Your impact on the future

One of my first bosses ended up being a longtime mentor and friend. She was a serial organization builder. Fortunately for her, she was also a prolific fundraiser.

These facts, and the success of the organizations she started, seemed contrary to many who worked for her because she was a non-stop river of ideas, tangents and seemingly disconnected concepts. Such chaos should not work.

But it (almost) always worked because she didn't hire or build boards based on long lists of accomplishments, tasks, percentage increases or degrees held. Heck, she didn't even hire based on the needs of the job at hand.

Sure, there were job descriptions and people needed to get things done. But she was more interested in hearing what you, the prospective team member, wanted to do, how you wanted to do it, why, and why that excited you.

In other words, she focused on people who were excited to build things. I suppose this worked in part because she was often in "new" organizations. Where we worked together was a 25 year old nonprofit, though. It was crusty, tepid and teetering on the edge. But it became something vital and, 25 years (and many staff changes later) has lived to do all sorts of good things.

I hear from a lot of people who are looking for roles in new sectors but are unsure how their skills transfer. Or who have been in fundraising but want to get into communications or marketing. And we're in a time when whole sectors of employment are being slashed by the government, capitalism, AI or all of them.

It leaves a lot of us looking at long bullet point lists in job descriptions and wondering what the hell use is our 20 years of experience doing great work?

I always hear be sure to talk about impact in your resume, not just repeat the things you were tasked with doing. And that's right.

But be clear about:

• the impact you want to have,
• how you want to do that work, and
• why that matters so much to you.

I do sometimes wonder if there's a place for desire, passion and big ideas (humanity?) in world of AI-driven recruitment.

But people doing the hiring want to hear, see and understand your vision for the work. And that vision is transferable across sectors and roles.

Put another way, if it doesn't help and what they're really looking for is a cog that will quietly produce widgets, at least you'll know that in advance.

Talk about the impact you will make at on April 8 at Job Searching: From Chaos to Calm

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