Spencer Campbell on Bad Job Search Advice, What to Do Instead, and How to Improve the Hiring Process

In Brief: Spencer Campbell (linkedin.com/in/spencer-campbell-impact, spencercampbelltalent.com), Founder and Principal Talent Agent of the Spencer Campbell Talent Agency, joins host Dan Freehling to discuss the modern job search. Spencer’s innovative business model involves acting as a talent agent for job seekers, providing advice, support, and representation to help them succeed in interviews and negotiations. Dan and Spencer discuss a program they're piloting called Heightened Impact, which combines high-quality coaching with expert talent representation to enhance value for job seekers. Spencer emphasizes the importance of networking and understanding one's value in the job search process, rather than focusing solely on polishing resumes. He criticizes conventional advice about job searching and highlights common mistakes job seekers make. Spencer and Dan also improvements to the hiring process, trends in the social sector career space and the potential impact of AI on the job market.

Recommended Reading: “Hidden Potential” by Adam Grant, “Never Search Alone” by Phil Terry, “What Color is Your Parachute” by Richard Nelson Bolles, “How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell, and “The Good Enough Job” by Simone Stolzoff.

Dan Freehling (00:00:01):

Welcome to Forward-Looking Leadership, a podcast for visionary leaders building future ready organizations. I'm your host, Dan Freehling. I'm the Founder of the coaching and consulting practice Contempus Leadership, developing the leaders and teams you want in charge through cutting-edge approaches and common-sense solutions. I'm honored to be joined today by Spencer Campbell. Spencer is the Founder and Principal Talent Agent of the Spencer Campbell Talent Agency. He brings a wealth of talent acquisition expertise, having led recruitment innovation at the social enterprise one acre fund, and most recently serving as VP for talent acquisition at a global education organization. Spencer and I met through Nick Martin, who anyone in the social impact career space should be following on LinkedIn, and have been thought partners and collaborators since. Most recently, Spencer and I joined forces to create a program called Heightened Impact, which is successfully nearing the end of its pilot phase and we'll get into in the episode. Listeners, whether you're in the job market or looking to advance your career or help others do so as a leader, mentor, coach, this conversation will be chock full of insights and expertise. Thanks for joining me on Forward-Looking Leadership, Spencer.

Spencer Campbell (00:01:02):

Hey, Dan. Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Dan Freehling (00:01:05):

Awesome. I'm so glad we finally got the opportunity to do this. So first, I genuinely love innovative business models and I feel like your business is an exemplar of that. I'd love for you to explain to listeners what the talent agency concept entails.

Spencer Campbell (00:01:19):

Yeah, of course. My pleasure. In most sectors, the recruiters, the people who interview you, screen you for a job. They work for the employer, they get paid when you get a job or they're just on the payroll of large employers. And so you as the job seeker, you are the product, not the customer, but in a few industries, Hollywood is a good example. Professional sports. In the literary world, it's talent that pays. Talent is represented by agents who do the heavy lifting of finding opportunities for their clients. And lots of people can hire a career coach or a resume writer, but with the talent agency, I wanted to bring something more like Hollywood style talent representation to the people in my niche, folks in social impact. So when I take someone on board as a client, I represent them. I take them to people in my network who I think who should hire them, and I pitch them.

(00:02:21):

I try to make a match and I also advise and support my clients so they can do their best on the interviews and get what they deserve and the negotiation. And it's been a wild ride. I had no idea if it was going to work. It really was a bit of a change of pace compared to what other people were doing, but there's been a great response to it. And I think job seeking really can be demoralizing and difficult and having someone who's on your side as not just a coach or an expert, but someone who's really going to bat for you directly, it's really quite powerful and it's something that I found a lot of people are interested in and willing to pay for even.

Dan Freehling (00:03:01):

It's just such a great opportunity for people to have somebody fully looking out for them, and I just love what you're doing with it. And I think just the innovative thinking on it of how can I make this better, especially in a space where there's so much that doesn't really work for job seekers out there is so important and so impactful. So just highly recommend everyone checks that out. If you're at all looking to be in the job market and in the social impact space. Spencer, you and I have a program that we're nearing the end of piloting called Heightened Impact, so I'm happy to chime in on some of the backgrounds on that as well, but I'd love for you to give your quick pitch on what that is and how we came about to do that.

Spencer Campbell (00:03:44):

Yeah, so really with Heightened Impact, it was well from my end, what I found is that I really was a good advisor, consultant, representative for my clients, but I found that a lot of people I was working with, they really did have some issues or needs that working with a really excellent executive coach would help them address. They didn't know what they wanted to do. It wasn't a question about the market, but something internally, and I find just for anyone listening to this that is often a challenge for job seekers is that it's not really about the job market. It's not where you fit in. It's something internal. What do I really want? What should I do with my life? What will make me happy at work? Where do I really belong? These are things that actually you don't need an agent to discuss. What you need is a really great coach. So with heightened impact, the idea was could we bring together high quality coaching, great Hollywood style talent representation, put both of those things together and see if it could supercharge the value of this for the people who sign up. And I don't know, anyway, we'll come back to this, can't share a whole lot today, but I've just been really impressed by putting these things together. What it means for the folks who participate, it really does, it's chocolate plus peanut butter. It's two different tastes that taste better together. I'll leave it there.

