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Before we get into today's episode, I have something incredibly special to share. My book, let's Be Diverse A Practical Guide to Leading Through Change, is officially out and available on Amazon. Honestly, this is an emotional moment for me. This book represents a dream, a journey, personal experiences, difficult lessons, and deep belief that we can all make a difference in how we lead and how we show up for one another. Wrote this book because we all face uncertainty. We all have moments when we question ourselves, struggle to find the answers, or wonder how we're going to get through a difficult situation. My hope is that these pages remind someone out there that they're not alone, that they have the courage to keep moving forward, and that even in the most uncertain moments, there's an opportunity to grow. And now my biggest dream is to get this book into as many hands as possible. So I'm asking you to be part of this journey. Head over to Amazon, search for let's Be Diverse, A Practical Guide Leading to Change and grab your copy today. And if you know someone who might need this message, please share it with them as well. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for supporting me, believing in me, helping me bring this dream to life. It truly means more than words can say. Let's get this book and as many hands as as possible because you never know whose life might be touched by a message that they need to hear. Now let's get on to today's episode.
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Opinions expressed in this episode are personal. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this streaming platform.
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Good day, wonderful people, and welcome to another edition of let's Be Diverse. I am your host, Andrew Stout. This episode is dedicated to all my loved ones who supported me through this journey. To those who have left us will always be in our hearts and will never be forgotten. Today our topic is from Reactive to Intentional the Future of Career Decisions. I'm so happy to have as my guest today this fantastic human. Her name is Cindy Schwartz. Cindy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad that you reached out. You were persistent in trying to nail me down and find a good time and I felt that energetically was the right time for us to finally come together and record something wonderful.
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Cindy, what's been energizing you these days? Give us the tea, give us the deets, give us it all. What's going on?
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What a great question. Actually, what's been energizing me is rest. Wild, wild rest. So I will get probably get into it, but I left a 22 year career just last October to start my own or re energize my coaching business and start my own podcast. And things were like gung ho, jump into it, get the ball moving, get all the creative juices flowing. And I'm now actually in a period of reflection in which I'm examining. Okay, so I've created phase one of my business and my podcast and now I'm in. Summertime is typically a slow period for coaching and I've already filmed and recorded all my episodes for my first season of my podcast. So now I get the opportunity to be in the energy of reflection, creativity, thinking about what my next steps look like. So right now what's energizing me is being in the woods. I am spending my summer in the woods with all the trees, hanging out with the bumblebees and just reflecting on this magnificent life that I have led so far and really curious to see what comes up in terms of what does phase two look like for me.
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Energy of reflection. What a great way to look at it and what a great way to to focus on the new and the things in the future. I always look at the summertime as relaxing, obviously taking it easy, reflecting, as you said. And then I find September is almost like the end of the year. We've hit September, how we want to close out the year, how do we want to do this, what new things we want to do in the new year. So all the planning and all everything gets set up starting in September. So you reflecting on that or your energy of reflection is a great way to describe that.
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Thank you. I think it's necessary. I think I talk about this a lot in my coaching practice that it's in the quiet moments that we really figure out who we are. And the rest of the year can be quite noisy. There's a lot going on and even like I said in my coaching practice, I see it. People don't want to be coached unless they are moving towards a very specific goal and they're like in the middle of designing something. The people that come to me that are more in reflection mode, those ones tend to take a break during the summer because we have all year to be in that energy of creating and now is the time to be on the other side of that. I really believe in the concept of the yin and the Yang and the energy flowing in yin. Yin is a very soft time. It's a reflective time, it's a softer time. And it's in that yin state that at least for me that's where I find the wonderful nuggets of wisdom that help me to grow the business and to take it in different directions. Because if we're constantly moving, inertia doesn't allow us the time to create new stuff.
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I agree with you 100%. Well, congratulations on everything that you're doing. Congratulations on taking the leap. Not everybody has the courage to do that. So you did that after a 20 year career. You could have stayed stagnant and comfortable and stayed in what you were doing and you took a chance on yourself to do what you wanted to do and you had the things you had passion for. So kudos to you for, for doing that.
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Thank you.
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You're very welcome. Before we begin, I always have a fun, thought provoking question. I'd ask all my guests to get things going. Are you ready for yours today?
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I sure am. Hit me.
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Okay, so your question is, if your life was made into a TV show, what would a title be and why?
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Oh my God, what a fun question. What's interesting? I know this might sound a bit cliche, but because I just designed over the course of the last year, my own podcast, I feel like my podcast is a bit of a reflection on what my TV Persona would be. So my, my podcast is called Out Loud with Cindy Schwartz. And the reason it actually had, it came in different iterations. The first name originally was becoming with Cindy Schwartz, but Michelle Obama had stolen the the proprietary rights to the word becoming, so it couldn't really be that. And then because it was a woman's podcast, I love the thought of it being with love and estrogen because I wanted to bring love and because it was a feminine centered podcast, the estrogen gave a little silly hint towards like who my listener be. But it ended up being out loud because I think what I really needed was to take myself out loud was to give myself a different voice. Not a voice because I already had one, but a different voice than I had ever had before. So I think my TV show would be like a reformed corporate recruiter slash director of talent who's now living like a hippie dippy life and talking to bumblebees and hanging out with trees and coaching women who want to become their best, most wildest selves. And I feel like Out Loud really captures the energy of where I'm trying to go. So hopefully I picked it.
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Well, you did. I think that. I think you picked a great name. And you're absolutely right. We go through this process of trying to pick a name and sometimes we know I think we almost overthink it, but you want to make sure that it's something that obviously it's catchy, but obviously you want to have something that nobody else is using. So I love that you did that. I love that you did the research. And it sounds like it's something that you've been thinking about for a while. So it's not like something that you decided last week. So the process was a continuous process until you got to where you are now. So I love it and I love the story, and I think that would be a pretty good show.
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I hope so. One day. You know what? One day. One day, hopefully it will become a show. Funnily enough, I mentioned that it is a woman's podcast, but I recorded a special episode for my listeners, which is not a woman, but I actually invited my husband. It hasn't aired yet. It's going to air in September. And it was a special episode for us to tell our love story. Like the. We've been together for 29 years, and whenever we tell our origin story amongst couples, people always say, this would make a great TV show or this would make a great screenplay. So who knows, Maybe that episode or the whole podcast will be turned into some fabulous movie or television production one day.
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You never know. We just never know what's going to happen in the future. So I love that. I love that.
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Yeah.
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Thank you so much, first of all, for. For having fun with us and answering that question to get us started. Who are you and what really drives you to do the work that you do?
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Who am I? What a great question. Who am I? I'm so many things, so I think I ended up in. So I. My. My background cut came from hr. So I think who I was was a person at that age of my life in my 20s who really liked helping people. I had always worked in customer service while I was a student. I studied sociology, and I chose HR as a profession. And because ultimately I wanted to help people. I didn't really know what that looked like. And my goal at the beginning of my career was to become an HR advisor, generalist, whatever followed that path, HR director, HR vp. But I ended up in recruitment by accident. And I not only ended up there by accident, but I ended up spending 22 years accidentally in the wrong company, but accidentally turned into intentional when I realized I was actually in the right place. So I landed there by accident. But it was really the right field for me because who I am is a very curious individual who loves to evolve personally. And my greatest gift in life is to spend time with other people, getting to know them by listening deeply and asking powerful questions so that I can help them figure out who do they want to become, who do they want to evolve into. So who I am is like a bridge. I act as a bridge between people's dreams and the intentional lives that they can create.
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And what a great way to look at it as far as a leader that you are, that you are a bridge. And I wish that a lot more leaders looked at it that way because that isn't an essence of what a leader really is, is or someone in HR is a bridge. We are the bridge between management or higher ups and between that and our individual contribut. What a great way to look at it.
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Yeah, I never wanted it to be as much as I can be ego driven or have my own feelings of what I wanted my own career to look like. It always felt so much better to lift up others and be in service of others because I do have a big personality and I have a strong voice. And for me, sometimes it's helping to bring out. If you act as a bridge instead of as a boss, I guess you could say you give people the confidence to empower themselves to become their loudest version of whatever they are. And so it always felt better to me to be empowering others because that, that's what fueled me. So it was like there, it was like this very ripple effect and it was a very reciprocal relationship was to feed them with energy and empowerment. Gave me what I needed to keep moving.
