We all deserve to work with people who respect us, invest in our growth, and compensate us fairly. These are the key ingredients for a successful career, but they’re tricky to find in tech, where career paths aren’t linear, companies can grow or fade quickly, and you’re one bad boss away from updating your LinkedIn profile.

RevelOne was founded by marketing execs who have hired and mentored people in companies of every size and stage. We’re passionate about helping people reach their potential and avoid the common pitfalls we’ve seen many people — including ourselves — experience in their careers.

We’ve talked to hundreds of talented marketers, like yourself, and we’ve heard similar challenges again and again from many people. 

Common Challenges from People in Tech Companies

• You’ve been burned by working for failed (or low growth) startups
• You’re unsure of what skills are needed to land your next big role
• You love your job, but you’re not learning from your boss (or your role) anymore
• You enjoy your role, but the company is not doing well
• Your skills and interests are not well suited for the company’s next stage of growth

We’re not here to give generic or superficial career advice — no lists of “7 Things You Should Never Wear to an Interview.”  Our goal in this series of articles is to go deep into the highly specialized challenges of startups and tech companies.

We’ve talked to top CMOs and leaders about their own career paths and what has made them successful. From this, we’ve developed a guide to help you think about what’s important, how to find happiness, and the steps required to get there.

The RevelOne Career Guide provides frameworks and data related to your goals, skills, compensation, and how to choose a company.

RevelOne Career Guide

• When Should You Make a Move? Time is your most precious asset — should you stick it out or move on?
• Choosing the Right Company – Should you go with an early startup where compensation will be more equity-focused or a larger company with more stability?
• What Really Matters to You? Do you know what makes you fulfilled or are you chasing the wrong things?
• Map Your Skills to Your Goals – Should you go deeper in your current channel or explore new ones to reach your goals?
• Finding Your Culture Fit – Do you know how to determine whether a company’s culture is a good match for you before joining?
• What Are Your Options Worth? Do you know how to assess your comp or what you are being offered?
• Your Network is Your Competitive Advantage –  Do you understand how to build an effective network and how to best leverage it?

 

About RevelOne

Are you making career decisions based on what’s really important to you, or are you playing it safe? Do your personal values drive your priorities or are you overly influenced by what others think?

You’ve probably been to a party where you talked to someone you barely knew about your job.  Did you have a feeling of pride or an insecure twist in your gut? That person might walk away and never think about you again, so why does someone else’s perceived reaction affect us this way?

When we haven’t thought about what really makes us happy, we default to chasing titles, status, or money, and we’re more likely to worry about the reactions of others. This often leads to a nagging sense that we’re not on a fulfilling path. 

To understand what really matters to you, you need to think about the bigger questions. Here are a few “big picture” resources that are a good starting point:

• Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the best frameworks we’ve seen for orienting yourself around what’s important to you and the “circle of control” that you can impact. Here’s a summary of some of the key ideas, but you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.
• Covey actually takes a lot from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the 20th Century’s most important books on finding meaning in one’s life. It’s an intense read as Frankl shares his harrowing experience in the Holocaust, but you’ll come away inspired by his empowering vision around how every individual can find meaning in focusing on what they can control in themselves and their response to any situation.
• Dan Pink’s Drive talks about what psychology has learned about intrinsic motivation and how autonomy, mastery, and purpose are its most important components. Watch his TED Talk here and learn more about the book and his work here.

While the above frameworks are amazing at the level of life philosophy and can apply to everything you do, we wanted to get more pragmatic with specific career questions. To do this, we created a career self-assessment guide. 

RevelOne Career Self-Assessment Guide

1. What motivates you most in a job?

• • Solving complex problems and learning new skills.
  • Working with smart people.
  • Autonomy.
  • Making money – this could be about financial security, goals you have for your family, funds to start your own thing, or future flexibility.
  • Working at a company whose mission is inspiring to you or whose product is personally relevant.

2. What are your superpowers?

• • Think about your strengths. Where do you excel most? Other people can be a source of good intel on this simply by paying attention to the compliments they give you. For example, what strengths come up repeatedly in your performance reviews? What do your colleagues come to you for help with?
  • We often focus on “fixing” our weaknesses, but this may not be the best strategy for either contentment or effectiveness. Research has shown that we are better off leaning into our strengths and where we can be exceptional, rather than investing energy in improving our weaker skills.