Dan Freehling (00:05:22):

There's something about I think the recruiting job expert types like yourself. I think there's kind of this idea in that space where it's what people really need is tactical hands-on advice from real experts. And I think from my space, from the coaching space, there's a lot of people who are saying basically that the materials don't matter, the expertise doesn't matter. It's only what you can do internally. And I think when you combine those two, rather than having that be in one person who does a little bit of each kind of badly, when you can combine a great coach and a great job search expert we have, it's a huge value add for clients. So we're super excited to be able to share the results and outcome of that very shortly with people, but wanted to at least talk that through a bit today and just give people a heads up of what we're doing in that area.

Spencer Campbell (00:06:18):

Yeah, definitely watch this space. I think it really has succeeded beyond my expectations and something I'm eager to continue moving forward. It's two different sets of skills. And so when you have both of those sets of expertise at your disposal as a job seeker, as someone who's really trying to figure out their next steps, it can unlock some things that would be hard to unlock any other way. That's what we've seen so far anyway, watch the space, watch my website and watch dads for details on this.

Dan Freehling (00:06:53):

Absolutely agree. It's been so cool to see that come to fruition. So more to come. What conventional advice about the job search process do you just straight up disagree with?

Spencer Campbell (00:07:04):

So many things. And I appreciate you asking this question because I just feel like we're awash in sort of bad advice and I will try not to add anything to that pile on this

(00:07:16):

call if I can help it, but your mileage may vary. I can't speak for all industries, all recruiters, but my background is in talent acquisition. I was a recruiter, I worked in recruiting innovations for a firm in a number of years, which meant my job was to make the recruiting process better, better for candidates cheaper, easier for hiring managers, more effective at putting the right buts in seats. And so I've just seen a lot of recruiting processes, half a million resumes, part of hundreds of hires and interviewed thousands of people and hired a lot of recruiters and talked a lot with recruiters over the years about the business and nature strategy of recruiting. So I know a little bit about what I'm about to share and that's one of the key things that I see is that a lot of this advice is not really rooted in real expertise.

(00:08:12):

A lot of the things that people share, it's sort of rooted in some other source. And I'll talk a little bit about this in just a second about why I feel like a lot of this stuff circulates, but I think a lot of people just don't really understand how recruiting works and it's sort of a mystery. And when you don't really know anybody who purports to tell you what's going on, you just want to listen to what they have to say. And so the big one that I see a lot, which I just think is total nonsense, is anything that has to do with AI or the ATS, the applicant tracking system being used against you, there is very little magic in a recruiting process. You hit submit on your resume, it ends up in someone's inbox more or less, and sometimes it gets read, sometimes it doesn't.

(00:09:07):

But overwhelmingly it's a person who's on the other side of this. It's just a person, probably someone very junior, maybe someone an outsourced laborer from the Philippines, maybe a stressed out, overworked HR manager. Maybe it's someone who doesn't really have a deep understanding of what you do, but it is a person. And so if you want to get your materials read more often, the thing is not to try to beat the robots, beat the ai. Those things don't really exist, not in the way that you might imagine. If you want to get your materials read, you need to write something that's very readable, make it a joy to read, easy to scan, easy to engage with, free of jargon, show it to your mom, and if she basically can understand what you're about, you have moved in the right direction. So any advice that runs counter to that is just rooted in nonsense and probably designed to sell you something that you don't really need because you really won't write your way to a new job.

(00:10:03):

I think this is the other number one piece of misinformation out there. A well-written resume is probably not going to make a large marginal impact on your job hunt compared to some of the other things you could do with the time that would take to rewrite your materials. You probably aren't spending nearly enough time figuring out where you should apply and having conversations with people who could help you address that question. People understand the value of networking, but I think a lot of people don't understand exactly what networking it is. It's not really badgering your friends for a job to hire you or to make a referral. Although if you see someone, if you know someone at a firm, their company is hiring never hurts to ask and often they can get a referral bonus, they can get a little bit of money for encouraging you to apply, maybe sharing a few things about your profile, but really the kind of networking that's more valuable is more open-ended conversations with people in your network who may help you find the job that's a good fit for you. We live in very, very specialized economy. You are probably an expert in something really, really, really specific. And even if you apply for jobs with the same title or sort of similar job description, it may be that you aren't as well qualified for that job as you think. And so just finding the right line to stand in is not a trivial problem for most job seekers. And I feel like a lot of the advice that's given to job seekers sort of over kind of glosses over this point.

(00:11:49):

And yeah, I think this is really a place where it makes sense for job seekers to spend the time having those conversations, figuring out where you fit in. So talking to other people in your industry about the work that they do and people they know that they think you should connect with. Understanding how does your industry work? Who are the different players in your specific niche? Who are the folks upstream and downstream from you? Who's in government? What does it look like? What does your space really look like? And people that you've worked with who are a little bit ahead of you in your career, where are they at now? What was their story? What was their progression? These are things that are hugely useful to you, probably much more useful than working on your resume in terms of connecting you to a well-fitting position. And I just don't see job seekers spending the energy and time on these things. They tend to get distracted. They tend to, if I just keep polishing my resume, I keep applying to another job. That's the thing that's going to, I spend another hour on social media on LinkedIn looking at jobs. That's probably not the best use of your time and I just don't think that this gets the emphasis that it deserves.

Dan Freehling (00:13:10):

Yeah, I mean you and I have talked about this a lot even on joint events and there's this feeling productive versus being productive in the job search. And I think the resume obsession is such a feeling productive thing, the applying to as many jobs as you can, even if they're not a great fit, as the feeling productive thing rather than the being productive aspect, which is that deep networking. You did mention on some of this bad advice out there. What do you think that's rooted in? Why is there so much terrible advice on LinkedIn and other places that people just really fall for a lot?