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So the title of this podcast suggests that many are making reactive decisions instead of intentional ones. What is the difference between a reactive career decision and an intentional career decision? And why does that distinction.
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Great question. I want to start off by giving a bit of pretext around candidates in a job market because there are different kinds of candidates and we will likely be referring to one type today. So I think it's important to give context. So there are people that are looking for work. Okay. Those are people that do not have a job and want, like not want, need a new job. Okay? That's one type of candidate. Then we have candidates that are working that are actively looking and want to get a new job because they are unhappy in the current job that they have and they are making an intentional effort to move towards changing their. Their situation. And then you have passive candidates. Passive candidates are the ones that are sitting around minding their own business and get reached out to either by headhunters or by companies directly. And they then engage in a process to potentially change their job. I'm likely going to be mostly referring to passive, candid. The last, I'd say eight to 10 years of my career in recruitment dealt with much more passive type candidates. Now, a passive candidate is someone, like I said, who wasn't actively looking for anything. They may have been thinking about it, but they weren't currently applying for any jobs. Then all of a sudden, someone pops into your LinkedIn in mail and says, you're the greatest thing I've ever seen and I have this opportunity and it is going to change your life. And then the candidate will then pounce on that opportunity and then decide or not whether they're going to engage themselves in process with recruiters or with the company directly. So those are the types of candidates that I'm talking about. So when I say there's reactivity, what I mean is that there's so much more to a job. One of the biggest things I observed in 22 years, whether it was passive or active candidates, was that the most important thing and the number one question that people always ask is, what is the salary? And I understand from a perspective of living your life and we all have bills to pay and we have mouths to feed, I get that that's important. It's treated always as paramount as the most important thing. And what I've seen time and time again is making a decision based on intangible factors like salary, vacation, how many hours the job is, how many days remote can you work? These are all the conditions for your success that will make you happy or not happy. But the reality is, is, is if the job is not aligned with who you are as a person and who you want to become, no amount of money will make you happy. And that especially came in, I would see with counteroffers, right? People would use these opportunities to get counteroffers, or they wouldn't even intentionally see it coming. And they would go out to market, they would be enticed by a recruiter telling them that they were the cure to cancer and you should come work for me and I'm going to pay you 5k more. There's nothing wrong with that in principle. What I found interesting and suspect was that people didn't really consider what they needed as a person in this equation. Who were they? Who were they becoming? What do they want? What are their values? What's important to them? What is the company like? We talk about company culture. Oh, we have coffee on Fridays or we have pizza on the week, whatever. But it's like we don't think about the deep, deep, deep things that truly matter when you're actually in the job and spending 40 hours a week with people all. And so I'll give you an example of what I mean by reactional or not intentional. So most candidates go on an interview, they meet an HR person, typically sometimes they'll usually meet the person they're going to report to. Obviously sometimes they might meet one person from the team and that's it. Can you imagine working in a place I. Sorry, I can't imagine most people can do it. So obviously everyone can imagine it. It's just me. But it's like I can't imagine going somewhere without really knowing who are my colleagues, who are my peers, what are people like? Here, I'll give you an example. So I have one of my coaching clients. She just changed jobs after 25 years. Okay. And one of the things that she. She's a sweet seat person. One of the things that she values as a leader is looking at feedback, let's say giving criticism or giving context to feedback. She always likes to look at it through the lens of positivity, making sure the person feels empowered, making sure the person feels heard while she's delivering that feedback. The environment that she's now come into, it's not to say that they don't value that, but it's more important for them to look at the angle of everything that went wrong and position it from that angle so that they can evaluate how they can become better. That's not a bad thing. It's not good or bad. It's just very different to how she's used to operating. And now she's having a very hard time reconciling, fitting into a new environment where that value of transparency that she normally had in positivity is not necessarily espoused. Where she is now, that's a very minute thing. We can't obviously know everything going into a new job, but if I was going to be going on an interview with a new company, I would be asking, can I come shadow for a day? Can I come have lunch with your team? Can I come spend time with you guys? I want to see what I'm getting into. And what I'm so glad about was that in my 22 years of partnering with with companies and with employees, I was able to share how I would want to do it with some companies. And they actually changed their hiring practices to reflect a more intentional match. And that felt really good that I was able to influence that because you really, really want to know what you're getting yourself into. Because the consequence to not knowing what you're getting into is you show up and it's not what you expected and then you're disappointed. And that's why people change jobs every two years. That's the real story. That's why.
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Yeah, there's so many scenarios that I can think of that you're, as you're talking, you're not going to just marry with them before you meet them and get to know them and, and see what it's going to be, what it's like to be with that person. So you're absolutely right. Going somewhere on a regular basis because we spend so much time with our work family, as we do with our, we do our regular family more, and I would say more so that we want to make sure that we get along with those people. Because then, then you're. Are you going into a, a safe environment or are you going into a not so safe environment? So I, I absolutely, I agree.
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Absolutely. And to give it like, I know you're probably going to ask me another question this will give the answer to, but it's, I think it's important to bears mentioning that often what happens in an interview already interviews in the world that we live in are such a, like, it's, it's so manufactured, right. Everybody's trying to be the best versions of themselves. So not only are we not going deep enough by asking, candidates also don't feel safe to ask very deep questions because if they go too deep, trying to understand the environment more, the culture more, or the leadership more, the company then gets offended. Why are they asking all these questions? And what do they want to know so much? And is this person going to be a problem? Is this person going to be a troublemaker? Only because they want to know more. But the reality is, is like the employer is presenting the best version of them. The highlight reels we talk about on social media, that's what an interview is. An interview is the highlight reel or of the candidate's experience and the company and what they have to offer. And so that's why there's this massive disconnect. It's like imagine you've referred to it as dating, right? Dating versus marriage. Imagine going on two dates with someone and then marrying them. Well, no, realistically, what are the chances that that's going to work? And that's why there's so much turnover, for sure.
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So you, you did talk about people going into interviews and talking about salaries and what it's like to work there. But what I want to know from you is from a candidate's perspective, what are some of the biggest mistakes people make when they're choosing their next opportunity? And you, you talked about it before. But how can we move past focusing on salary title or simply escaping bad situations to make decisions that align with our strengths, values and long term goals?
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Great question. So I think it actually has to start with the employer and not with the candidate. We need to change the culture of how we interview in order for candidates to be able to make more intentional choices. So the employer, like what I observed in 22 years of working with over at least 500 companies, of hiring for them directly, what I observed is the process is extremely rigid and they don't allow for an honest dialogue in which two people can be brutally honest with each other to determine if there is a match. And by brutal honesty, what I just mean is transparency. This is what we have to offer. Is this something that you think would offer value to your career? The other thing is companies are still acting like it's 19, I don't know, 84. And that they have the upper hand and that it's all about the candidate wooing them and that it's like it's a very imbalanced relationship. Employers still think that they have the upper hand, which technically they do, because they're making candidates feel like they can't be fully honest because they're maybe not being fully honest. And it's only hurting them though. So they, there's this power imbalance that exists that the companies think is working for them, but it's not because it doesn't allow them to choose the best possible candidate. So what I would call for is a reform in the way that we actually conduct interviews. As employers, as HR professionals, as HR professionals, it is our responsibility and to teach the hiring managers and the executives what does a good interview look like? What does an opportunity to get to know people look like? Because the other thing I'm seeing is that employers are hiring based solely. So just like candidates are focused on vacation and salary, employers are focused on skills and abilities. And while that's of course important, the employer is not focusing on the passion or the interest of the candidate. If employers hired for passion instead of just skills, skills are important. It's definitely a part of the equation. You're not going to hire someone that's passionate, that doesn't know what they're doing, especially in a more senior role that requires, you know, a certain expertise. But If I was a hiring manager and I had two candidates in front of me for a director role, and both of them had equal experience, but one of them came to me with exuberance and passion about a leadership style that I knew could change the face of maybe a department that really needs that change, I would. Even if the person who had More passion had 5 years less experience, I would probably take them because I know that the impact to the team would be much greater than the experience itself. So I really believe it needs to start with the employers. Once the employers. Once you have an employer that's willing to truly get to know candidates and evaluate what they bring to the table and measure them on passion, then candidates are then able to come to the interview prepared as themselves, able to ask interesting questions, tell the employer, like I observed, I used to have to coach people before they went on an interview. Don't say that you want to grow within the company because then they're going to think that they, that they want to hire someone for right now, they're trying to fix a problem. Right now, they don't want to think about two years from now. They don't want to have to replace you in two years from now. So please lie and say that you don't want to grow. What person doesn't want to grow? And for me to have to tell people you need to go lie to pretend to be something that you're not to get the job, first of all, that's just terrible. And also how, how happy is that person going to be in a job after they've just lied about what their intentions are and they had to lie because the company didn't allow for the truth to happen. So I feel like it's really a dance between the two parties, but it has to start with the companies and HR people out there. Please, for the ones of you that care, this needs to start with us.
