all you do.” “Don’t leave old friends behind — you may need them.”) It’s worth a few minutes of your time.

Read it here.

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You Are Not Behind.

A J-school student told me a few weeks ago that she’s worried she’s behind when it comes to her career. Her peers have more experience or have won more awards than she has. She sees college journalists at other schools who seem to be a few steps ahead of her professionally.

“Am I behind?” she asked. “Should I be worried?”

I told her that I remembered feeling the same way in college. Back in 2005, I remember watching ESPN and seeing a headline-making interview that NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens had done with a college sophomore at Syracuse. I’d always thought I was a little ahead of the pack: I’d been published in The Boston Globe, had written for a few different papers at that point, and was in journalism school at Mizzou. I’d won a national award for high school journalists. I was doing pretty well!

And then I watched that ESPN interview and thought, There’s someone else ahead of me! I’m falling behind!

How were they “ahead,” exactly? They’d done something different — something pretty exceptional — and it scared me to think that there were others doing great work, too.

But a few years later, I started to look back and wonder why I’d been so nervous in the first place. I wrote:

I get jealous, sometimes, when I see 25 year olds who are way ahead of where I am. I get competitive. How’d that person pull off a book deal at 25? How’d they get a movie done? How’d they make their first million already?

But then I remember that this isn’t a 400-meter race. We’re not all shooting for the same end goal.

We’re all on different paths. We’re all running our own races at our own speeds.

It’s tough to tell where each of us is going now. It’s only with time — a decade, maybe more — that we’ll start to understand where we’ve been going.

In the meantime, what really matters is that we keep going.

That’s what I reminded that J-school student: There is no race. There is no ahead, or behind. There’s only the path you take, at the speed that suits you best. Keep moving forward — launch things, try things, keep learning. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done at 20, 30, or 70. There’s always more road ahead of you, and new opportunities. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done today — your best work is still ahead.

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That amazing dirtbike race photo is by Simon Moog on Unsplash.

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6 Simple Tips For Writing A Great Resume.

Here’s a not-all-that-surprising declaration, based on 5+ years of looking at resumes: Most resumes aren’t very good. They suffer from the same basic issues in design and editing.

But you — the future job applicant! — can do better! Here’s a simple list of ways to make your resume better right away:

1) Use a template from Google Docs to design your resume — They’re clean, they’re simple, they’re easy to share, they’re free, and they’re designed to help you get all of the key information onto a single page. (They also come with a matching cover letter template, which is a nice touch.) Use their templates — you career’s too important for a resume created in Word!

2) Showcase what you’ve actually done in a role — Every bullet in your resume is an opportunity to show me what you’ve actually done, and how much of it you did. If you had an internship in college at a newspaper, saying, “Wrote stories about _____” is OK, but “Wrote 20 feature stories about _____” is far better.  The more you can show the size of your impact, the better.

3) Be strategic about where you place the education section — If you’re in school or just graduated, education should probably be the first thing on your resume. Recruiters will judge a resume differently if you’re in school or a recent grad. If you’re a few years out, it probably belongs towards the bottom of the resume.

4) Throw in a fast fact about yourself, but only if it’s really great — If you’ve achieved some sort of truly unusual feat — maybe you won your university’s Scrabble tournament, or you’re a championship slam poet — it actually might be worth including! The goal with your resume is to catch a recruiter’s eye, and a detail like that might help you stand out from the crowd. But it would have to be a heck of a tidbit to be worthy. (It’s great that you’re the captain of your rec softball team, but that’s not quite the level of excellence that will help here. And if you do include a fast fact, limit it to one, please!)

5) Put everything in the past tense — I’ve seen resumes where some roles are in present tense, and some are in past tense, and it gets a little unwieldy. Keep it simple, and keep it all in past tense — even your current job.

6) Keep it to one page — A recruiter is using your resume to decide if they’d like to know more about you. The resume is a first glance, not a deep dive. No matter how much you’ve done, you can keep it to a page.

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Don’t Make Business Cards. Build Your Own Website Instead.

I talked to a group of journalism students last week, and they had a professional question: Do students need their own business cards?

The short answer: I don’t think business cards help much with the job search. Every journalism student’s business card looks pretty much the same: Your name, your contact information, and a line somewhere that says “Reporter/Editor/Journalist.” When you’ve got three inches of space to work with, you can’t say much.

If I were in J-school, I’d focus instead on the space where you can say a lot more: Your own domain. I’ve given this advice before, and I’ll say it again:

When someone gets your resume, the first thing they’re going to do is Google your name. And if you’re pitching an organization on your digital skills, you need something better than yourname.wix.com. Go to domainr.com and search for your name. If you can buy yourname.com, do it. If that’s taken, try something that fits your career aspirations: yournamereports.com, byyourname.com, yournamestories.com, etc. Build a website that showcases your reporting, and make it easy for someone to contact you. (You wouldn’t believe how many people build websites with no contact information!)

Then take the next step: Open up an incognito window, and search for your own name. (That way, you’ll see results that aren’t personalized for you.) What comes up? Is there anything on there you wouldn’t want a potential employer to see?

