Kathryn Minshew - How Employers and Employees Should Build Careers

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello, and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:49)
My guest this week is Kathryn Minshew, the co-founder and CEO of The Muse and co-author of The New Rules for Work, The Modern Playbook for Navigating Your Career. I've learned in business that the quality of people and the culture they create dictate outcomes. Having made plenty of mistakes hiring and having had many enormous successes, I'm always interested in best practices for finding and successfully recruiting the right people. Given that Kathryn runs a jobs marketplace and has written a book on the topic, she's the perfect person to explore some of the core concepts around pairing people with the right positions. We discussed how companies should market to prospective employees, how employees should represent themselves to employers, and the most common mistakes she sees across the hiring landscape. Please enjoy our conversation.
What do you think more broadly speaking are the largest changes in just the nature of work, both the work itself, but also how people approach the problem, the matching problem of finding the thing that's appropriate for them?

**Kathryn Minshew** (1:40)
Well, I think that a lot of people today are looking at their career from the perspective of finding the right fit.
And I think that's a really important change because maybe I'll use dating and marriage as an analogy.
Several hundred years ago, arranged marriages were common, a lot of marriages were, it was a functional thing. You married to get land, to get status, to support yourself. Careers for a long time also were somewhat similar. It was, I got to do something to pay the bills.
And now we are, many of us are lucky enough to suddenly have a much wider set of options. And so people are asking themselves, what do I value? What do I care about? What gives me meaning? And in the personal realm, people are starting, obviously, there's a sort of age-old quest for finding the right fit in a relationship. But I think a lot of those same lessons and stories have really interesting parallels in the world of career because what I've seen over the last decade is a massive rise in talented individuals thinking about their career as finding a match or a fit. And this idea that each job or each career path might have benefits and drawbacks, that workplaces have values and cultures, so to speak, and ethos. And sometimes you get part of a group of people and it just fits, it clicks. People can talk about jobs as feeling like they've joined their tribe, and sometimes you're the odd man out and it can be a very alienating experience. And so I think that as it becomes more common for people to evaluate roles and jobs, not just by classic criteria like how much does it pay me, but also by more sort of emotional or next level criteria such as, is this a mission that I want to be part of? Am I learning and developing? How do I feel about the team and the leadership and the managers? Is this my tribe? I think that changes the way that people look for jobs and the tools they use to do so.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:27)
How do you think about cramming some of this into formulas? So there's been many famous ones like Daniel Pink's Comes to Mind, where I think it's like autonomy, mastery and purpose are the dimensions of fulfillment in a career or in a job. Do you think in those terms, given that you run a business that's effectively a marketplace business, is that how you think about it as something that can be reduced to dimensions?
Or is it more idiosyncratic than that?

**Kathryn Minshew** (3:49)
I certainly think it's more complicated than a three to four element formula would suggest. We do have something we talk about with clients called the three P's, people, purpose and path.
These are three things that are important to candidates, not all three to all candidates. But when you're talking with someone who's used to candidates are making decisions based on salary alone, it's often helpful to instead reintroduce them to the three P's. A lot of our candidates care about the people that they're working with. As I said, the teams, the managers, the other humans that they will spend 40 plus hours of their week with. The purpose is the overall purpose of the company.