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:

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?

2. What are your superpowers?

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

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

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

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.

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.

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.

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

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.

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. 

 

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.

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.
  1. Negotiating for more equity sends a positive message to hiring companies because it shows you are aligned with their performance and mission.  
  2. 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:

Stock Options Value Calculator

RevelOne Stock & Options 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

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.

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?

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?

How to Make Your Network Your Competitive Advantage

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:

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

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.

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

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

RevelOne Time To Move ToolThe 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

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.