Spencer Campbell (00:13:45):

Well, I have a cynical, let me deal with a cynical and non-cynical answer on that. I

Dan Freehling (00:13:50):

Like that framing. Yeah,

Spencer Campbell (00:13:52):

The cynical answer is that well, okay, everything is a market. LinkedIn is a market for information. And so who has incentive to generate content, it's people ultimately will monetize that content. And job seeking is a massive pain point. If you just make up something and say, Hey, buy my product for $99 and it will solve all your job seeking woes, that's a really effective sales pitch. And the job seeker isn't really in a place to push back on that to complain. They don't know if you know what you're talking about or not. There's no sort of LinkedIn police to keep those bad actors off. And so if you just say whatever you want, if it doesn't work, you probably end up blaming yourself is the job seeker? Rather than saying, Hey, I got sold a bill of goods by this person. You feel bad about it, which you shouldn't.

(00:14:44):

So I do think there's just, given the nature of the job market, given how much job seeking sucks, it's really easy for bad actors to put in to just sell you on ideas that don't really work and promise you sort of it's all snake oil has the same economic thing, promise people the moon for very low cost and anyway, and hope they don't get wise to it after the sale. I think that's the most cynical version of it. I think this is probably rooted in things that nobody can sell you on something without your cooperation. And I think a lot of these ideas persist because these are sort of ego protecting fantasies. So if you believe that robots or AI is keeping your resume out of the hands of people who would read it, and if only you could get past those evil gatekeepers to get them in their hands, that takes the responsibility off of you to find the right job.

(00:15:54):

Now suddenly this is someone else's fault. It's not your problem anymore. You don't have to find the right job. This is, you have externalized this. And so that's a little bit easier for most of us to swallow some of this stuff I've seen, we did talk about this the last question, but there's been some advice circulating, which I just think is completely insane about if you're asked to produce something as part of the recruitment process, they want to see a written exercise or something, they want you to submit a deliverable that they're not really sincere. They're people out there just trying to steal your good ideas. And we would always find this hilarious as recruiters that this idea would circulate as much as it did because it's sort of not that you work really hard on this stuff, and it's not to minimize what job seekers submit when they're asked to do these things, but take the Hollywood example again.

(00:16:49):

All these actors show up to auditions, they record audition tapes and 30 people show up for the audition. They shoot the tape, only one of them is hired, gets the role, and now you have 29 other tapes. They're not making a movie out of those tapes. And it's the same thing in your process. Nobody is trying to steal your ideas. They are worth shockingly little to the employer beyond evaluating whether you're a good fit for the role, there just isn't much they can do with them. But telling yourself that, oh, they didn't really want my ideas. They were just trying to steal them. That is a much easier pill to swallow for the average human being that feels so much better to leave the job hunt saying, well, I guess what I submitted wasn't up to par, wasn't what they were looking for. That can hurt, that might.

(00:17:39):

And so it makes sense for us to turn away from that and to go to an idea which is from my perspective as a recruiter who's seen these exercises being submitted, that's utterly nonsense. I don't know a single person who's operating that way. Could someone in the history of time have harvested a candidate exercise? Maybe. I guess I've never seen it in the time I've worked in the sector and the people I've seen who get most worked up about this, it's folks who are just feeling defensive in the process, which is very natural. We connect our identity a lot to what we do and putting all this time submitting something and having it fall short, that's a lot. And I think we tend to underestimate how emotional, how traumatic some of this stuff can be. And so it makes sense that people want to protect their ego, they want to protect themselves from feeling sort of battered by the process. And I do think that almost all of the wrong ideas about recruiting, they have some sort of root in something that is just easier for job seekers to swallow rather than the truth, which may be a little bit harder to take on board. I'll stop there.

Dan Freehling (00:18:54):

I think you're so right on all of that. Yeah, there's not this harvesting operation of out of context job application,

Spencer Campbell (00:19:03):

Exercise.

Dan Freehling (00:19:05):

It's so ludicrous. But I think you're so right about that of it's such a vulnerable place to be on the job market and looking, and I think a lot of people willingly or unwittingly take advantage of that and tell people either what they wish was true or what candidates want to hear, but not actually the tough love message of what's really needed to get a job search over the finish line. And there's no prize for winning second place in a job search. You have to actually lands the role. And that more often than not comes from your professional reputation, from your networks, from really having a strong fit with the role and so much less from all of these things that feel good and give you that kind of quick win feeling that people just really fall for in my experience. And it's even really strong professionals who come out and just really fall for this.

(00:20:06):

And I think it is tied into that identity and tied into that ego. And it's such a harder pitch for people like you at me to be saying, honestly, you should be focused more on figuring out what you really bring to the table in terms of value, figuring out who you should network with in a non-transactional way, really going out and doing the kind of things that don't have immediate payoffs, but that put you in the right lines to your previous metaphor. It's much easier to say, follow my seven step process and it'll get you a job. And it's a tough one, but I hope that people are starting to get wise to it or at least the kind of sharp people who are operating at a bit of a higher level in terms of their job search are getting wise to it.

Spencer Campbell (00:20:53):

I think that's right. We all want sort of, it's natural to want a quick fix. It's natural to want something easy and painless. These are tried and true techniques to sell anything. And I think for me, because of the way this business is structured, I have very little incentive to be anything but truthful. And I think it's because I only get paid when we win. I only get paid when they get the job. So if anything, my incentives are to go the other way. It's like to really get people into this very practical sort of, let's figure this out. Let's solve this thing. Let's confront the tough issues directly because that's the thing that's ultimately going to eventually get you hired. And I think for anyone who's listening to this who's on the job hunt, you're in the same boat, you only get paid what you win.