3. What kinds of roles and activities made you happiest?

• • Which roles or projects do you enjoy most? What activities move you toward that “flow” state where time flies and it doesn’t feel like work?
  • What kind of work had the opposite effect, and felt like a grind or a drain of energy on you? When were you chugging coffee to get through a project? Is it digging into data or technology, or doing creative work involving language, messaging, or visuals? 
  • Do you like working individually with well-defined task ownership and a hands-off mentality? Or do you prefer working in a team that is fully collaborative with looser lines drawn?
  • What size company or team resonates with you? Do you enjoy smaller teams and projects that are in a formative stage? Do you like knowing everyone and having more fluid, broad roles? Do you like being scrappy with limited resources but having the opportunity to tinker and experiment with something entirely new?
  • Or, do you like larger, more developed environments where the group’s output is much bigger? Do you like scaling and optimizing something that already exists and has data to analyze? Do you enjoy having the resources for leverage and doing things more thoughtfully? Do you like the breadth of a larger org, with a wider range of people to interact with?

4. Do you like to be more of a specialist or generalist?

• • Do you like going deep into a topic and becoming an expert? Do you enjoy mastery in a topic area where people come to you for answers? Do you want to progress by running a team in that function?  
  • Or, do you quickly get bored in a given subject matter area and crave diversity? Do you like the feeling of being out of your comfort zone in a new topic and having to figure it out? Are you comfortable NOT being an expert while making connections between disparate areas?

These questions are meant to tap into your authentic reactions to help you understand exactly what makes you happy in your career. You can test opportunities against these factors and they may point you in the direction of trying a new type of role or environment. 

We also recommend that you explore our article on How to Decide Which Company is Right for You and How to Find Your Culture Fit.  All in all, we recommend that you try to put title and status aside, and keep yourself open to opportunities that are the most meaningful for you.

 

About RevelOne

Company culture plays a fundamental role in your happiness and success at work. It impacts how companies treat everyone from employees to customers, so it has a major impact on both your experience and the company’s overall success. We’ve developed some simple steps to help you assess whether a company’s culture will bring out the best in you.

What’s Important to You?

First, take a moment to rank the fundamental elements of a company’s culture (listed below) that are the most important to you. Remember, it’s important to prioritize these factors because you most likely won’t find one company that can give you everything.

• Company mission & impact
• Company values and norms
• Compensation levels and philosophy
• Approach to advancement & growth
• Work/life balance

If you’re having a difficult time weighing these factors, read our article on how to Discover What Really Matters to You in Your Career. 

Next, here are three approaches you can use to collect information and further evaluate a company’s culture. 

1. Glassdoor Rating

This can be a great tool for understanding a company’s culture, work/life balance, and get a diverse set of insider opinions. Make sure there is a large enough volume of reviews and you are not just looking at the total scores. 

Don’t get thrown off if there are some negative reviews. Even great companies have a few disgruntled employees, and unhappy people are far more likely to post a review than satisfied people so there is always a negative bias to consider. Regardless, you can compare their overall score to your current employer’s score to give you a baseline. Also, look for how they rank among other companies you’re considering and look for consistent themes (both positive and negative) in the comments and recent trends.

2. Employee Turnover (a Useful LinkedIn Hack)

You can get a good sense of turnover rate by looking at past employees as a percentage of current employees on LinkedIn by following the steps below.

• Do a LinkedIn search by company name to get their current number of employees.
• Next, click “All Filters” to access LinkedIn’s advanced search options. Unselect the company’s name under “Current Companies” and select the company’s name under “Past Companies” to get the total number of past employees.
• Divide the number of past company employees by the number of current employees to get the turnover rate and then divide that number by the number of years the company has been in operation to get the annual rate. If that number is over 10-15%…run!

3. Ex-employee Insights

This may seem awkward, but it might be the most important and revealing step. Find someone who worked in the department you’re joining. Contact her or him through LinkedIn and let them know that you’re considering a position at their former company. Make sure they know you want their unfiltered input and that you will keep what they share confidential. You’ll be surprised at how candid and helpful many people will be, and it can end up being a nice networking opportunity as well. If you can get a backchannel reference through mutual acquaintances, start there.