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Yeah. Everything you said there was absolute gold. Transparency is super important. And I think we have to understand too, that we're not the only shop in town. So when someone is looking for work, which you said, there's different categories of people that are looking, they're probably not just applying at your company and waiting to hear from you. They're applying as many places as they can. And if they see three, four jobs that fit their, their values and the things that they believe in and they're going to want to do that, they're going to want to apply to those jobs because they can't wait on you to make a decision. They got to, they got to apply to other places and then they'll figure out what place is going to be good for them based on whatever they're looking for. Right?
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So absolutely. And to take, just to take that your comment one step further, is that also how you treat candidates during the process is really important. Companies spend money hiring consultants. Like, how are we going to have a better hiring process? How are we going to hire the best talent in the world? How about showing the candidate interest? How about following up quickly? How about giving actual constructive feedback? Right. I've been out of the recruitment game for almost a year now, but I still follow a lot of my colleagues from Quantum on LinkedIn. And I see that they're, they're sharing their wisdom about what the recruiting world looks like. And, and I'm seeing the same patterns a year later. Nothing has changed. Companies are taking too long to get back to candidates. And the reality is you don't need to spend any money on hiring. All you need to do is to make candidates feel like you want them and be excited and engaged with them in the process. Because you're right, Andrew, those candidates, especially the good ones, have four or five offers, and you know who they're going to take. Most smart candidates who make intentional decisions will pick the company that treated them the best during the process, even if it paid 5k less. Let's say there's an expression, I don't know who said it, we'll have to look up the quote later. But people won't remember how you treated them. They will remember how you made them feel. And if you make a candidate feel valued, Mr. Employer, they will be loyal to you and they will want to join your firm and they will come running in your direction.
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You're just talking about employers and how they're. During their hiring process. They can also fall into reactive decision making, which is what you're talking about. Why do organizations often rush into the hiring process? And what questions should leaders be asking before they even begin looking for a candidate?
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Great question. The biggest problem is, again, we're back to the word reactivity is that here's part of the issue. Okay, So a lot of candidates are leaving quickly. They get headhunted, they apply for jobs because they're not happy. And then the typical process of the world is two weeks notice, right? So basically you have two weeks to fill a vacancy. But. And so it's a very reactive process in which leaders and HR get nervous. Oh my God, the person's leaving. And so they react to that situation. Often I would take a mandate and I would ask the question, when are you looking to hire this person for? And the answer, by the way, 92% of the time was yesterday. And so, but dating or finding or courting or finding the right candidate is a process that takes, it takes time. Right? And so if you know that it's, it's. First of all, it's not going to take two weeks. It depends on the level of the role. If we're talking about an entry level, accounts payable clerk, it's a different story than hiring for an HR director. Okay, so it's a different world and it's. But the reality is, is what I find companies should be doing is doing a post mortem after a personal leave. Most companies do an exit interview. I don't know if anyone actually does anything with this, with this information, but there's really valuable nuggets of gold in those exit interviews to be able to find out, okay, what worked for that person and what didn't work so that they can hire the next person again, not just strictly based on a 10 year old outdated job description. Often the job descriptions are not updated, right? Our world has changed so much in the last 10 years. Forget AI, we're just talking about technology and how it's evolved and, and people and how the world works. And even just hiring, all of it has evolved so much, yet the job descriptions are stale and they're the same. So just having the person leaves, have the exit interview as quickly as possible, gather the intelligence, sit down with your HR leaders and say, okay, what has typically worked in this role? What didn't work? Let's rejig this job description to hire intentionally, to create a role that people are excited about and want to come work for. Because if I'm a candidate, by the way, so I'm now we're talking to, I'm speaking directly to candidates. When you go on an interview, you should ask the employer a really important question is why is this job open? Did someone leave? Did someone quit? Did someone run away screaming, did the person get promoted? That's always a great reason to join a company if you see that there's promotion opportunities available. But you should be asking why is this role open? And you should take it a step further, candidates and say, when is the last time this job was revised? Did you guys sit down after the last person left and did you guys do a postmortem? And if not, please do so before you continue to interview me, because I want to know that I'm Walking into something that is created with intention. A candidate can't choose an intentional job if the company doesn't create an intentional environment for them to succeed.
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As you were talking, I'm thinking most people, and I'm not going to generalize this here, but I would say a good percentage of people usually plan things in their lives. They're planning what we're gonna have for supper, where are we gonna eat for supper, for going out, where are we going on vacation. So these are things that they plan. Most people are used to planning. So when you were taking on a job or applying for a job, I don't believe, and you can maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that people intentionally apply to a job and get the job thinking, I'll, if I get this, I'll just take this for the short term. Maybe they're thinking, I'll take this, and this company looks like a company that moves. I could probably move, or there's lots of opportunity with the company. So you're maybe wanting to move within. But I don't know if many people are taking a job to move intentionally thinking, I'm going to do this job for a year and then I'm going to move to another company.
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I agree with that. And now we're actually getting to the center of what I really, really believe in and has become the ethos of my coaching practice, because I don't usually I do work with some corporations, but my practice is about working with individuals and groups on making intentional career choices. So to your point, Andrew, people are not going into it thinking, I'll stay here for a year. They are thinking they don't want to change. People do like stability. I will say that in. In my years, what I saw was people are very attached to financial security, obviously, as am I, as a mu. As are all of us. They are. A lot of people are very attracted to stability and they want the idea of going into something with the hope that it will be for the long term. Yeah, but here's what they're not doing. They're not thinking beyond a year. They should technically be thinking two years, three years, four years. Not because they need to stay there for two years or three years. They need to literally be planning. Like you said, we spend more time planning like what we're having for dinner or planning, let's say, vacations than we do our own, not our careers. What I want to reference here is becoming we don't. Very few people spend time planning who they want to Become. As our careers develop, we become different people. We mature, we, we grow, we learn new skills, we learn new expertise, we take on new passions. We become different people. Who I was when I started Quantum is not who I was when I left, right? But people don't take the time to think about this process of evolution or this process of becoming. And I know that they don't because I didn't listen if people were doing it when I was working in recruitment and I was having very in depth conversations because by the way, when I was a recruiter, I was doing my best to have really deep and meaningful conversations with candidates. To say like, is this really what you want? Does this offer value? What did you think when you met that hiring manager? Do you see them as being a leader that's going to inspire you? What do you think about the company's products? Why is it that you would take this offer? Is it because of the money? Is it because of the, the role like it. But it was very rare that we would talk about becoming. It also wasn't my job as a recruiter to flesh that out, right? It's my job to make a deal, essentially. Right. And that's why I became a coach. I became a coach 10 years while I was, 10 years ago, while I was still in recruitment because I wanted to have deep, meaningful conversations about becoming. So people that come into my coaching practice, which I, I, I do a lot of different things of reinvention of people's careers. But really what I like, my strength and my talent is helping people become the best professional version of themselves. And the best professional version of themselves is an amalgamation of their values which I help them identify their talents. And by the way, I don't mean their skills, their talents, because you can have a bunch of skills that you're good at, it doesn't mean you love them. Talents is like skills plus love equals talent. Helping them, I find out their ideal conditions for success. Helping them think about the long term, helping them think just even about the language in which they want to speak to helping them identify if an opportunity is psychologically safe for them. But it's really even going back to all like I'm working with one client right now. We're going all the way back to the beginning of his career, a 30 year career to say what did 20 year old you want to do? And then what did 30 year old you want to do? And what did 40 year old you want to do? Because we're establishing a pattern of how he's changed, how he's becoming something new. And so it's when we really evaluate where we've past success is a predictor of future decisions. So it's like just taking the time. So if you are engaged by a headhunter, let's say a headhunter does reach out to you and presents you with an opportunity that really does look interesting. I'm certainly not encouraging you to not pursue that. But before you take the time or while in conjunction, while you're taking the time to meet them and establish the salary and establish the conditions and all this kind of stuff, also ask yourself the important questions. Does this job allow me to become the version of me, a future version of me? How can today me serve future me so that this decision that I'm going to make to change jobs doesn't just serve me and my problems? In, in the meantime, I'm not paid enough or my manager's making me angry, or we often react to what the problem is rather than planning for the future. So I really encourage you, take those opportunities, seize those opportunities from recruiters and people that are reaching out to you, but engage with a person, even if it's just talking to friends or talking to people in your life. Ask yourself interesting questions. Is, is this really for me or A lot of the time, Andrew, you know what it's really about? It's not even about money. It's about ego. It's about like, oh my God, I even was with a friend this weekend and she's like, oh my God, today was so exciting. It makes you feel so good about yourself and that's great. That is fantastic. You are in a much better position than the poor candidate who doesn't have a job that's looking for one and is dying for some confidence. Right? So I get it. It's. It's a fun thing. But I really, really, really want passive candidates. Please heed my message. Take the time to evaluate who you want to be in a year and two. Map it out. As I was mentioning before, I'm a bridge. Think about the bridge that you need to take to get to where you want to be.