(00:21:41):

And so I think for job seekers, even though it may be uncomfortable in the moment to grapple with some of this stuff, eventually you'll have to, right? Unless you have an unlimited pool of money behind you, the quicker you can really sort of get a handle on where you are in the market, what's working, what's not, where do you fit in, who can help me? The quicker you answer those questions, the quicker you can end your search. I share all this freely with as many people as I can because I do think this really does accelerate it. If people can just take a moment, reflect and really approach this with sort of love for themselves, but also a little bit of psychological distance.

(00:22:24):

You are trying to sell something. You're selling your time, you're selling your attention, you're selling your network, your expertise, and it's not, you will show up to work, but you're being hired not because of anything about you personally, but because of the skill sets you bring, the strengths you bring, really try to put some distance between yourself and your work. Be your own talent agent, right? Advocate for yourself in that way. And if things don't go your way on a particular job that you're really excited about, it's understandable, it really makes sense that that would hit you. But if you can try to take yourself out of yourself in those moments and think, ah, that was really tough for Spencer, but I'm sure she'll do better on the next one. That was really encouraging to get that far. I'm a silver medalist on this thing and try to pick that might help folks really dive into this stuff to access some of these things that are so hard to access and to grapple with the things that can be hard to grapple with.

Dan Freehling (00:23:27):

Just so well said. And I mean you and I see this process play out over and over again and it just helping people to shortcut to the past, the ego protecting phase and into the real work of it is a huge value add. Just getting to that place of knowing your fit and really your background and your connections is where the real value is and just get there as soon as you can.

Spencer Campbell (00:23:52):

Totally.

Dan Freehling (00:23:53):

So in addition to this conventional advice that's just way off base, what mistakes do you see job seekers themselves making a lot of the time?

Spencer Campbell (00:24:03):

Yeah, I remember I took on board a client last year and she came to me and showed me her spreadsheet, which was great that she was even tracking because a lot of people, they just sort of apply when they see things. And so I think just even not tracking your applications, so what did I apply to and what happened with each one of those roles and any other information that might be relevant in your context to do some analysis. So she had her spreadsheet and she showed me and she said, I've applied for a hundred different jobs and nobody has come back to me. I haven't gotten any feedback. And we looked at this, we looked together what she was applying for and she was an impressive individual, someone who was really succeeding in her domain. She was sort of in the marketing field or marketing communications, but she was applying for these roles, which were like, I'm anonymizing this story a little bit just because we're still sort of in the transition of her signing it over to this new contract, not to spoil the story, but anyway, she was applying for chief VP senior roles that were just out of reach according to where she was in her career.

(00:25:24):

She was ambitious, she was clearly going places. I knew she was sharp, she interviewed really well. She was thorough in the materials that she had given to me, but there's no way that she was getting hired for the sort of things that she was applying to. They were just far beyond where she is today. And for the most part, she was applying cold rather than looking, being introduced, tapping her network, understanding where she actually fit in the talent, in the talent space. And so I tell the story because I think she is emblematic of most of the people that I meet in that they're just applying for the wrong jobs. It comes from a good place, it's very understandable. It can be hard to figure out where we fit into the market and to translate our experience to new jobs. But most of us, if you get to a hundred jobs applied to and nobody has come back to you, certainly the problem is you're applying for the wrong jobs.

(00:26:20):

No matter how bad your resume is written today, you can aim for much better than one out of a hundred. So that's a signal from the job market. It's a signal that what you are doing is maybe not working. And this is the other mistake I see is people say, well, I really want feedback. I never get any feedback. I just get ghosted and even when I apply, I get something very odine and I get thanks, but no thanks. And I do wish that recruiters were able to give more substantive feedback, but I think what the recruiter says is much less interesting and helpful to you than what they do. The feedback is what happens. So if they don't get back to you within four weeks, assume it's a no and just look if you're applying for jobs and you should see a difference, what are the trends between the people who say yes to you and the people who don't?

(00:27:23):

And that is likely has something to teach you about where the market sees you, where you might fit in. And it is not always an obvious thing for job seekers to do this analysis themselves to really get their head around this. It's not something that is natural. And I think I've been reading some of the research on this and it's because it's very hard to learn from negative feedback in job searches. It's overwhelmingly negative feedback. So even a successful search you're going to apply. It's very rare we see a client who applies for one job and gets it and that doesn't do anything else. Not that it never happens, but it's definitely the minority of cases. So in most cases, the job search process is mostly made of failure and failure is a hard thing to learn from. And so I think again, we talked about earlier about the psychological distance and sort of trying to put some separation so you could do some analysis.

(00:28:20):

I would say the mistake here might be continuing to apply, continuing to do the same thing over and over again without really analyzing what's happening. You are getting feedback. Feedback you can take on board, you can choose to learn from if only you can take a look at it. And I think the other thing that we talked about, which is why this might happen so often, it's just a hard thing to hear. So often our identity is tied up and it can be hard to confront that, well, this product manager job at Google or similar, it's just not on the cards and maybe it's going to take a little bit longer to get there than you hoped. And so when we think about, it's a very natural human impulse to avoid, to not take on board, to not see, to not understand or grapple with these things which are striking at our identity. But for the recruiter, they don't see that. They're not a part of the psychodrama. They're just looking at the resumes that have come in and trying to pick the one which is most aligned to what they're looking for.