By using these three data points, you can paint a clear picture of the company’s culture and compare that to your own values to assess fit. This small investment can save you years of stress and unhappiness.

 

About RevelOne

Company selection is a critical part of your success and, unfortunately, you only have a handful of chances to get it right over your career. As a specialized marketing talent firm, RevelOne has a deep understanding of what it takes to match the right candidates with the right companies. We also understand the difficulties candidates face in deciding which company to join.

This article offers important criteria you should consider when choosing a company to work with. We also provide information on a tool that collects insights on top companies in the country that will help you make more informed career decisions.

Criteria and Questions to Help You Choose a Company

When you work for a great company, you gain access to meaningful opportunities, an invaluable network of smart people, and compelling financial rewards. It’s a decision that should be strategic and well thought out.  Although we can’t promise we will help you pick the next Airbnb, we can provide advice and tools that will increase your chances of success and happiness.

While our criteria and questions are helpful in guiding your decision-making process, you will still need to decide how to weigh and prioritize them. You won’t make the best company decisions if you haven’t thought deeply about how these factors fit with your personal goals, career stage, and risk profile. 

• The People – What are the founders and management team like and do you share their values? What are their leadership styles and backgrounds? Have they built and led companies before or will you be living through a first-time CEO’s learning curve? 
• Investors – Do they have investors / VCs with proven track records? Blue-chip backing is a good indicator of a company with promise since investors have a broader and more informed perspective of identifying company potential.
• Role Fit – Is your function or channel important to the company’s business? Does leadership value it? Is it properly resourced?
• Market Size – Is the company going after a large opportunity or targeting a niche market? This could mean tackling a huge addressable market with many competitors or substitute options. It could also mean solving a problem that is very important to a smaller number of customers, who can later become your evangelists.
• Product Fit – Is the product or vertical personally relevant to you? Is the company’s broader mission something you believe in? Do you find the business/tech problems that the company is solving compelling? Bigger picture, does the company’s solution effectively solve a meaningful customer pain point and can it win?
• Traction – Are there tangible signs of success (e.g., customer/revenue growth, big deals signed, margins, investor demand, profitability)? A faster growth trajectory can certainly mean more opportunities for personal growth. Less traction isn’t necessarily indicative of failure. It can simply signify that the company is in an earlier stage of development, which comes with different types of advantages. So, it’s ok to have less traction, just be aware of where you are on that risk curve.
• Company Type – You should think about B2C, B2B or some hybrid depending on your areas of interest and the implications for what the product/marketing/sales model means for your role. Enterprise/B2B companies involve higher consideration/lower volume marketing and often include supporting a Sales team. B2C marketing often involves a higher transaction volume with greater channel complexity, testing, and analytics.
• Culture Fit – Do the culture and values fit you? What type of people get promoted to leadership roles? This is actually more important than most people think, which is why we devoted an entire article to it. 
• Life Factors – Consider the broader elements that may affect your mental state more than you think, such as location and commute. For example is the job located in a city where you want to live (e.g., interesting people and access to things you enjoy doing)? Is there a commute that you can handle or flexibility in where and when you work?

 

About RevelOne

Compensation is about more than numbers and can be an emotional topic because it also touches on notions of fairness and self-worth. Unfortunately, these emotions can produce bad decisions. At RevelOne, we see hundreds of offers a year and talk to candidates as they wrestle with major career decisions.

We’ve seen marketers choose jobs based on the last few thousand dollars when they might end up burning years in the wrong role, miss out on a huge equity win, or lose the opportunity to develop key skills. And given the evidence of the gender pay gap and other signs of inequality, having a thoughtful and data-driven approach to assessing compensation is more important than ever.  

Below are some important factors to consider when evaluating an offer. We also provide a tool that can help you understand and calculate the value of your startup compensation package across a range of scenarios.

Important Factors to Consider

1.  Think deeply about your personal situation and risk profile.

• • Can you take a lower salary in exchange for higher equity that can be life-changing if your company is successful? Or, to build skills that will increase your future earnings trajectory?
  • Do you have a high mortgage or expenses and need more predictable cash flows? 
  • Are you willing to increase your earnings by tying more of your salary to incentive-based compensation that depends on the results you deliver?