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So I know we've talked about this throughout this episode, but I want to dig into this a little bit deeper here because you've been talking about it quite a bit. So I wanted to get your feedback on how we fix this. So whether you're an employee or an employer, what are the long term consequences of getting the fit wrong? And how does misalignment impact the company's engagement, performance, retention, and overall workplace Culture.
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Great question. I think that from the outside, it looks like the biggest problem or the biggest consequence to this is turnover. And I think that's true. But I think it lies deeper than that. I think what it really comes down to is making the wrong hiring decision creates dissatisfaction in a person's life, which then bleeds into the company. So hiring the wrong person and having the wrong person in the job affects the company's return on investment. Right. If you hire the right person that's extremely passionate and they can double, triple, quadruple the return on investment than a person who's unmotivated coming in can do. Right. A person that's unmotivated can actually do more damage than good.
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Right.
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And this is often back to the point of the job was misrepresented. Right? The job was misrepresented. And by the way, most of the time, the misrepresentation is not done on purpose. I'm not. I'm not suggesting that this is nefarious in any way. It's because the postmortem wasn't done. So the candidate needs to think about who they want to become, and the employer thinks about what does this job need to be so that the person can become. It's like it needs to be more personalized to the human instead of the job description. And if we can do that, then we're going to have a very motivated workforce. Loyal employees are the most valuable asset a company can have. And to have a loyal employee, it's to hire them to do a job that they actually want to do. And so the misrepresentation happens because it hasn't been properly evaluated. So it's important. So how do we fix the problem is I think people are going to have to be brave in interviews. Candidates are going to have to ask hard questions. This is what I want to do. This is my expertise. I can do X, Y, Z. But actually, what I know about myself in evaluating my becoming is that what I really want to be doing is taking XYZ and applying it to klm. Right. I have one of my coaching clients who works in an intellectual property. Okay. And so she works with companies to help design intellectual property. But actually she. So she's been doing that for five to seven years now. What she really wants to do is look at the analytics of the intellectual property. That's what she's really passionate about right now. So we're designing a way for her to be able to go find opportunities that could relate to the analytics because she knows she's spending Time figuring out who she's becoming. She knows what's going to motivate her. She could just change jobs into something else that's ip but likely it won't satisfy her even if it pays more money. The more money. The honeymoon of more money lasts three to six months and then that wears off, especially after taxes. So I think it's really the candidates have to ask hard questions like or make statements to be as truthful as possible about who you are and what you want, but also showing the company that you want to work together to create the whole point of the company. The candidate saying I want to do this is to create a return on investment for the company. The company needs to see what's in it for them and at the same time the company needs to be honest with themselves and say who's the best person for the job and is it the person that's the most qualified or is it the person that has the person who knows who they are that is so much more valuable than a person that has a lot of skills and has done no self reflection at all.
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Cindy, before we wrap up here today, if you could leave our listeners with one mindset shift or one question they should ask before making their next career move or hiring decision, what would it be?
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Great question. I have a tendency to not answer a question but give an anecdote. So I'm about to do that. So I apologize. My husband hates when I do this. I'm going to use myself as an example. Okay? So the technical answer to that question is I want you to think about a future version of you and what do they need? Okay? That's the best piece of advice I can give you is do something nice for future you. Okay? And the way that I did that was that 10 years ago I decided to go back to school to become a coach because 40 year old me knew because I had done so much work on myself and really spent the time like walking my own walk and talking my own talk, I knew I had a very strong sneaking suspicion that 50 year old me would not want to be doing what they were doing and anymore because I really really loved the world of recruitment. I really loved it. It was such an incredible ride. The amount of impact I was able to have was massive. But the work is a bit transactional and it doesn't allow for a lot, as I was mentioning earlier, very deep meaningful interactions. It was like during the time that I was holding shepherding the process for the candidate and for the client or while we were brokering an offer. I could have very deep and meaningful conversations with both the candidate and the client. But once the deal was made, the candidate would go off to the job and then I would get an email maybe if I was lucky, a couple of months in saying, oh, it's going great. So much. Thank you so much, Cindy. You made a great choice for me. Thank you so much. I'm so glad you reached out. Companies like, oh yeah, they're doing a great job. I didn't get to see the impact of what my work was. And ten year ago me was starting to notice that the impact mattered, that really mattered to me. So I needed to create a bridge for myself in which I would be able to have that impact later. So I stuck around. And what's interesting actually is that when I did my coaching certification, it actually was such an incredible program that it reinvigorated my love for my work at Quantum and it actually changed the way that I interacted with candidates. Because in a coaching program you learn how to listen deeply in a way that you don't necessarily know to. How to. As a consultant, consultants are there to give advice. Coaches are there to hold space. And so in learning to hold space, I ended up becoming a different type of consultant. So it really benefited for me, but it made me sad that I would place these people and then didn't know what happened to them after I was like, I needed to go deeper. And so 40 year old me prepared 50 year old me's reality. And so the reality is, is that to your point, from the beginning of the episode, I left a job, a good job, a well paying job with a good title, where I was really respected, to go into the unknown. And that takes a lot of balls, okay, and, and I know it does, but I knew that I would be a better coach. First of all, if I again really walked my own walk, I couldn't be telling people all day, every day, make more intentional choices and then stay in something that was great but wasn't meeting my fullest potential. Because like you said, I wasn't unhappy. But I needed to access more of me that 50 year old me needed. And 40 year old me helped do that. So by preparing. So my gift to you back again listeners is think about a future version of you and what do they need? And start planting very small seeds, like a garden, very small perennial seeds of what the next year needs to look like, what is the next two years need to look like, what is the next three. Because then when it comes time to, by the way, to choose yourself to maybe leave the corporate world. I have one client that just left a crazy job in Manhattan to become an artist. It takes courage to do that. But the more seeds you plant, by the time you do it, your garden is full of lush opportunity for you to grab so you can do. That's the intention behind all of this. When I say reactivity versus intention, it doesn't need to be this big, this big meaningful thing. It needs to be about making small, intentional choices and planting small, intentional seeds so that future you can grab the thing you want by the horns and grab.
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My call to action today would be to like share and follow this episode. Cindy, I wanted to take the time to thank you for coming on today. Some of the things that I admire about you is your energy, your ability to challenge people in a positive way, your absolute commitment to people, your honesty and integrity, your passion and your human centered approach to career and life. It has been an absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you and I want to take the time to thank you for joining us today.
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Thank you so much Andrew. I'm really happy to have had a platform to share these thoughts because you're right, I am super passionate about it. My whole thing is is to live in joy. My objective of being in service of others is to live a life of joy. And if we make, if we really think about who we want to become, it just creates a space for all that joy to blossom. So thank you Andrew for your kind words. I really, it means a lot to me.
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On behalf of myself and my guest today, Cindy, I'd like to thank you all for listening today. Until next time, be safe and remember everyone that if we all work together, we can accomplish anything you have been listening to.
