Helen Kearney is a sales recruiter for a global software company. Her life’s journey and her career specialization allow us to examine the question that we all – at one time or another – find ourselves asking: what is my perfect job (or purpose or life’s mission)?

As she explains, many people are exceptionally naive about their professional value. They may not understand their involvement in the larger transaction and the realities of their role in the marketplace. As such, she says, they often fail to consider or understand the needs of the employer and their concerns. Like any good marraige or satisfying position, a job is a reciprocal transaction.

Near the end of the episode, you’ll also hear Helen’s tips for your preparing your LinkedIn profile, resume, and job interview.

Below you’ll find a transcript of this podcast episode that has been edited for your reading pleasure. You’ll also see links at the bottom of this post where you can find more information on the people and ideas mentioned in the episode.

John Patterson: Helen Kearney, welcome to the Influence Ecology Podcast. Great to have you here.

Helen Kearney: You as well.

John Patterson: Take a minute and introduce yourself, if you would.

Helen Kearney: Hi, I’m Helen Kearney and I live in Denver, Colorado and I am a recruiter for a global software company and very excited to talk with you today.

John Patterson: Great. It’s good to have you here as well. I’m actually a bit excited to speak with you for a few reasons. So one, is you’re in a recruiting business and you have a lot to say about that, from what I understand.

But there’s also something really valuable I think for our customers who are, of course, attempting to satisfy some aims that they have for their career and for their work. And so in your notes, you talk a little bit about the perfect job fallacy or the illusion of all of that. And I’m looking forward to talking about that with you and finding out some of your thoughts about it. But before we get to that, let’s talk a little bit about your own journey with Influence Ecology.

Tell us a little bit about the way that you were thinking before you met Influence Ecology, what was going on for you. And then we’ll start to move towards what’s happened since, but what was life like before Influence Ecology for you?

Helen Kearney: Yeah. I really had a goal in my life to have a successful career that paid great money and was kind of transferable that I could pick up from company to company and carry on. And so I, more than a lot of people I knew was very ambitious and really moved forward in my career. And when I came to Influence Ecology, by all measures was very successful. And I was drawn to the ecology and the education because it is for people who are already successful. But in my career, I had always had a bit of a background angst and always returned to this thought of, “I don’t know, I feel like I’m meant to do something and I just need to find that mission.”

And I had really convinced myself that I was sort of here on this planet to do something extraordinary and this wasn’t it. So everything had the undertone of a bit of unhappiness. So I was sort of being driven by that. And even though I had these really great jobs, so …

John Patterson: Did you do a lot of things to try to reveal to yourself that perfect direction or orientation or …

Helen Kearney: Yes.

John Patterson: And I bring it up because I hear this quite often, people are on a quest to find out what am I supposed to do with my life?

And it starts very early on, of course, with people, parents asking you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But there is this sense that there is some kind of perfect role, perfect job, perfect place in the universe, whatever you might call it. And I just need to uncover it. So tell us a little bit about what you did to deal with that.

Helen Kearney: Oh, yes. My self-awareness meter is very, very high. I mean I have done all kinds of self development courses and read all of the personality, different types. And being in HR, you often have access to all of those tests and things like that. Anytime someone goes to talk to me about who they are or whatnot, I can tell you every little nuance of how I am in the world and how I express myself and what really is valuable to me. And I hear this a lot from people, but I do just think it’s such a fantasy that we have from a very early age, you pointed that out perfectly, that there is this ideal structure that I get to perfectly plug into that satisfies my … “I wake up in the morning and I’m just alive and I just, oh, I want to get out of bed. And yes …”

That every moment has this high. And so I had to come to terms with sometimes there’s just like a normalcy to your job and it’s not always going to be fun every moment. Like for me, being the performer personality, it was so helpful when I started to study with Influence Ecology because I realized that yes, I really enjoy people and I love that aspect of my job. And there will always be parts that are producer-focused and I stopped making myself wrong for really not liking that stuff.

And I was actually listening to a podcast recently where you said something about how performers are often prone to thinking, “Oh, if only I was more disciplined,” or just that sense of, “I should be that other thing. And I feel bad about the fact that I just like to talk to people and I should be doing it differently.”

John Patterson: This is really good because this is the year of satisfaction here at Influence Ecology. And one of the things that we’re addressing right now in … This is March, I don’t know when this podcast will come out, but it’s currently March and the year of satisfaction for Influence Ecology. And one of the things that we’re working on or dealing with is that people always have some sort of standard by which they gauge their satisfaction.

And that standard is often a bar that’s set really high. So for example, “I should never be bored,” is a ridiculous standard. “I should be happy all the time,” is it ridiculous standard. “I should constantly be excited and passionate about what I’m doing.” Again, a ridiculous standard. A standard that can’t be met. And if that is in fact your standard, there’s going to be some suffering that goes on with it.

So in terms of the job, the perfect job fallacy there is, from what I can tell in speaking with people, and I’d love to hear your perspective a little bit from somebody working in recruiting. But there is the sense that there is some job that when I find that job, I will be happy, I will be satisfied, I’ll always be engaged. I’ll always want to get up and go to work or roll out of bed. There will never be anything as mundane as maintenance and labor. It will always be something quite exciting. So comments about all that.

Helen Kearney: Yeah, and the same goes on the flip side of it. When we’re interviewing people, oftentimes managers think there’s a perfect candidate. People get conceptions and ideas that are subjective or they create these narratives about all of that.

One of the things I hear most often is, “I really want to get paid what I’m worth.” It’s like, well great. If I was hiring for a law clerk and I had an attorney apply, guess what? Yeah, maybe I’ll pay him a tiny bit more, but he’s still going to be a law clerk. I think that we talk about with deliberate focus, you may not have that. It’s not fun. You have to repeat it. And so in the area of, we call it early career, we don’t say young people, but early career folks, oftentimes out of college, they’re actually not used to having their butt in a seat every day and coming to work and it’s like, “This is boring.” And so early career folks, we often have to train them to type up an email that capitalizes things, things like that.

And then especially in sales, people say, “Oh, I want to go into sales because I want to make a lot of money.” But guess what? It’s scary. You have to pick up that phone and you have to have people that say no, or you put in all this effort. As you get more senior in your sales career, you put a ton of effort and all your eggs in a basket for a large deal with a huge corporation. And yet you’re neglecting maybe some smaller deals. They’re out of sight. And then all of a sudden at the last minute that big deal falls apart and you really have to learn that you need to focus on sort of objectively your whole pipeline or you’re focused on putting a lot of effort into one thing and then suddenly, all of a sudden, this other deal comes in, they call it a blue bird that comes in. And if you’re managing that whole aspect of all of your job, that’ll often … It’ll kind of work out.

I also tell people when they’re job seeking that you can call, say, luck happens. Oh, like, “Helen, you were really lucky in your career.” No, I knocked on a lot of doors in my pathway to success and getting where I wanted to go. And I’d like other people to consider this.

You need to talk to a lot of people. You need to transact for and ask informational interview kinds of questions with people that are kind of doing work that you think you might want to do. You need to talk to them and say, “Well, what is it actually like? What do you love about it? What’s hard?” And get the real picture.

And I had many times in my career where I got very focused. “Oh yes, I know that I want to become an HR business partner. That is the next step in my career.” And then I started interview...