2. Negotiating for more equity sends a positive message to hiring companies because it shows you are aligned with their performance and mission.  
3. Similarly, shifting some base salary to a performance-based bonus signals confidence in your abilities.

What Is Your Equity Worth?

Equity is a critical part of your compensation, but it is also highly complex and often not well understood. Just knowing the number of options you have isn’t enough. You need to know:

• Strike price
• Ownership percentages/shares outstanding
• Potential exit valuations (find out the most recent valuations and model three scenarios for exits including low, medium, and “home run”)
• Liquidation preferences (these preferences can actually drive the nightmare stories you hear where companies get sold but employees walk away with nothing)

Stock Options Value Calculator

To help you understand your equity value, we created a downloadable Excel sheet that guides you through the key variables and calculates the value of your options. 

It’s a great tool to use before you accept an offer and be sure to keep it updated after you join a company.

 

Download Options Calculator

 

 

 

 

 

 

About RevelOne

Don’t go it alone. People with a “team” around them are more nimble, learn faster, and are happier. They are also less likely to make major mistakes by learning from others.

Everyone will tell you to “network,” but let’s get specific about why and how.

Why Build a Network?

• Immediate Tactical Support – your network can be used for timely feedback on key decisions such as reviewing new campaign tactics, avoiding common mistakes, selecting the best vendors, and, in general, creating a space where you have the freedom to ask “dumb” questions.
• Skill Development –  learn best practices from peers and bring creative ideas into your work by seeing how other professionals approach problems in different industries.
• Secret Weapon for Job Hunting – your network can also be used as a sounding board for roles and comp. Plus, when you are ready to move, your network can be a source of intelligence and intros to other companies.

In his book, “The Alliance,” LinkedIn founder, Reid Hoffman talks about the importance of external networks for individuals and how companies should encourage them so their employees learn and bring new ideas into the company. And Keith Ferrazzi, in “Never Eat Alone,” shares how connecting people to each other and bringing a spirit of generosity to networking will help you build real and authentic relationships.

Who Should Be in Your Network?

You should have a broad, “outer ring” of people in your network that you meet at work, conferences, and through your professional network. You can easily keep up with this broader group via social media. 

We think it’s also worth consciously developing and investing in a narrower “inner ring” of people that you think of as your advisory network. This generally includes up to 20 people that fall into one of 3 buckets:

• Peers – People in similar roles and professional levels are a great resource. They can include colleagues within your own company and some from outside, who bring a different perspective and allow you to be a little more candid and ask “dumb questions.” You should also seek out contacts in different roles or channels where you can learn from each other or identify new areas or skills of personal interest that you want to develop (see our Marketing Skills Map for ideas). 

• Mentors/Managers – These are professionals that are senior to you and may include a former boss or someone in your field that you met through a conference. Many senior professionals find mentoring rewarding and an important part of their own careers. If you reach out politely and establish a cadence that is respectful of their time, you’d be surprised how often people are up for it. You can also go a bit broader by engaging on LinkedIn / Twitter or an outreach email with thinkers or leaders you admire in your area.

• “The people who knew you when” – This is a broader category that is less about business networking and more about perspective on your personal goals and mission. It might include friends from childhood, college roommates, or even more recent friends that you met in a non-work related context. This group is meant to bring wide-ranging perspectives on who you are via some grounding in your past or a view of who you are beyond the confines of the tech/business world. They keep you honest about bigger issues that are important to you, and they are more likely to call ‘bullshit’ when they see it. (Read our article on What Really Matters to You in Your Career for more on how you can leverage your “inner ring” to help you make important career decisions.) 

How to Keep in Touch

We’re all busy, so we have to invest in keeping in touch. You should think about keeping a list of your core network and making sure you communicate every quarter or two. If you are the super-structured type, you can use your calendar or a tool like Asana to build a cycle of staying in touch. Mix up your contact strategy with coffee meetings, a phone call, or just an email update. Over time, you’ll be surprised how a little consistency in communication can start to build a shared experience and desire to help each other out along the way.

 

About RevelOne

Time is your most precious asset. You can save and spend more money, but the weeks and months of your life just tick forward in one direction.

