Revisiting Job Search and Best-Fit Environment During and After the Pandemic

How do you find passion and meaning for the rest of your career? In my book, RELAUNCH! Stagnation, Change, and Renewal in Mid-Career and Beyond, I presented a concept called the Intersection Principle. It proposes that passion and meaning occurs when four factors merge: best skills, strongest interests, best-fit environment, and the corresponding job opportunities. When looking for the right job opportunities, the first task is to seek out the best-fit environments in which to use your skills and interests. This sets the scene for where to target the job search. The idea is, why waste time on looking for the right job in the wrong place? Or if you have already been offered a job, does it make sense to accept a job in a place where you are unlikely to fit or be happy over the long term?

From experience with unhappy career changers, the motivation to change is so often based on a misfit with a supervisor, work demands and expectations, work teams, company culture, no advancement possibilities or very often, a need for more meaningful work opportunities. So starting your job search by finding compatible work environments in which you can use your skills and interests over the long-term makes sense. It increases the chances of ending up with a good fit for both you and an employer, a win-win situation.

This article includes, but also goes beyond, using this strategy for just looking for a new job. It includes situations in which a sudden new job offer is being considered in a pandemic and post-pandemic job market. Under these circumstances there is a sometimes urgent need to replace a lost job and to find new stability in an unstable and unknown job market and even career, while retaining a livable income. There may also be the lure of a much higher salary in a job where you might not really fit and last very long, with risk of future unemployment worsened by job market uncertainty or company instability.

Let’s first look at doing a general job search. Many people find it difficult to start by looking for employers rather than jobs. It's a counterintuitive strategy because looking for jobs seems the most direct, easiest, and logical route when there are so many job posting sites available. The problem is that even if you find a job from a random posting, it could be with an employer that isn't your best fit. If so, after a few months and certainly long term that could be trouble. So, how do you start a new job search with best-fit employers?

First, you need to know the job(s) for which you are searching and the location. (Note that location may be less of a critical issue for remote jobs.) Then, you need to locate employers who employ workers in those jobs. Easy ways to do this are:

1. Use this tool from the US Department of Labor.
2. Go to LinkedIn. Type a job in the search box and then filter as appropriate by companies.

Both of these sources allow you to narrow by various criteria.

Another, less apparent method is to use Google Maps.  Simply type in the location of interest and the types of companies you are looking for. More detailed information on this and related Google search methods are described in the article Search Smarter: 7 Great Ways to Leverage Google's Power for Your Job Search.

Second, determine the kind of work environment you prefer. 

Consider what is important to you in the following areas and write them down so you remember.  Note the one or more factors that are critical to you.

1. The Organizational Culture - Includes how decisions are made and communicated, work hours, time off, amount of creativity expected, attitude toward customers, importance of honesty in communications, level of emphasis on ethics and fairness, emphasis on diversity.
2. Work Teams - Includes opportunity for leadership, whether focus is on competitiveness or collaboration, how conflict is handled, opportunities for promotion, importance of team trust and camaraderie, control of personal schedule. 
3. Supervision - Hands-on vs hands-off supervision, opportunities to be mentored, clarity of expectations, frequency of performance reviews.
4. Physical Environment - Company location, work at home options, working indoors vs outdoors, work in cubicles vs open space, having owned or shared workspace.
5. Company Size 
6. Other

Consider the "Organizational Personality". Use the Good & Co app for Apple or Android devices and take the quiz to broadly measure your dominant personality types. It's free and appears to be a soundly developed career tool. Your results can then be compared to the corresponding traits of a large pool of organizations. You can read more about their system on the Good & Co website.

Third, do research to narrow down the organizations you found to those you fit best.  This is based on what you deem as most important, and when possible, to those which fit your dominant personality type. Start by looking at the organization websites. Then use resources such as glassdoor.com and themuse.com to get inside views from others. 

You can use the Good and Co quiz results and company resources to locate and find out about companies with which you may have a good personality fit. Be sure to read what the company match scores mean since match scores will look high for almost all companies you search. Only 2000 companies are covered, so you may not find a company you are looking for. 

Finally, as you narrow further, use your LinkedIn and other network contacts to find out more. This might be the most accurate information about the promising companies on your list and may also generate other best-fits that your contacts recommend. These same contacts may also help get you interviews as you proceed with your job search.

Once you've found your best-fit workplaces, then you can target your job search to positions that use your strongest skills and best interests, exclusively in those organizations. When you get interviews you can observe and ask questions that give you deeper insights about the company environment. Look particularly for indicators of stability and growth vs projections for decline and loss of jobs, particularly those that are in line with your best skills and strongest interests.. When you get job offers you will then have a good sense of how well you will thrive in that organization's environment. 

To do this type of job search you will have to work against your instincts to search through job listings, the most popular method. This targeted system is far less competitive and works well when you also use non-traditional strategies for finding job opportunities within your targeted organizations. Try strategies such as searching organization websites for open jobs which may not be posted elsewhere, direct unsolicited contacts with hiring managers, and getting introduced to influential staff and managers through your network contacts.

If you have been recruited, have gotten unexpected job offers, or have received job offers through your network, your research process should be the same as described in this article, before accepting a job. Making a decision based on best-fit environment can be particularly difficult if you’ve been offered a more prestigious position or one with a higher salary, or if you've been unemployed for a while. Taking the job offered can be very tempting. However, it’s usually worthwhile to take a step back to evaluate the situation carefully and determine how you might fit over time without getting caught up in the emotions of the moment. Discussing it with a neutral trusted person could help.

In summary, a good environmental fit where you work is one of the most important components of insuring a long tenure in the right place....a place where you can use your best skills and strongest interests in surroundings you love and in which your presence is appreciated by your employer. The most efficient way to do this is to limit your job search to your best-fit work environments.