Do You Want to Be in Our Next Book on Managing Your Career Better?

Randy Street and I (coauthors of Who and Power Score), are crazy passionate about helping leaders manage their careers better.

Gallup says only 13% of people love their jobs. We believe that the main reason people don’t love their jobs is that they are in the wrong one.
So if you want to be happy in your life, and happy in your career, we would like to offer to help you get hired to your dream job. In fact, that’s the working subtitle of our new book project: Who Me? Getting Hired to Your Dream Job.

Why do you care about this topic?

We care about this topic for many reasons. Nearly all of our work is on the employer side. Helping companies figure out who to hire. And we see so many candidates who are bad matches for the jobs they think they want because they have not done a good job managing their career choices.

Successful leaders actually stink at managing their careers. I was sitting in the office of a “successful” investor last week. He has been profiled in Fortune, as managing one of the biggest fortunes in the world. But this guy rated his career happiness only a 91/100. That’s because he finds himself passively spending his time doing things he doesn’t want to do (e.g. sitting on planes and being at boring board meetings too often). And he has not proactively made the time to spend time doing the things he is great at, and that he loves (e.g. schmoozing business leaders and government leaders to get ideas to do research about where to invest next). It’s likely he could be 95/100 or 99/100 happy if he followed some of our advice about managing his career more actively—to either change his current job, or get hired to a better one.

The advice in most books about job search and job hunting don’t ring true to us. Many books offer generic advice (“to know your strengths”) but don’t give you concrete steps about how to actually get your dream job. Other books tell you to lie and dodge questions about your weaker areas, which is bad advice on many levels. Lying is bad. And getting jobs that don’t fit your actual strengths and weaknesses is bad. Other books encourage you to follow your passions, without any practical sense for what the market is willing to pay for your passions. That’s not super helpful advice either. In light of job misery being a huge problem, and because we are sitting on some of the biggest and richest datasets on the careers of leaders (15,000+ careers, 600 data points per career = 9 million+ data points), we feel compelled to offer an alternative approach to getting hired to your dream job. An approach which is grounded in data, psychology, and business realities. We are hoping that you will find it the most useful career management/job hunting/job search book you have ever read.

How can I be in your next book?

To be in our next book, please send us your best success or failure stories about:

1. How did you figure out what is your dream job?
2. How did you get the interview?
3. How did you seal the deal?

Please post your stories in the comments box. Or please email them to me at geoff.smart@ghsmart.com. Thank you! We will collect hundreds of stories, and only a few will make it into our book. So no promises. But if your story is exciting, illustrative, and useful to the reader, we’ll work it in.

Can you share a peek at a better way to manage my career?

Well OK. Here is a tool we’ve been using for years, to help leaders manage their career better. It’s a simple Career Strategy Discussion guide that you can have with yourself, a client (if you work in consulting or money management), or with an employee, It’s self-explanatory. We’ll probably tweak it a few times before the book comes out, but here is your early look. This content is synced with our Who book (and the concept of the Skill-Will Bullseye) and our Power Score book (Priorities, Who, and Relationships).

Download the SMARTtools for Leaders™ Career Management Tool.