(00:29:40):

Recruiters want you to succeed, but they're constrained by forces at their organization and mostly they're just trying to reduce risk. They don't want to get yelled at by the hiring manager or the CEO or whoever for putting forward a candidate who just isn't a good fit for the job. So for the recruiter, the main thing they're trying to do is reduce risk, put plausible candidates in front of the hiring committee. And if you are less plausible than someone else who's applied, you're not going through to the next round. And so this is why this stuff is so important. The number one mistake that jobs seekers make is applying for the wrong jobs.

Dan Freehling (00:30:19):

Just on the opposite side of that, if you're getting feedback that's saying you're at the right level, then listen to that as well. So for example, as Spencer knows very well, but we had this wonderful client and at first it was kind of unclear what level we were targeting, what kind of roles we were targeting with her, and she kept getting interviews second round, third round, final round for a few seriously high level roles. And that's feedback in itself as well to stay the course and one of these will come through, it's just a matter of time. And I think that's also feedback to be listening to if your materials are working, it's kind of the imposter syndrome idea, but if people who have all the incentive of the world to hire a person they really want on their team are telling you you're a credible candidate, listen to that as well.

Spencer Campbell (00:31:15):

100%. And yeah, I think I've been overly negative. And just to finish the story with the candidate applying for chief marketing officers, ultimately we started working together. I was able to introduce her to a hiring manager in my network who absolutely loved what she put together, had a track record of hiring young, ambitious talent and really giving them when we got down to it, what she didn't want was a huge salary. She wanted a manager who really would take care of her, who would really sponsor her and look out for her interest and invest time. And this is someone who I knew really well from my network and I knew that he had a track record of doing exactly that, including the people I had worked with directly in the past. So introducing them, it was a great match. What I do is mostly matchmaking and ultimately this role was a little bit of a jump up.

(00:32:06):

It wasn't the enormous jump that maybe she had hoped for at the very beginning of her hunt, but it was still a 20% pay increase, really nice bonus structure and with a manager who I know is going to back her for her whole career. And so seeing her embrace that, get excited about the role and kind of build momentum for this and realize, oh, I can get basically everything that I want here if I just make this slight pivot. And anyway, what I live for, the success stories, I live for the people seeing that actually if I find where I belong, I can get everything I want and I am good. And there's no such thing as a sympathy hire people who want you, they interview you, they hire you for role. It's because you annihilated the recruiting process. You got there through your efforts. You got there by being enormously good and beating out maybe hundreds of other candidates to get there. So when you win, it really hurts to fall short in the process. But man, the highs are so high when it goes well.

Dan Freehling (00:33:17):

It's so true and thanks for sharing that for sure. It's important to really know what you're looking for and what your top priorities are in a new role too. And there could be different seasons in your life where maybe this is somewhere you want to be making more money, and that's the number one thing. Maybe this is somewhere you want a flexible environment and that's the number one thing. And just really getting clear on that and any trade-offs willing to make I think are also really important for people to keep in mind.

Spencer Campbell (00:33:51):

Totally. You can get, I find that most job seekers have pretty reasonable expectations. It's rare that I meet someone who's totally off base relative to the talent market, the value of their skills. But often we can get distracted by things. People are probably familiar with this research about the connection between how much you're paid and how happy you are. And lots of people have opined on this, but if you, oftentimes when we want more money, what we really want is recognition support. We feel like we're not getting what we deserve psychologically in our current role, or we feel like our skills are not being fully put to work. If your money, people should prioritize whatever salary. If they want to chase a higher salary, there's no problem with doing that. And if you need more money, having a large collection of Gucci bags will really make you as happy as you can be.

(00:34:54):

Go to maximize the salary that you get. For most people, though other things on the job drive satisfaction in a much deeper way. So often like good colleagues, a great manager, flexibility in how you work, an opportunity to grow and to have real autonomy in your role. These are the things that in the social science research, we find again and again, drive job satisfaction. And so often the number can be a bit of a distraction. And so sometimes I'm encouraging clients to apply for things that are less generously paid, but the manager is great, the mission is great, and the role is going to give them a lot of opportunity to just be to thrive, to learn to grow, and to have autonomy. And I think I really encourage every job seeker to reflect on what do I want from work, what do I want to get out of it? And in those reflection exercises is unusual that the highest possible salary comes to the top of that in the conversations I've had on this.

Dan Freehling (00:36:00):

Yeah, it's all just so important there and would double down on all of that for people besides the obvious factors, so people work hard and have the right work experience and educational background and all of that, what should hiring managers and executives be looking for in promising social sector talent?

Spencer Campbell (00:36:23):

Okay, so I'm going to give maybe a spicy take and maybe this will be surprising given no, this conversation has gone before when I was hiring for my own teams. Well, lemme step back for a second. We talked before about for recruiters and for hiring managers, often what they're trying to do is minimize risk. The worst thing that can happen is that I hire somebody who is a bad fit for the job and they either make a huge mess after they're hired and I look like an idiot or they don't stay in the role very long and I have to let them go or they leave because it's such a bad fit and I have to try again. And so really for hiring managers and for recruiters, often the main thing that they're trying to do is minimize risk. They want to get someone who is the right level for the role, not too junior, not too senior, someone who's going to stick around for a long time and competently do the job.

