The day I was laid off in 2023, I posted about it on LinkedIn. The support was overwhelming, enough that I wanted to return the love, which is how I came to offer free coaching – it was something (coaching skills refined over many years) that I could give back to others who’d been laid off, burned out or otherwise needed to take a breath and rethink their work.
A coaching conversation for an old work acquaintance who had been laid off the day before me turned into a mutual peer coaching and brainstorming effort, and it spiraled from there. She shared Orville Pierson’s work with me. I told her about Designing Your Life. Collectively we had all the tools we needed to create well-run job searches with room for exploration and creativity. That would’ve been amazing by itself, but when she realized Orville had also written a book about how to run a job search team, something magical happened.
We started a real team, growing to 5 people who were all approximately following Pierson’s methodology for running a strategic, targeted job search. We may not have found jobs any faster than other people, but we’ve all stayed focused and motivated by the support we give each other for months. This team has become an informal advisory board and accountability partner for each of us, whether we’re freelancing, taking time off, starting our new roles or continuing the search.
Here’s how we did it!
Get started intentionally.
It’s vital to agree on your purpose and how you’ll work together. We created a team charter and mapped out a little process for ourselves, both to make sure we actually agreed and to make it easier to bring new team members on board.
We’re a job search team. We’re all looking for our next opportunities at the same time, and we’re here to help each other. Our approach is heavily influenced by Orville Pierson & emphasizes meeting decision-makers over applying for jobs. We all agree to:
(from our team charter)
- Take a proactive job search approach
- Share our search project plans & support each others’ plans
- Join the weekly meeting or share a report if we can’t be there
- Hold ourselves accountable with daily updates
- Commit to spend regular effort on our job search
- Commit to spend some time each week helping others in the group or outside it.
- Remember that we are humans, not job-search-robots, and we deserve whatever form of self care works for us
- Maintain confidentiality about our conversations
What’s a proactive job search approach? It’s one where you decide what you’re looking for, and go find it (not just by applying to posted roles). Ours was based on what Pierson laid out in The Unwritten Rules for the Highly Successful Job Search, roughly:
- Start with a plan – each of us target specific industries, companies and types of work we wanted
- Build strategic collateral – with support and editing from each other, we each created a short pitch and strategic marketing plan in addition to resumes, portfolios, and LinkedIn
- Quantify & measure progress – we started with the measures Pierson recommended, but tweaked them based on our individual values (I added a “how many other people did I help this week?” count, others added “how much time did I spend learning?” and so forth)
- Commit the time – each of us made finding our next work a nearly-full-time job, and some of us tracked that time (we had some vigorous debate about effort-based vs. outcome-based measurements, as people with product development backgrounds!)
That approach doesn’t guarantee you a job, but we all have a much better grasp of what’s happening in the market, and we’re now connected with people we can help and who can help us.
Be mindful in deciding how you work.
We worked remotely and largely asynchronously, which is very different from what Pierson described in his Team Up! book – the book includes a ton of templates for things you’re meant to print out and display.
Once agreed on how we’d work in our charter, we realized we needed some tools to help us – Slack for a daily “what I did yesterday, what I’ll do today, where am I blocked” standup update, video meetings once a week to reflect more deeply on the wins and losses of the previous week & set intentions for the new one, Google Drive to share our metrics each week, and so we could support each other with edits and feedback on our collateral.
Staying supportive and connected is key! I don’t think we ever specifically said “you must comment on everyone’s standup note in Slack”, but everyone always either announces they’re not working that day or comments on everyone else’s update.
Needs will change. In the early days, we were all writing resumes and plans, and it made each of us nervous to get feedback – or ask for it and not get it, which turns out to be WAY WORSE. As our searches progressed, and the emotional roller coaster dragged on, we came up with a new metric: TSLED (Time Since Last Existential Dread), a way to acknowledge the personal toll an extended job search can take.
You have to trust the people you choose for your team. Obviously you need to trust them from the very beginning; looking for a job, especially if you’re laid off, feels like a big risk to your sense of self. For us, this became more and more important as our searches evolved. We were careful to only invite people to join if we all felt great about it after they’d have a long conversation with each team member. We also just… decided to trust each other and be vulnerable very quickly. I deeply appreciate my team members who let their feelings out early on – I don’t tend to do that, and they made the environment safer for all of us to be depressed, angry, self-doubting, joyful, proud, creative, ambitious and assertive.
Plan for some individual variation. We all bought into the general concept of proactive searching, but we’re different people with different styles, so we varied our approaches. Some of us leaned harder into strategic marketing from day 1, others wanted to learn a new set of skills first, and we all processed job loss in different ways at different speeds. We also had different results! After 6 months, we can take credit for 2 businesses started, 2 new full time gigs, one side hustle gaining momentum, and at least 2 significant reinventions.
Bring your full self, everyone is needed.
We’re lucky to have a couple of coaches, some analysts, some writers and some get-it-done-ers (honestly, we’re ALL get-it-done-ers) among the group. If we’d had recruiters, marketers, sales people, developers, therapists, etc… all of those skills would’ve been useful in their own ways.
It’s probably obvious that a job search team extends your network. The people on your team know other people and will become incredible references. Each of us has, directly or indirectly, made connections that helped the other person find a client, a role or some key piece of information.
And! The whole team pooled resources and skills to apply to any problem. We shared advice and insights we read, self care strategies, questions for the group to reflect on, recipes for lunches, advice for visualizing success, approaches to “austerity measures” while unemployed, as well as cute pictures of our pets and local weather reports. There are only five of us, but we’re mighty – you can ask this group for help with almost anything and get it.
No unsolicited advice, though! We didn’t put this in our charter, and maybe should have. We always ask before telling people what we think they need, because a) we’re often wrong and b) you’re not always in the mood for advice – sometimes you want to vent or just feel your feelings and move on.
Your full self means your FULL self. Move at a sustainable pace. We each worked a 3-5 day week on searching for our next work. Some of us took vacations, none of us worked weekends, and we generally treated our search, including supporting each other, as our “job”.
End gracefully. Or… don’t.
One of the things Pierson says about job search teams is that you have to leave when you find a job, making room for the next job seeker. We considered that rule, but decided to ignore it.
We’re a small team, and we don’t have a queue of people waiting to join, but more importantly: we all feel like friends as well as an advisory board for each other. While the people who found jobs did have to write a wrap-up report and do have a harder time joining our synchronous calls, everyone still sets intentions for the week, reports in daily, and checks in to support everyone else. Our weekly calls prioritize people who are actively searching for their next role, but everyone contributes.
At some point, I assume we’ll all be working more-or-less full time and will shift the cadence and content of our connections, but this group of people have seen each other through an incredibly intense, creative, frustrating, irreplaceable period of life. It would be impossible to forget them.