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Let's be diverse with Andrew Stout to stay up to date with future content. Hit Subscribe.
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Before we get into today's episode, I have something incredibly special to share. My book, let's Be Diverse A Practical Guide to Leading Through Change, is officially out and available on Amazon. Honestly, this is an emotional moment for me. This book represents a dream, a journey, personal experiences, difficult lessons, and deep belief that we can all make a difference in how we lead and how we show up for one another. Wrote this book because we all face uncertainty. We all have moments when we question ourselves, struggle to find the answers, or wonder how we're going to get through a difficult situation. My hope is that these pages remind someone out there that they're not alone, that they have the courage to keep moving forward, and that even in the most uncertain moments, there's an opportunity to grow. And now my biggest dream is to get this book into as many hands as possible. So I'm asking you to be part of this journey. Head over to Amazon, search for let's Be Diverse, A Practical Guide Leading to Change and grab your copy today. And if you know someone who might need this message, please share it with them as well. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for supporting me, believing in me, helping me bring this dream to life. It truly means more than words can say. Let's get this book and as many hands as as possible because you never know whose life might be touched by a message that they need to hear. Now let's get on to today's episode.
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Opinions expressed in this episode are personal. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this streaming platform.
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Good day, wonderful people, and welcome to another edition of let's Be Diverse. I am your host, Andrew Stout. This episode is dedicated to all my loved ones who supported me through this journey. To those who have left us will always be in our hearts and will never be forgotten. Today our topic is from Reactive to Intentional the Future of Career Decisions. I'm so happy to have as my guest today this fantastic human. Her name is Cindy Schwartz. Cindy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad that you reached out. You were persistent in trying to nail me down and find a good time and I felt that energetically was the right time for us to finally come together and record something wonderful.
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Cindy, what's been energizing you these days? Give us the tea, give us the deets, give us it all. What's going on?
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What a great question. Actually, what's been energizing me is rest. Wild, wild rest. So I will get probably get into it, but I left a 22 year career just last October to start my own or re energize my coaching business and start my own podcast. And things were like gung ho, jump into it, get the ball moving, get all the creative juices flowing. And I'm now actually in a period of reflection in which I'm examining. Okay, so I've created phase one of my business and my podcast and now I'm in. Summertime is typically a slow period for coaching and I've already filmed and recorded all my episodes for my first season of my podcast. So now I get the opportunity to be in the energy of reflection, creativity, thinking about what my next steps look like. So right now what's energizing me is being in the woods. I am spending my summer in the woods with all the trees, hanging out with the bumblebees and just reflecting on this magnificent life that I have led so far and really curious to see what comes up in terms of what does phase two look like for me.
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Energy of reflection. What a great way to look at it and what a great way to to focus on the new and the things in the future. I always look at the summertime as relaxing, obviously taking it easy, reflecting, as you said. And then I find September is almost like the end of the year. We've hit September, how we want to close out the year, how do we want to do this, what new things we want to do in the new year. So all the planning and all everything gets set up starting in September. So you reflecting on that or your energy of reflection is a great way to describe that.
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Thank you. I think it's necessary. I think I talk about this a lot in my coaching practice that it's in the quiet moments that we really figure out who we are. And the rest of the year can be quite noisy. There's a lot going on and even like I said in my coaching practice, I see it. People don't want to be coached unless they are moving towards a very specific goal and they're like in the middle of designing something. The people that come to me that are more in reflection mode, those ones tend to take a break during the summer because we have all year to be in that energy of creating and now is the time to be on the other side of that. I really believe in the concept of the yin and the Yang and the energy flowing in yin. Yin is a very soft time. It's a reflective time, it's a softer time. And it's in that yin state that at least for me that's where I find the wonderful nuggets of wisdom that help me to grow the business and to take it in different directions. Because if we're constantly moving, inertia doesn't allow us the time to create new stuff.
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I agree with you 100%. Well, congratulations on everything that you're doing. Congratulations on taking the leap. Not everybody has the courage to do that. So you did that after a 20 year career. You could have stayed stagnant and comfortable and stayed in what you were doing and you took a chance on yourself to do what you wanted to do and you had the things you had passion for. So kudos to you for, for doing that.
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Thank you.
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You're very welcome. Before we begin, I always have a fun, thought provoking question. I'd ask all my guests to get things going. Are you ready for yours today?
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I sure am. Hit me.
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Okay, so your question is, if your life was made into a TV show, what would a title be and why?
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Oh my God, what a fun question. What's interesting? I know this might sound a bit cliche, but because I just designed over the course of the last year, my own podcast, I feel like my podcast is a bit of a reflection on what my TV Persona would be. So my, my podcast is called Out Loud with Cindy Schwartz. And the reason it actually had, it came in different iterations. The first name originally was becoming with Cindy Schwartz, but Michelle Obama had stolen the the proprietary rights to the word becoming, so it couldn't really be that. And then because it was a woman's podcast, I love the thought of it being with love and estrogen because I wanted to bring love and because it was a feminine centered podcast, the estrogen gave a little silly hint towards like who my listener be. But it ended up being out loud because I think what I really needed was to take myself out loud was to give myself a different voice. Not a voice because I already had one, but a different voice than I had ever had before. So I think my TV show would be like a reformed corporate recruiter slash director of talent who's now living like a hippie dippy life and talking to bumblebees and hanging out with trees and coaching women who want to become their best, most wildest selves. And I feel like Out Loud really captures the energy of where I'm trying to go. So hopefully I picked it.
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Well, you did. I think that. I think you picked a great name. And you're absolutely right. We go through this process of trying to pick a name and sometimes we know I think we almost overthink it, but you want to make sure that it's something that obviously it's catchy, but obviously you want to have something that nobody else is using. So I love that you did that. I love that you did the research. And it sounds like it's something that you've been thinking about for a while. So it's not like something that you decided last week. So the process was a continuous process until you got to where you are now. So I love it and I love the story, and I think that would be a pretty good show.
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I hope so. One day. You know what? One day. One day, hopefully it will become a show. Funnily enough, I mentioned that it is a woman's podcast, but I recorded a special episode for my listeners, which is not a woman, but I actually invited my husband. It hasn't aired yet. It's going to air in September. And it was a special episode for us to tell our love story. Like the. We've been together for 29 years, and whenever we tell our origin story amongst couples, people always say, this would make a great TV show or this would make a great screenplay. So who knows, Maybe that episode or the whole podcast will be turned into some fabulous movie or television production one day.
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You never know. We just never know what's going to happen in the future. So I love that. I love that.
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Yeah.
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Thank you so much, first of all, for. For having fun with us and answering that question to get us started. Who are you and what really drives you to do the work that you do?
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Who am I? What a great question. Who am I? I'm so many things, so I think I ended up in. So I. My. My background cut came from hr. So I think who I was was a person at that age of my life in my 20s who really liked helping people. I had always worked in customer service while I was a student. I studied sociology, and I chose HR as a profession. And because ultimately I wanted to help people. I didn't really know what that looked like. And my goal at the beginning of my career was to become an HR advisor, generalist, whatever followed that path, HR director, HR vp. But I ended up in recruitment by accident. And I not only ended up there by accident, but I ended up spending 22 years accidentally in the wrong company, but accidentally turned into intentional when I realized I was actually in the right place. So I landed there by accident. But it was really the right field for me because who I am is a very curious individual who loves to evolve personally. And my greatest gift in life is to spend time with other people, getting to know them by listening deeply and asking powerful questions so that I can help them figure out who do they want to become, who do they want to evolve into. So who I am is like a bridge. I act as a bridge between people's dreams and the intentional lives that they can create.
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And what a great way to look at it as far as a leader that you are, that you are a bridge. And I wish that a lot more leaders looked at it that way because that isn't an essence of what a leader really is, is or someone in HR is a bridge. We are the bridge between management or higher ups and between that and our individual contribut. What a great way to look at it.
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Yeah, I never wanted it to be as much as I can be ego driven or have my own feelings of what I wanted my own career to look like. It always felt so much better to lift up others and be in service of others because I do have a big personality and I have a strong voice. And for me, sometimes it's helping to bring out. If you act as a bridge instead of as a boss, I guess you could say you give people the confidence to empower themselves to become their loudest version of whatever they are. And so it always felt better to me to be empowering others because that, that's what fueled me. So it was like there, it was like this very ripple effect and it was a very reciprocal relationship was to feed them with energy and empowerment. Gave me what I needed to keep moving.