(00:37:20):

And sometimes this frustrates job seekers and they think, well, why don't they give more people a chance? And I would say that if you were trying to hire a plumber or a wedding planner or a babysitter or a carpenter and the person shows up for the interview and they say, Hey, I'm switching careers. I know that babysitting will make me really happy, but I've never done it before. I'm really eager to watch your kid. Most of you are going to have, you won't want to hire that candidate. Most of us are fairly risk averse and that risk aversion is understandable. So my push for hiring managers and executives is to try to take more risks. It's not nearly as risky as you think. In my own hiring on my own teams, I almost exclusively hire junior talent interns who are really sharp. I don't care where they went to school, I don't care when they graduated, but I evaluate what they're actually going to do on the job.

(00:38:16):

And I see who is really phenomenally smart and eager to learn and who really wants to work well with others on the team, high iq, high eq, and they just want to be in the seat. That's what I biased towards hiring for when I was hiring recruiters as a VP of talent acquisition and now at the agency when I'm hiring people to join my team, I don't really care what you did in the past. And I think often it's hard to find large scale studies that show any sort of correlation between performance on the job and things like years of experience where you went to school, what you studied, all the sort of stuff that ends up on the typical resume. A lot of it does not correlate to performance on the job I had to study, I had to look into this in a fairly deep way at a past company in order to build sort of a hiring system to take on board interns.

(00:39:23):

So we didn't have the capacity to really screen 10,000 intern resumes, but we wanted to hire a big cohort of interns. And so what do you do? How do you assess people fairly effectively? How do you match folks with the right vacancy if you don't have the time to just review all those cvs? And often testing if you test for those personality and character traits that are predictive of performance, things like someone's fluid intelligence, things like someone's emotional intelligence, those really predict performance so strongly. And we found honestly that this process worked better than the one that starts with resumes. And we implemented our learnings from this intern hiring across all of the vacancies at the organization because the folks that came out of this process that was rooted in assessing what could the person actually do rather than a piece of paper as the starting point, that led to much better hiring decisions anyway. So take a few more risks and really understand what will drive performance in your role and how do you test for exactly that? How do you push someone to do exactly what they're going to be doing on the job in the interview process, get at those traits.

Dan Freehling (00:40:43):

It's a fascinating perspective and a good push for those on the hiring side too, to look beyond some of the traditional metrics they use and into what will actually make a difference on the job. So thanks for sharing that. Spencer. What are some trends you're seeing for the social sector career space? I know that you are super plugged in here, that's your main area of work. What are some trends you're seeing there?

Spencer Campbell (00:41:12):

Some things that are positive for job seekers? I think we're seeing more salary transparency. We're seeing more humane hiring processes, folks committing to shorter hiring processes that are a little bit more transparent, which I think is great. I think I would push for anyone who's a recruiter or a talent person in any sector to really just put the salary on your job descriptions. I think this is going to become the law of the land and more and more geography. So even if it isn't in where you work now, it will be soon and it is just so much easier if we're more candid about this, you'll get better candidates, you'll get more applicants from the right level. And it's just so much kinder to the candidates to not waste their time if it's really just not a match on salary. We are seeing the same sort of the social sector is in its own way, it's still a market talent.

(00:42:27):

Market is still a market. And so when you look at the people who have good job security in the social sector being a great fundraiser, these are the folks that, they're either from donors, they're writing grants, they're working with individual donors. This is a really valuable skill to have in the social sector. If you're a good fundraiser, you'll have an easy job hunt, but all other useful technical skills as well, right? Skills and data skills and analytics skills in finance, recruiting, staffing, if you can really learn how to do something really well, of course engineering, learning how to code these sort of things. Nobody is hiring you just for the fun of it. They're hiring for you to solve a problem. And so if you have the skillset to solve that problem, your job prospects, your job hunt's going to be easier. One of the other positive things I'm seeing is that there are some really large philanthropists folks like Melinda French-Gates, MacKenzie Scott, who are making sort of gifts that are unrestricted and to a whole variety of organizations that previously wouldn't get that funding.

(00:43:45):

And organizations, most of the time they're taking that funding and they're using it to hire great people. What do most companies spend the vast majority of their budgets on? It's on their people. And so often if you can keep yourself aware of the trends on who's funding the players in your industry, this is true in the social sector and more widely, what does that funding landscape look like? That's often a leading indicator of the hiring landscape and this is something that job seekers can really leverage in their own searches. And so that's what I've seen. I've seen a lot of really positive, a lot of vacancies have opened up due to some of this historic level of investment in some of these large philanthropists who are making a concerted effort to give more sooner. And it's great for the space. It's really helping a diverse range of nonprofits and purpose driven organizations to scale up and succeed. So I would like to see that.

Dan Freehling (00:44:42):

Yeah, thanks for sharing those. So you mentioned that the salary being listed on the job posting being an important change and something you'd encourage recruiters and hiring managers to just start doing. If you could make any other sweeping change to the hiring process from a systems perspective, what would that be?

Spencer Campbell (00:45:03):

Yeah, so we talked a little bit about I would love to see more CV or resume free processes. I would love to see recruiters start with a chance for everybody to demonstrate some skill, everybody to demonstrate, take a test, answer some questions, these sort of things. Something that directly speaks to the job. I think it's a learning opportunity for all the candidates. I think maybe there are job seekers listening to this and they think, oh, that sounds horrible. I don't want to do any more work. But I also think that it's sort of like Tinder right now where it's too easy to swipe right on jobs which have no intention of ever swiping right back on you. And so I would love to see actually a little bit more friction. It should be harder to apply to the average job because that will lead to people being a little bit more thoughtful about where they apply and it will lead to hiring teams getting more useful information about prospective candidates sooner.

