Midlife MavericksI was on the phone with a young lady who came highly recommended by someone I trust. Let’s call her Anna.
Every once in a while I take on these mentoring calls to do the Mary Shirley “send the elevator back down” thing.
This is a woman in corporate finance, early-career, at a large firm. About 30% of her role is business development, which almost nobody at her level bothers to do, and this year she has brought in over $250,000 of revenue doing it. She is razor sharp, articulate and polite. The whole package, let’s call it.
She is trying to move jobs and a recruiter told her that her side business, which she runs on social media, made her look uncommitted to her day job. She had made a thousand dollars from it the month before.
A recruiter looked at what she does at the weekend and called it a commitment problem. She asked me whether she should just take it off her CV.
And I have to say, my mouth went full Claudia, and out came all my fucks.
Quote of the Week
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night, introduction
Would he have said that to Tom?
If she posted about ultra marathons instead, and her name was Tom, would anyone have mentioned this?
Of course not.
It would have been seen as discipline and ability to deal with stress and time management. Nobody would have sat across a table and wondered aloud whether all that early-morning running was eating into his focus. I’m not even going to mention that no guy would be asked how they manage “all that” with young kids, something I’ve heard repeatedly myself but I bet not Johnny or Tom, who had kids the same age as mine and have hobbies that take far longer time away from home (hello Saturdays golfing).
I’m not generalising what I think about recruiters. The same fact gets read differently depending on who is carrying it, and if you do not know that, you will spend years trying to fix “your” fact.
The thing you are hiding is the evidence
This really triggered me because I have similar stories to tell and I see this happening a lot more to women than men.
Anna is awesome at sales. She even manages to get strangers on the internet to hand over their cash to her, in her free time. Month after month.
She works out who might actually buy, and she asks. She gets told no. She shows up the next day and asks again, pushy but patient. In other words, she knows how to build and manage a pipeline.
It’s the same skill her employer is currently paying for, and she has now demonstrated it twice: once inside the corporate world, for $250,000, and once on her own time, for a thousand dollars a month.
And there is Bob the recruiter telling her to hide this second activity.
If you are sitting on something similar, and I suspect a fair number of you are, understand what you actually have. It’s the cleanest proof you own. Nobody assigned this to you. There was no budget and no list for you to call. You built demand from nothing while holding down a demanding job, and it worked.
If you do not write it, somebody else writes it for you
I spent my entire career trying to hide my side interests. The fact that I have always had ten things going on at once, and that I was visibly, obviously not the default person in the room. I thought the smaller I made myself, the more seriously I would be taken. There was no one telling me about portfolio careers back then. And that it is alright to have multiple interests.
I was wrong about it.
These days I write. First about building a business, then about raising money for hedge funds. I write because I want to clear my head and I love it. And also to decide what comes up when somebody types my name before a meeting.
You are running the same calculation right now about whatever you have not put your name to.
That is all “controlling the narrative” means. The first page of results about you becomes something you chose. Regardless of what Bob the recruiter says.
What if you’re still on the inside
This works even when you have not left yet and have no intention of announcing anything.
Write/create about what interests you.
It could be about your day to day job. How you find clients. The follow-up that went unanswered, and what you did about it. The thing you say early in a first conversation now that you did not say a year ago, and how it changed the temperature of the call.
Call it showing your work.
Anyone hiring for a revenue role reads four of those and knows exactly how your brain works, which is a lot more than a CV will ever tell them.
And the useful side effect: when somebody searches you and finds a year of you being thoughtful about how you win business, the weekend side project starts to look like consistency and commitment instead of a distraction.
The bottom line
You have been told, somewhere along the way, probably by someone who meant well, that the safest version of you is the one with fewer edges. That there should be nothing on the internet that could be held against you.
It might be the worst advice you have ever taken.
Being invisible has never once protected anybody. It just means that when the reorg comes, or the role you actually want gets filled off a list you were never on, nothing out there is doing any work on your behalf. No particular reason for anyone to think of you.
A recruiter noticing your side business is the least of your problems.
So this week, search your own name. Properly, in an incognito window, the way somebody would before deciding whether to take a call with you, and write down the first five results.
Then start. Publish one thing that changes what somebody finds.
And when you look at those five results, whose version of you are they?
Hit reply and tell me. I want to know how many of you find nothing at all when you search your own name.
See you Wednesday,
Claudia
P.S. If a recruiter ever tells you your outside interests look like a commitment problem, you are allowed to ask, out loud, whether they would say the same to a man with a marathon habit. You will not get that job. You were never getting that job anyway.