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So the title of this podcast suggests that many are making reactive decisions instead of intentional ones. What is the difference between a reactive career decision and an intentional career decision? And why does that distinction.
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Great question. I want to start off by giving a bit of pretext around candidates in a job market because there are different kinds of candidates and we will likely be referring to one type today. So I think it's important to give context. So there are people that are looking for work. Okay. Those are people that do not have a job and want, like not want, need a new job. Okay? That's one type of candidate. Then we have candidates that are working that are actively looking and want to get a new job because they are unhappy in the current job that they have and they are making an intentional effort to move towards changing their. Their situation. And then you have passive candidates. Passive candidates are the ones that are sitting around minding their own business and get reached out to either by headhunters or by companies directly. And they then engage in a process to potentially change their job. I'm likely going to be mostly referring to passive, candid. The last, I'd say eight to 10 years of my career in recruitment dealt with much more passive type candidates. Now, a passive candidate is someone, like I said, who wasn't actively looking for anything. They may have been thinking about it, but they weren't currently applying for any jobs. Then all of a sudden, someone pops into your LinkedIn in mail and says, you're the greatest thing I've ever seen and I have this opportunity and it is going to change your life. And then the candidate will then pounce on that opportunity and then decide or not whether they're going to engage themselves in process with recruiters or with the company directly. So those are the types of candidates that I'm talking about. So when I say there's reactivity, what I mean is that there's so much more to a job. One of the biggest things I observed in 22 years, whether it was passive or active candidates, was that the most important thing and the number one question that people always ask is, what is the salary? And I understand from a perspective of living your life and we all have bills to pay and we have mouths to feed, I get that that's important. It's treated always as paramount as the most important thing. And what I've seen time and time again is making a decision based on intangible factors like salary, vacation, how many hours the job is, how many days remote can you work? These are all the conditions for your success that will make you happy or not happy. But the reality is, is, is if the job is not aligned with who you are as a person and who you want to become, no amount of money will make you happy. And that especially came in, I would see with counteroffers, right? People would use these opportunities to get counteroffers, or they wouldn't even intentionally see it coming. And they would go out to market, they would be enticed by a recruiter telling them that they were the cure to cancer and you should come work for me and I'm going to pay you 5k more. There's nothing wrong with that in principle. What I found interesting and suspect was that people didn't really consider what they needed as a person in this equation. Who were they? Who were they becoming? What do they want? What are their values? What's important to them? What is the company like? We talk about company culture. Oh, we have coffee on Fridays or we have pizza on the week, whatever. But it's like we don't think about the deep, deep, deep things that truly matter when you're actually in the job and spending 40 hours a week with people all. And so I'll give you an example of what I mean by reactional or not intentional. So most candidates go on an interview, they meet an HR person, typically sometimes they'll usually meet the person they're going to report to. Obviously sometimes they might meet one person from the team and that's it. Can you imagine working in a place I. Sorry, I can't imagine most people can do it. So obviously everyone can imagine it. It's just me. But it's like I can't imagine going somewhere without really knowing who are my colleagues, who are my peers, what are people like? Here, I'll give you an example. So I have one of my coaching clients. She just changed jobs after 25 years. Okay. And one of the things that she. She's a sweet seat person. One of the things that she values as a leader is looking at feedback, let's say giving criticism or giving context to feedback. She always likes to look at it through the lens of positivity, making sure the person feels empowered, making sure the person feels heard while she's delivering that feedback. The environment that she's now come into, it's not to say that they don't value that, but it's more important for them to look at the angle of everything that went wrong and position it from that angle so that they can evaluate how they can become better. That's not a bad thing. It's not good or bad. It's just very different to how she's used to operating. And now she's having a very hard time reconciling, fitting into a new environment where that value of transparency that she normally had in positivity is not necessarily espoused. Where she is now, that's a very minute thing. We can't obviously know everything going into a new job, but if I was going to be going on an interview with a new company, I would be asking, can I come shadow for a day? Can I come have lunch with your team? Can I come spend time with you guys? I want to see what I'm getting into. And what I'm so glad about was that in my 22 years of partnering with with companies and with employees, I was able to share how I would want to do it with some companies. And they actually changed their hiring practices to reflect a more intentional match. And that felt really good that I was able to influence that because you really, really want to know what you're getting yourself into. Because the consequence to not knowing what you're getting into is you show up and it's not what you expected and then you're disappointed. And that's why people change jobs every two years. That's the real story. That's why.
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Yeah, there's so many scenarios that I can think of that you're, as you're talking, you're not going to just marry with them before you meet them and get to know them and, and see what it's going to be, what it's like to be with that person. So you're absolutely right. Going somewhere on a regular basis because we spend so much time with our work family, as we do with our, we do our regular family more, and I would say more so that we want to make sure that we get along with those people. Because then, then you're. Are you going into a, a safe environment or are you going into a not so safe environment? So I, I absolutely, I agree.
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Absolutely. And to give it like, I know you're probably going to ask me another question this will give the answer to, but it's, I think it's important to bears mentioning that often what happens in an interview already interviews in the world that we live in are such a, like, it's, it's so manufactured, right. Everybody's trying to be the best versions of themselves. So not only are we not going deep enough by asking, candidates also don't feel safe to ask very deep questions because if they go too deep, trying to understand the environment more, the culture more, or the leadership more, the company then gets offended. Why are they asking all these questions? And what do they want to know so much? And is this person going to be a problem? Is this person going to be a troublemaker? Only because they want to know more. But the reality is, is like the employer is presenting the best version of them. The highlight reels we talk about on social media, that's what an interview is. An interview is the highlight reel or of the candidate's experience and the company and what they have to offer. And so that's why there's this massive disconnect. It's like imagine you've referred to it as dating, right? Dating versus marriage. Imagine going on two dates with someone and then marrying them. Well, no, realistically, what are the chances that that's going to work? And that's why there's so much turnover, for sure.
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So you, you did talk about people going into interviews and talking about salaries and what it's like to work there. But what I want to know from you is from a candidate's perspective, what are some of the biggest mistakes people make when they're choosing their next opportunity? And you, you talked about it before. But how can we move past focusing on salary title or simply escaping bad situations to make decisions that align with our strengths, values and long term goals?
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Great question. So I think it actually has to start with the employer and not with the candidate. We need to change the culture of how we interview in order for candidates to be able to make more intentional choices. So the employer, like what I observed in 22 years of working with over at least 500 companies, of hiring for them directly, what I observed is the process is extremely rigid and they don't allow for an honest dialogue in which two people can be brutally honest with each other to determine if there is a match. And by brutal honesty, what I just mean is transparency. This is what we have to offer. Is this something that you think would offer value to your career? The other thing is companies are still acting like it's 19, I don't know, 84. And that they have the upper hand and that it's all about the candidate wooing them and that it's like it's a very imbalanced relationship. Employers still think that they have the upper hand, which technically they do, because they're making candidates feel like they can't be fully honest because they're maybe not being fully honest. And it's only hurting them though. So they, there's this power imbalance that exists that the companies think is working for them, but it's not because it doesn't allow them to choose the best possible candidate. So what I would call for is a reform in the way that we actually conduct interviews. As employers, as HR professionals, as HR professionals, it is our responsibility and to teach the hiring managers and the executives what does a good interview look like? What does an opportunity to get to know people look like? Because the other thing I'm seeing is that employers are hiring based solely. So just like candidates are focused on vacation and salary, employers are focused on skills and abilities. And while that's of course important, the employer is not focusing on the passion or the interest of the candidate. If employers hired for passion instead of just skills, skills are important. It's definitely a part of the equation. You're not going to hire someone that's passionate, that doesn't know what they're doing, especially in a more senior role that requires, you know, a certain expertise. But If I was a hiring manager and I had two candidates in front of me for a director role, and both of them had equal experience, but one of them came to me with exuberance and passion about a leadership style that I knew could change the face of maybe a department that really needs that change, I would. Even if the person who had More passion had 5 years less experience, I would probably take them because I know that the impact to the team would be much greater than the experience itself. So I really believe it needs to start with the employers. Once the employers. Once you have an employer that's willing to truly get to know candidates and evaluate what they bring to the table and measure them on passion, then candidates are then able to come to the interview prepared as themselves, able to ask interesting questions, tell the employer, like I observed, I used to have to coach people before they went on an interview. Don't say that you want to grow within the company because then they're going to think that they, that they want to hire someone for right now, they're trying to fix a problem. Right now, they don't want to think about two years from now. They don't want to have to replace you in two years from now. So please lie and say that you don't want to grow. What person doesn't want to grow? And for me to have to tell people you need to go lie to pretend to be something that you're not to get the job, first of all, that's just terrible. And also how, how happy is that person going to be in a job after they've just lied about what their intentions are and they had to lie because the company didn't allow for the truth to happen. So I feel like it's really a dance between the two parties, but it has to start with the companies and HR people out there. Please, for the ones of you that care, this needs to start with us.