(00:46:07):

I think it's curious to see will ai, and I know potentially we'll come to this and it's a topic everyone's talking about these days, but it's like will we see AI tools being leveraged the same way that they're starting to? We've seen people talk about this in the dating market where it's like, oh, well you're not going to have to swipe anymore because my robot's going to swipe on your robot and that's going to do some of the preliminary matchmaking for us. I remain hopeful, but skeptical on these sort of things, making an impact on being useful to job seekers, being able to be leveraged that way to make it a little bit easier to make these matches. But right now we have too many choices. It's maybe too easy to apply. And so it goes back to the things we talked about earlier. It leads to the hiring teams being overwhelmed with pretty mediocre applications and it's leading to job seekers having to apply for many, many, many things and never hearing back. And so it's a fairly negative development in the space, which I would love to see reversed.

Dan Freehling (00:47:22):

I think the idea of a resume free hiring process is really, really fascinating and people should give that some thought of what value is the resume adding and is this a possibility for your org to do and would that actually improve things? That's just really cool to think about. You've mentioned the job search process being matchmaking before and then the kind of Tinder example on this last answer. I'm wondering how much of the job search is akin to that, where it's like there's some people that are just going on a date every night of the week and not finding any luck and other people meeting people through friends kind of short circuiting this what can be a grueling hellish process and applying more humanity back to it. And I'm wondering if there's any sort of parallels with that and the job search.

Spencer Campbell (00:48:21):

I think it's sort of shut through with parallels frankly. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe if anyone wants to hire me to launch a online dating company replacement for Tinder, this is a open call. Please reach out. I would love to. This is my dream job is to apply the learnings from the job search, from job search matchmaking to actual matchmaking because I think there's a lot here that we can learn from. And what you alluded to in the question is maybe the key thing, which is your friends can fix you up with better people than even some of these really powerful apps. And it's because this concept of loose ties or weak ties sometimes, and it's one of the strongest results that we've ever found in social psychology.

(00:49:11):

Your network is an exceptionally good filter. People who are similar to you, people who are you are connected to, people who can introduce you to relatively more interesting people than complete strangers. We tend to clump together by interest and traits that are similar to each other. And so recruiters know a lot of recruiters, accountants know a lot of accountants. And so if you're looking for a new accounting job, rather than going onto some job board, which has nothing to do with it, talk to your accountant friends who are similar enough to you to filter out things that aren't a good match for you but are different enough that they have opportunities that you aren't already seeing. And so when you put those two factors together, your extended network, your friends, your extended family, your colleagues that you worked with in the past, these are really good sources of leads for four jobs. And again, if you're looking to get fixed up on a date, leveraging your network in the same way is probably, I would give the same advice to someone who's looking to meet someone they might get along with. That's probably going to be a better use of your time than swiping, spending two hours swiping right on everybody who's online just because of the power of weak ties.

Dan Freehling (00:50:39):

I love the weak ties connection there. Another thing that's coming to mind for me and from your response to that too is I think a lot of the time we know our friends and family better than they know themselves too. It's so hard to look inward and understand what is so appealing about you and why people love spending time with you and that kind of a thing. And I think other people who know us well can often intuitively do this better, even if they can't articulate it themselves, but they have a better sense of it than we can even sometimes

Spencer Campbell (00:51:19):

Spot on. Dan, you're so right. I think that's the other piece of this is we are often a mystery to ourselves, but we're not a mystery to the people who've had a look at us. It's obvious, well, the things that are good about you are obvious to the people that are close to you in your life and you're often completely blind to them for similar reasons as what we discussed earlier about sort of tied up in how we feel about ourselves, how we think about ourselves, imposter syndrome, whatever your close context don't suffer from the same blindness as you do. I think Adam Grant spoke about this in Hidden Potential quite a bit. You can leverage that expertise in you that you're close and extended contacts have about your skills about who you are a hundred percent.

Dan Freehling (00:52:09):

And you mentioned the AI future that is possibly upon us depending on who you talk to right now. So I'd love to just get your thoughts on first AI in the job search process of the candidate matching and that kind of stuff, and then AI just for future of work more broadly of how you see this impacting what we do for work and careers in the near future and even further out, if you don't mind.

Spencer Campbell (00:52:41):

Yeah, I think we're sort of at the peak of the AI hype cycle. I'm a daily user of chat, GPT. I'm a big fan of the product. I ask my researchers at the agency to use it to help 'em do their work. I think it underpins a lot of the great work we do as sort of a research tool, research aid. It supercharges human effort enough that I'm willing to pay for it at least at 20 bucks a month. I do not think we are on the brink of AI overlords taking over the world and displacing all jobs. I think this is a little bit of marketing copy by people who are trying to sell AI products. And I also think it's just a very natural fear of being replaced. I think if your job is sort of the assembly line version of knowledge work where you're taking information from one place and mechanically putting it in a different place with some small transformation in between, that job is done.

(00:53:47):

AI has already started doing that job and days are numbered, start looking for something new. But I think a lot of us that it just isn't what we do. And so much of what we do day to day is powered by creativity. It's powered by addressing the very human sort of points of friction. Almost the entire time I've had anything to do with hr, I have been on sales calls with people promising to deploy technology that would make recruiters obsolete. And almost invariably it just doesn't work because the things that gum up recruiting processes are not based in technical limitations. They're based in the limitations in human understanding and human processing abilities. Hiring managers struggle to hire because of their own shortcomings as human beings, not because of necessarily a talent pool which is lacking and they fail to grapple with that in the same way that job seekers continue to apply for jobs that are a bad fit, a AI tool that automates or puts more candidates in front of them, it probably won't solve those very human sticking points which really come up the works.