Your job is where you develop your skills, so you need to know when to hunker down in your job and when to fire up LinkedIn and start looking. Top stock traders say their most important trade decisions are picking the right time to “sell.” The same is true in your career.  

The decision to look isn’t easy. You need to balance the danger of inertia with the distraction of always looking for the next best thing.

This article is designed to help you through this critical decision-making process by providing insights on signs to look for, questions to ask yourself, and how hiring companies perceive your moves. At the end, we also provide a link to a tool which will take you through a few questions and assess if it’s your time to move.

5 Signs It’s Time to Move

1. Your learning curve has flattened, you feel like you are optimizing more than innovating, and you’re not truly moving the needle.
2. Good people are leaving the company, and the culture is deteriorating.
3. That opportunity to expand your role or start managing more people has been “next quarter” for a long time now.
4. Management does not value or fully understand your role or initiatives.
5. Investing another precious year in the same place is starting to feel “riskier” than moving somewhere and tackling new challenges.

Questions to Ask Yourself

• Are you continually learning and being challenged in new ways? This includes getting exposed to new channels, tools, tactics, and analyses. Do you have room to pursue new areas that you’ve identified as important to your goals?
• Is someone investing in your learning and career development in a structured way? Do you have managers who give you the direction you need? You should look to avoid both extremes of being micromanaged and having someone completely hands-off. 
• Is your channel or function valued? Does leadership and the rest of the org understand and support what you do? Is it important to the business? Is it well resourced? Examples of mismatches include brand marketers at a company driven by quants and engineers or SEO experts at a company just “checking the box” and not understanding the cross-functional commitment SEO entails.
• Are you still passionate about the company’s product and mission?
• How do you feel day-to-day coming in to work? How do you feel when you think about being in your current role in 6-12 months? 
• Do you have a meaningful promotion or role change coming up?
• Is your comp competitive for your function and level?
• Is the company on track to meaningful growth or an exit? Are the most talented people who you admire sticking around or leaving?
• Is there a culture fit, and can you “be yourself” where you are?
• What is your overall risk tolerance for making a move? You need to take your broader personal and financial situation into account too.

The above questions help drive a rational evaluation, but it’s ok to give your gut a vote too — it can be a good overall indicator.

How Your Moves Look to the Market

You should focus your thinking around the internal factors above, but we also wanted to give you some perspective on how hiring managers and recruiters view work experience and tenure.

As a specialized marketing recruiting firm, we have a window into how these factors impact hiring decisions for our clients. The market looks with skepticism at someone who changes companies every year or two. Conversely, someone with very long stints at just one or two companies may raise questions around breadth of experience, ambition, and flexibility.

These evaluations aren’t always relevant (or fair), but here are the initial impressions we hear from hiring managers around these two extremes.

How Hiring Managers See Candidates — The 2 Extremes

“The Lifer” Long stints at just one or two companies Do they have enough diversity of experience to learn from different types of problems and multiple cultures and orgs? Do they lack curiosity or scrappiness? Was there strong progression within the tenure? For long stints at larger companies, are they too comfortable with a big company structure and pace? Did they exhibit a capacity to grow and reinvent themselves within that company?

“The Jumper” Switches companies every year or two Are they getting fired repeatedly?  Are they missing the grit to work through tough times? Is there a lack of commitment to a mission & team? Is there a possible lack of earned progression? Have they had an opportunity to put a plan in place and then learn from and live with the results?

In Summary

You should make this decision for the right reasons. You don’t want inertia, laziness, or tunnel vision in your current role to prevent you from picking your head up and being strategic. On the other hand, you don’t want to be distracted from performing well in your current role because you’re spending too much time looking around. You also shouldn’t jump ship too quickly because of a temporary bad stretch at work or baseless hopes that “the grass is always greener” in a different role. 

As a benchmark, 2-3 years is a good standard for each “tour of duty.” After that, the burden of proof shifts to making sure you are still growing in your current role and if you’re not, you might want to consider changing roles within your company or moving somewhere new. 

Self Assessment Tool

The RevelOne Time to Move Tool can help you think about your progress. After answering a few pivotal questions about your career trajectory, you will be given a score with actionable advice.

People tell us this tool helped them consider the most important factors in deciding if it was time to make a move.

Explore Time to Move Tool

 

 

About RevelOne