Your goal should be to get your own domain to the top of the page — but at the very least, you want it on the first page. (If you built your site with WordPress, use a tool like All in One SEO to set up your site correctly for Google.) Make sure that what comes up represents you: a LinkedIn profile (and yes, take a minute and personalize your LinkedIn URL), a Twitter account, and clips or work from your previous experiences.

If you meet someone new, remember: What matters most is what they’ll see when they Google you. Make sure that what shows up there — your personal domain, your professional social media profiles, etc. — showcases who you are and what you want to do next in your career.

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That photo is by Nick Adams from Unsplash.

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You, Too, Can Make A Thing.

I was so excited to find a story in the New York Times Food section this week, titled, “A New Generation of Food Magazines Thinks Small, and in Ink.” Here’s how it starts:

Shayne Chammavanijakul, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, felt let down by the way some magazines depicted Asian cuisines — framed as alien, styled with visual clichés and oversimplified. So she started her own.

Last summer, between her freshman and sophomore years, she fried corn chips and rolled burritos at Chipotle, saving her wages to pay a few contributors. She gathered enough financial and editorial support from friends and family to print 10,000 copies of the first issue of Dill, packed with articles about noodle dishes, from Indonesian soto ayam to Filipino pancit puso.

“We present things in a way that isn’t sensational,” said Ms. Chammavanijakul, 20, whose family has roots in Thailand. “Food isn’t bizarre or cool or something you do on a dare. We have no interest in exoticizing it.”

At a time when traditional food magazines are shrinking and cutting staff, Dill is part of an unexpected groundswell across the country: a wave of small, sophisticated print magazines, produced on a shoestring by young editors with strong points of view and a passion for their subjects — from the subtleties of regional Thai home cooking to the intersection of food and queer culture.

I read that story and smiled because… well, this is exactly what I’d be trying to do if I was still in college.

I’ve written before about stry.us — what we did right, what I did wrong — but I don’t think I’ve ever written about this before: Part of my plan in Biloxi involved a print magazine. (Somewhere back in a closet in D.C., there are still probably 50 copies in a box. At the top of this post, that’s a photo of the cover.)

Why a print magazine? When I was in Biloxi, I wasn’t quite sure what I was building towards. I didn’t know if stry.us was going to be a business, or just a showcase for my work. But I knew that either way, I needed to be able to showcase my best work — and the basic WordPress site I’d made together wasn’t quite it.

So I found a printer in Biloxi who liked what I was doing. I took my favorite 8 or 9 stories, and packaged them together into a more cohesive story about the Katrina recovery. The idea was that if I was meeting with a publisher, I could always pull a copy out of my bag and say, “This was what I was working on the whole time.”

If they asked who wrote the stories, I could say: I did.

If they asked who took the photos, I could say: I did.

If they asked who laid the thing out in InDesign, I could say: I did.

I didn’t want to be a designer or a photographer. But I did want to prove that I was capable of being more than a reporter.

The barriers to making something basic weren’t high: It took a lot of time, and a few hundred dollars. I wish I’d tried something like it in college: I think a group of reporters, editors, photographers, and designers could have made something pretty amazing — and it would have been a heck of a showcase for our work.

It doesn’t have to be a business. It doesn’t have to be anything more than an issue or two. It’s just something to show off your work.

When you make something new, you show us how you work — and what you can do.

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The Montage Scene.

montage scene

I was having dinner recently with a few friends, all of whom have started new jobs in 2017. We were talking about the struggles with a new job: Building relationships with new co-workers, learning new workplace procedures and etiquette, and challenging yourself in a new role.

And then, in the way that dinner conversations tend to go to strange places, we got to talking about the movies. A friend noted that they don’t show people putting in the day-in and day-out work in movies. If movies were like real life, someone would show up at an office, pitch a big idea, and then spend the next eight months slowly getting the buy-in to make that idea happen. Nobody wants to watch a movie where someone spends two months writing memos or getting coffee to brainstorm new ideas. Wouldn’t make for much of a movie.

Then we thought about it some more, and realized that we were wrong. They actually do show people putting in the work in movies! But it’s always in a montage:

And all of us at that dinner table agreed: The early stages of a job are a lot like the montage scene of the movie. You put in a lot of work, you try to make stuff happen, but it’s not glamorous. It’s… work.

In the movies, the montage scene is always fun. When you see a montage in a “Rocky” movie, you know that a big fight is coming up. You know you’re going to get closure for a character soon.

The montage scene at a new job isn’t quite like that. It’s work, and more work, and building new routines, and learning new stuff. It doesn’t always lead somewhere right away. You start a new job with a lot of ambition, but it always takes more time than you think to start getting stuff done that you’re excited about and proud of.

At BuzzFeed, the montage scene lasted my entire first year. It took a long time to build something from nothing, and even when we made progress, I’d look back on what we’d built so far and realize: We hadn’t done that much. It was frustrating.

But eventually we got there. Eventually, all new jobs get out of the montage scene, and then you can move on to bigger things. But you’ve got to put in that work first — and unlike the movies, you can’t compress it all into a three-minute-long montage.

Keep your head down and keep doing the work. You’ll make it through.

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That photo of a film reel comes via Noom Peerapong and Unsplash.

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