(00:55:01):

And my sense is that I think this is probably true in most parts of the economy. I don't want to claim to be an expert in all things, but it's, I think often the technological thing is a distraction and it's, at any rate, I'm really excited about this and I think personally I'm going to deploy AI in my own business. It's been a huge coup and we're going to use it to make a lot of money and grow the business. And I think a lot of people are going to be on the other side of this figuring out how to leverage it. I would advice for job seekers on this is think about how could you use these tools to pursue your very human aims. Anyway, I'll leave that there. Yeah,

Dan Freehling (00:55:52):

It's a refreshing perspective and I think so grounded as well. And I love the framing of it as pursuing your human names, making your career more deeply creative and deeply human. And I was listening to a really interesting interview with Sam Altman a bit ago, and he was saying that initially they were thinking that blue collar work would be the first to be replaced. And what they're actually finding is that it's going to be that generic kind of lower end white collar work of that kind of copy and paste, uncreative corporate communication kind of stuff. And actually think that's probably a great thing that we have less of that out in the working world and it frees people up to do things that are not just being kind of white collar corporate drone and actually be using their humidity and their creativity.

Spencer Campbell (00:56:45):

No, I mean at the turn of the 20th century, there were a lot of guys getting paid to shovel horse crap in New York City and the automobile came around and all those people lost their jobs and we're okay with that. I think there's a lot of just crappy jobs that we should all celebrate their demise of. I think the other thing I would say, just not to get this super political, the real fear, the real downside is sort, is there further concentration of wealth? Is it how do we incentivize new jobs to be created that are better or simply take a ensure that billionaires pay their fair share and we get some of the efficiencies that are being gained in the economy. Those need to go back into the pockets of regular people, and that's probably going to need some sort of intervention anyway. It's like there will be changes, changes are definitely coming, but I'm bullish that if we push people the right way, we push the economy in the direction we want, it'll be good. It can be good for workers, lousy, crappier jobs cease to exist, potentially better jobs come and a better economy for us all.

Dan Freehling (00:58:16):

It's such important thing to consider the political ramifications for this, and it's again, just really interesting to think about and what will this look like and how can we proactively as a country or as a world be looking to put in those protections and those regulations where they make sense. So this doesn't turn into some dystopian nightmare as well. So what career books or other resources of any kind do you find yourself coming back to the most often? And I'm going to take my own, I know I have the Career Design Map book, I'm going to take that off the table so it doesn't turn into a shilling session for my own publications, but I'd love to hear which ones you find yourself going back to the most often.

Spencer Campbell (00:58:59):

No, definitely. I'm a big fan of your book. I particularly love the quiz. I think it's a great starting point for a lot of people who are on this journey. I also really like Never Search Alone by Phil Terry. I usually, I buy a copy of this book for each client and send it to 'em. And I think Phil has a really smart approach. It's a 250 page book. Two pages of it are about resumes, and I disagree with most of what he says on those two pages. But the rest of the book is incredibly useful for, I would say most job seekers who are pursuing sort of a mid-career knowledge worker sort of job in social impact or in tech or really the lessons are widely applicable. And he outlines how to do what he calls a listening tour, which is a much more effective form of networking. I spoke a little bit about some of these ideas earlier, but if you really want a foolproof or an effective, a tested approach to your job hunt, I think I resonate with so much of what says what Phil says and Never Search Alone.

(01:00:17):

The other ones I'll call out are the classic, What Color is Your Parachute? I think particularly the early chapters of this outline, some tried and true dynamics of how does recruiting processes work, and I think there's also quite a bit of very practical advice on negotiation in that I also find myself turning to books which are a little bit more broad on how do we make sense of our careers and our lives. I just finished one called How to Do Nothing and don't feel like you need to optimize every single aspect of your life or job. I think that there's a lot of pressure in our culture to be the best, to find the best, and often there's a benefit to stepping away from that. The Good Enough Job also speaks to this idea as well, how do you ask a little bit less from work? How do you not put your whole identity into work, which is something I grappled with a lot. A few years ago when I left a job I'd been in for a long time and went on sabbatical, I really took a long time to figure out what I wanted to do with myself and who I was outside of my job. And I think this is something for anyone who's had a point of transition to think about who you are outside of the job market. Yeah, those are the ones I really like.

Dan Freehling (01:01:45):

So many great recommendations there for people to check out. Spencer, how can people learn more about what you're up to? Follow along and get in touch if they'd like.

Spencer Campbell (01:01:55):

Yeah. The best way to find me is on LinkedIn, just search for Spencer Campbell Talent on LinkedIn and you'll find my company page and my personal page. People can also book time to speak with me via my website. That's spencercampbelltalent.com.

Dan Freehling (01:02:18):

Great. Well, I would really encourage anyone in the job seeking space to follow Spencer and get in touch with him if his services sounded appealing from everything we've talked about and it's just so nice after having done so much work together, Spencer, to finally have you on the podcast, so really appreciate you taking the time.

Spencer Campbell (01:02:36):

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Dan Freehling (01:02:39):

Of course. So we'll throw all those links in the show notes at contempusleadership.com. And everyone, thanks for joining us. If you have a chance to leave a quick review on whatever podcast player you're using, that goes a long way in helping to spread the word with people. So thank you for doing that in advance and thanks again Spencer. Appreciate it.

Spencer Campbell (01:02:56):

Take care.