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Yeah. Everything you said there was absolute gold. Transparency is super important. And I think we have to understand too, that we're not the only shop in town. So when someone is looking for work, which you said, there's different categories of people that are looking, they're probably not just applying at your company and waiting to hear from you. They're applying as many places as they can. And if they see three, four jobs that fit their, their values and the things that they believe in and they're going to want to do that, they're going to want to apply to those jobs because they can't wait on you to make a decision. They got to, they got to apply to other places and then they'll figure out what place is going to be good for them based on whatever they're looking for. Right?
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So absolutely. And to take, just to take that your comment one step further, is that also how you treat candidates during the process is really important. Companies spend money hiring consultants. Like, how are we going to have a better hiring process? How are we going to hire the best talent in the world? How about showing the candidate interest? How about following up quickly? How about giving actual constructive feedback? Right. I've been out of the recruitment game for almost a year now, but I still follow a lot of my colleagues from Quantum on LinkedIn. And I see that they're, they're sharing their wisdom about what the recruiting world looks like. And, and I'm seeing the same patterns a year later. Nothing has changed. Companies are taking too long to get back to candidates. And the reality is you don't need to spend any money on hiring. All you need to do is to make candidates feel like you want them and be excited and engaged with them in the process. Because you're right, Andrew, those candidates, especially the good ones, have four or five offers, and you know who they're going to take. Most smart candidates who make intentional decisions will pick the company that treated them the best during the process, even if it paid 5k less. Let's say there's an expression, I don't know who said it, we'll have to look up the quote later. But people won't remember how you treated them. They will remember how you made them feel. And if you make a candidate feel valued, Mr. Employer, they will be loyal to you and they will want to join your firm and they will come running in your direction.
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You're just talking about employers and how they're. During their hiring process. They can also fall into reactive decision making, which is what you're talking about. Why do organizations often rush into the hiring process? And what questions should leaders be asking before they even begin looking for a candidate?
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Great question. The biggest problem is, again, we're back to the word reactivity is that here's part of the issue. Okay, So a lot of candidates are leaving quickly. They get headhunted, they apply for jobs because they're not happy. And then the typical process of the world is two weeks notice, right? So basically you have two weeks to fill a vacancy. But. And so it's a very reactive process in which leaders and HR get nervous. Oh my God, the person's leaving. And so they react to that situation. Often I would take a mandate and I would ask the question, when are you looking to hire this person for? And the answer, by the way, 92% of the time was yesterday. And so, but dating or finding or courting or finding the right candidate is a process that takes, it takes time. Right? And so if you know that it's, it's. First of all, it's not going to take two weeks. It depends on the level of the role. If we're talking about an entry level, accounts payable clerk, it's a different story than hiring for an HR director. Okay, so it's a different world and it's. But the reality is, is what I find companies should be doing is doing a post mortem after a personal leave. Most companies do an exit interview. I don't know if anyone actually does anything with this, with this information, but there's really valuable nuggets of gold in those exit interviews to be able to find out, okay, what worked for that person and what didn't work so that they can hire the next person again, not just strictly based on a 10 year old outdated job description. Often the job descriptions are not updated, right? Our world has changed so much in the last 10 years. Forget AI, we're just talking about technology and how it's evolved and, and people and how the world works. And even just hiring, all of it has evolved so much, yet the job descriptions are stale and they're the same. So just having the person leaves, have the exit interview as quickly as possible, gather the intelligence, sit down with your HR leaders and say, okay, what has typically worked in this role? What didn't work? Let's rejig this job description to hire intentionally, to create a role that people are excited about and want to come work for. Because if I'm a candidate, by the way, so I'm now we're talking to, I'm speaking directly to candidates. When you go on an interview, you should ask the employer a really important question is why is this job open? Did someone leave? Did someone quit? Did someone run away screaming, did the person get promoted? That's always a great reason to join a company if you see that there's promotion opportunities available. But you should be asking why is this role open? And you should take it a step further, candidates and say, when is the last time this job was revised? Did you guys sit down after the last person left and did you guys do a postmortem? And if not, please do so before you continue to interview me, because I want to know that I'm Walking into something that is created with intention. A candidate can't choose an intentional job if the company doesn't create an intentional environment for them to succeed.
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As you were talking, I'm thinking most people, and I'm not going to generalize this here, but I would say a good percentage of people usually plan things in their lives. They're planning what we're gonna have for supper, where are we gonna eat for supper, for going out, where are we going on vacation. So these are things that they plan. Most people are used to planning. So when you were taking on a job or applying for a job, I don't believe, and you can maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that people intentionally apply to a job and get the job thinking, I'll, if I get this, I'll just take this for the short term. Maybe they're thinking, I'll take this, and this company looks like a company that moves. I could probably move, or there's lots of opportunity with the company. So you're maybe wanting to move within. But I don't know if many people are taking a job to move intentionally thinking, I'm going to do this job for a year and then I'm going to move to another company.
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I agree with that. And now we're actually getting to the center of what I really, really believe in and has become the ethos of my coaching practice, because I don't usually I do work with some corporations, but my practice is about working with individuals and groups on making intentional career choices. So to your point, Andrew, people are not going into it thinking, I'll stay here for a year. They are thinking they don't want to change. People do like stability. I will say that in. In my years, what I saw was people are very attached to financial security, obviously, as am I, as a mu. As are all of us. They are. A lot of people are very attracted to stability and they want the idea of going into something with the hope that it will be for the long term. Yeah, but here's what they're not doing. They're not thinking beyond a year. They should technically be thinking two years, three years, four years. Not because they need to stay there for two years or three years. They need to literally be planning. Like you said, we spend more time planning like what we're having for dinner or planning, let's say, vacations than we do our own, not our careers. What I want to reference here is becoming we don't. Very few people spend time planning who they want to Become. As our careers develop, we become different people. We mature, we, we grow, we learn new skills, we learn new expertise, we take on new passions. We become different people. Who I was when I started Quantum is not who I was when I left, right? But people don't take the time to think about this process of evolution or this process of becoming. And I know that they don't because I didn't listen if people were doing it when I was working in recruitment and I was having very in depth conversations because by the way, when I was a recruiter, I was doing my best to have really deep and meaningful conversations with candidates. To say like, is this really what you want? Does this offer value? What did you think when you met that hiring manager? Do you see them as being a leader that's going to inspire you? What do you think about the company's products? Why is it that you would take this offer? Is it because of the money? Is it because of the, the role like it. But it was very rare that we would talk about becoming. It also wasn't my job as a recruiter to flesh that out, right? It's my job to make a deal, essentially. Right. And that's why I became a coach. I became a coach 10 years while I was, 10 years ago, while I was still in recruitment because I wanted to have deep, meaningful conversations about becoming. So people that come into my coaching practice, which I, I, I do a lot of different things of reinvention of people's careers. But really what I like, my strength and my talent is helping people become the best professional version of themselves. And the best professional version of themselves is an amalgamation of their values which I help them identify their talents. And by the way, I don't mean their skills, their talents, because you can have a bunch of skills that you're good at, it doesn't mean you love them. Talents is like skills plus love equals talent. Helping them, I find out their ideal conditions for success. Helping them think about the long term, helping them think just even about the language in which they want to speak to helping them identify if an opportunity is psychologically safe for them. But it's really even going back to all like I'm working with one client right now. We're going all the way back to the beginning of his career, a 30 year career to say what did 20 year old you want to do? And then what did 30 year old you want to do? And what did 40 year old you want to do? Because we're establishing a pattern of how he's changed, how he's becoming something new. And so it's when we really evaluate where we've past success is a predictor of future decisions. So it's like just taking the time. So if you are engaged by a headhunter, let's say a headhunter does reach out to you and presents you with an opportunity that really does look interesting. I'm certainly not encouraging you to not pursue that. But before you take the time or while in conjunction, while you're taking the time to meet them and establish the salary and establish the conditions and all this kind of stuff, also ask yourself the important questions. Does this job allow me to become the version of me, a future version of me? How can today me serve future me so that this decision that I'm going to make to change jobs doesn't just serve me and my problems? In, in the meantime, I'm not paid enough or my manager's making me angry, or we often react to what the problem is rather than planning for the future. So I really encourage you, take those opportunities, seize those opportunities from recruiters and people that are reaching out to you, but engage with a person, even if it's just talking to friends or talking to people in your life. Ask yourself interesting questions. Is, is this really for me or A lot of the time, Andrew, you know what it's really about? It's not even about money. It's about ego. It's about like, oh my God, I even was with a friend this weekend and she's like, oh my God, today was so exciting. It makes you feel so good about yourself and that's great. That is fantastic. You are in a much better position than the poor candidate who doesn't have a job that's looking for one and is dying for some confidence. Right? So I get it. It's. It's a fun thing. But I really, really, really want passive candidates. Please heed my message. Take the time to evaluate who you want to be in a year and two. Map it out. As I was mentioning before, I'm a bridge. Think about the bridge that you need to take to get to where you want to be.
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So I know we've talked about this throughout this episode, but I want to dig into this a little bit deeper here because you've been talking about it quite a bit. So I wanted to get your feedback on how we fix this. So whether you're an employee or an employer, what are the long term consequences of getting the fit wrong? And how does misalignment impact the company's engagement, performance, retention, and overall workplace Culture.
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Great question. I think that from the outside, it looks like the biggest problem or the biggest consequence to this is turnover. And I think that's true. But I think it lies deeper than that. I think what it really comes down to is making the wrong hiring decision creates dissatisfaction in a person's life, which then bleeds into the company. So hiring the wrong person and having the wrong person in the job affects the company's return on investment. Right. If you hire the right person that's extremely passionate and they can double, triple, quadruple the return on investment than a person who's unmotivated coming in can do. Right. A person that's unmotivated can actually do more damage than good.
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Right.
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And this is often back to the point of the job was misrepresented. Right? The job was misrepresented. And by the way, most of the time, the misrepresentation is not done on purpose. I'm not. I'm not suggesting that this is nefarious in any way. It's because the postmortem wasn't done. So the candidate needs to think about who they want to become, and the employer thinks about what does this job need to be so that the person can become. It's like it needs to be more personalized to the human instead of the job description. And if we can do that, then we're going to have a very motivated workforce. Loyal employees are the most valuable asset a company can have. And to have a loyal employee, it's to hire them to do a job that they actually want to do. And so the misrepresentation happens because it hasn't been properly evaluated. So it's important. So how do we fix the problem is I think people are going to have to be brave in interviews. Candidates are going to have to ask hard questions. This is what I want to do. This is my expertise. I can do X, Y, Z. But actually, what I know about myself in evaluating my becoming is that what I really want to be doing is taking XYZ and applying it to klm. Right. I have one of my coaching clients who works in an intellectual property. Okay. And so she works with companies to help design intellectual property. But actually she. So she's been doing that for five to seven years now. What she really wants to do is look at the analytics of the intellectual property. That's what she's really passionate about right now. So we're designing a way for her to be able to go find opportunities that could relate to the analytics because she knows she's spending Time figuring out who she's becoming. She knows what's going to motivate her. She could just change jobs into something else that's ip but likely it won't satisfy her even if it pays more money. The more money. The honeymoon of more money lasts three to six months and then that wears off, especially after taxes. So I think it's really the candidates have to ask hard questions like or make statements to be as truthful as possible about who you are and what you want, but also showing the company that you want to work together to create the whole point of the company. The candidate saying I want to do this is to create a return on investment for the company. The company needs to see what's in it for them and at the same time the company needs to be honest with themselves and say who's the best person for the job and is it the person that's the most qualified or is it the person that has the person who knows who they are that is so much more valuable than a person that has a lot of skills and has done no self reflection at all.
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Cindy, before we wrap up here today, if you could leave our listeners with one mindset shift or one question they should ask before making their next career move or hiring decision, what would it be?
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Great question. I have a tendency to not answer a question but give an anecdote. So I'm about to do that. So I apologize. My husband hates when I do this. I'm going to use myself as an example. Okay? So the technical answer to that question is I want you to think about a future version of you and what do they need? Okay? That's the best piece of advice I can give you is do something nice for future you. Okay? And the way that I did that was that 10 years ago I decided to go back to school to become a coach because 40 year old me knew because I had done so much work on myself and really spent the time like walking my own walk and talking my own talk, I knew I had a very strong sneaking suspicion that 50 year old me would not want to be doing what they were doing and anymore because I really really loved the world of recruitment. I really loved it. It was such an incredible ride. The amount of impact I was able to have was massive. But the work is a bit transactional and it doesn't allow for a lot, as I was mentioning earlier, very deep meaningful interactions. It was like during the time that I was holding shepherding the process for the candidate and for the client or while we were brokering an offer. I could have very deep and meaningful conversations with both the candidate and the client. But once the deal was made, the candidate would go off to the job and then I would get an email maybe if I was lucky, a couple of months in saying, oh, it's going great. So much. Thank you so much, Cindy. You made a great choice for me. Thank you so much. I'm so glad you reached out. Companies like, oh yeah, they're doing a great job. I didn't get to see the impact of what my work was. And ten year ago me was starting to notice that the impact mattered, that really mattered to me. So I needed to create a bridge for myself in which I would be able to have that impact later. So I stuck around. And what's interesting actually is that when I did my coaching certification, it actually was such an incredible program that it reinvigorated my love for my work at Quantum and it actually changed the way that I interacted with candidates. Because in a coaching program you learn how to listen deeply in a way that you don't necessarily know to. How to. As a consultant, consultants are there to give advice. Coaches are there to hold space. And so in learning to hold space, I ended up becoming a different type of consultant. So it really benefited for me, but it made me sad that I would place these people and then didn't know what happened to them after I was like, I needed to go deeper. And so 40 year old me prepared 50 year old me's reality. And so the reality is, is that to your point, from the beginning of the episode, I left a job, a good job, a well paying job with a good title, where I was really respected, to go into the unknown. And that takes a lot of balls, okay, and, and I know it does, but I knew that I would be a better coach. First of all, if I again really walked my own walk, I couldn't be telling people all day, every day, make more intentional choices and then stay in something that was great but wasn't meeting my fullest potential. Because like you said, I wasn't unhappy. But I needed to access more of me that 50 year old me needed. And 40 year old me helped do that. So by preparing. So my gift to you back again listeners is think about a future version of you and what do they need? And start planting very small seeds, like a garden, very small perennial seeds of what the next year needs to look like, what is the next two years need to look like, what is the next three. Because then when it comes time to, by the way, to choose yourself to maybe leave the corporate world. I have one client that just left a crazy job in Manhattan to become an artist. It takes courage to do that. But the more seeds you plant, by the time you do it, your garden is full of lush opportunity for you to grab so you can do. That's the intention behind all of this. When I say reactivity versus intention, it doesn't need to be this big, this big meaningful thing. It needs to be about making small, intentional choices and planting small, intentional seeds so that future you can grab the thing you want by the horns and grab.
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My call to action today would be to like share and follow this episode. Cindy, I wanted to take the time to thank you for coming on today. Some of the things that I admire about you is your energy, your ability to challenge people in a positive way, your absolute commitment to people, your honesty and integrity, your passion and your human centered approach to career and life. It has been an absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you and I want to take the time to thank you for joining us today.
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Thank you so much Andrew. I'm really happy to have had a platform to share these thoughts because you're right, I am super passionate about it. My whole thing is is to live in joy. My objective of being in service of others is to live a life of joy. And if we make, if we really think about who we want to become, it just creates a space for all that joy to blossom. So thank you Andrew for your kind words. I really, it means a lot to me.
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On behalf of myself and my guest today, Cindy, I'd like to thank you all for listening today. Until next time, be safe and remember everyone that if we all work together, we can accomplish anything you have been listening to.
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