Autorentext

Emily Durham

Klappentext

Career advice that actually works from a straight-shooter recruiter

Did you know the average job search takes more than five months? That’s because today’s job market is more challenging—and more confusing—than ever. How are we supposed to get hired, get paid, and get ahead in our careers? Why is everything so complicated and gatekept? 

That’s where Emily the Recruiter comes in. Using her years of experience as a recruiter and career coach, she pulls back the curtain on everything employment-related and tells you all you need to know about job hunting, networking, and not letting your boss drive you crazy. A much-needed antidote to the “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” ethos, this guidebook gives you the real talk you need to lock in when you clock in.

You’ll learn how to:

• Optimize your résumé and LinkedIn profile
• Network like a pro
• Strike a healthy work-life balance
• Crush job interviews and salary negotiations
• Defeat impostor syndrome and communicate with confidence
• Succeed in your career without making it your whole identity
  If you’re ready to work smarter, not harder, Clock In is the no-filter, no-fluff resource you need to thrive in your nine-to-five—and beyond.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

Wake Up, the Dream Isn't Yours

I have a feeling the person who first said, "If you love your job, you'll never work a day in your life" is the same person who said, "You'll find love when you least expect it." So far, they're 0 for 2.

Think back to the first time someone asked you, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" You were probably five or six years old, sitting in a classroom with a well-intentioned teacher asking you to draw a picture of your dream job on construction paper. You could barely tie your shoes, and yet they were asking you to draw pictures of taxable activities. Very capitalism coded.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

"What are you going to study?"

"What are your career goals?"

All valid questions . . . for people who have fully developed frontal lobes. Sigh.

These same questions likely echoed in high school when suddenly you were seventeen and feeling the pressure to pick the perfect university program to help you land your dream job. If you didn't pick the right major, it seemed, your whole life would be thrown offtrack. You'd be working in the wrong field, miserable and making no money, unable to afford a place to live or a family. Teenage you-the same you who likely stole beers from your parents' fridge and lied about where you were going with your friends-was responsible for making a life-altering decision. A roughly $100,000 decision at that. You couldn't drive, vote, or order a martini, but you were somehow expected to have the entirety of your professional life mapped out.

Dare I say we're a little too comfortable asking kids to dream of labor?

Waking Up from
the Dream

Listen, I'm not going to get philosophical on your ass in every chapter, but you need to hear this. By the end of this book, you're going to feel completely equipped to navigate and redirect your career a million times over. But first, you'll need to emotionally detach from the process, otherwise it's going to eat you alive.

This starts with understanding that the "dream job" is just that: a dream. It doesn't actually exist.

Why is that? For one thing, the aspirations we dream up early in life are limited by our youth and lack of experience, and they often don't correspond with the way our careers actually turn out. In fact, a startling 50 percent of recent college grads are working in fields that don't use their degrees.

As a kid, when you were asked about your career aspirations, where did your answer come from? The careers we dream of are the careers we know exist and that we believe we have access to. Naturally as a seven-year-old, you aren't consciously processing these factors, but they are still very much at play.

Children's career ambitions are molded by what they see. For example, I knew my dad worked in sales, my mom worked in insurance, and most of the women I saw on TV worked in fashion or were stay-at-home moms. I also really liked my grade 4 teacher. She was cool. So here were the career options I could imagine:

Actress

Sales

Full-time mom

Fashion designer

Fashion model

Teacher

(Working in insurance was never on the list, even back then. Sorry, Mom.)

Chances are the dream job you had as a child was informed by your environment, too. And chances are the dream job you aspired to have as a young adult was, at least a little bit, informed by your childhood dream job or self-beliefs. It's all connected, and we can't get ahead until we disconnect.

Humor me. Make a list of the jobs you were interested in as a child, and then the jobs you were aiming to enter in high school and college. Notice any patterns? What beliefs did you hold about your skills and abilities?

Let's unpack that.

Not to state the obvious, but the jobs on your list were all jobs that you knew existed as a kid because you had exposure to them through your family, friends, or media. If a job was more obscure or unglamorous, you probably hadn't heard of it: Bob the Actuary or Bob the Warehouse Project Manager doesn't have quite the same ring as Bob the Builder. Other times, young people might know a career path exists but are discouraged from exploring it because of family expectations and pressures to pursue certain jobs. (I think my cousins are still disappointed I'm not a lawyer.)

Manufactured
Dreams

My point is: Our environment shapes our career ambitions and the confidence we have to pursue them. One of the best examples of this is the relative lack of women in fields related to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). In 2024, only about 30 percent of people working in STEM jobs were women, even though women, of course, represent about 50 percent of the population.

When they hear this statistic, some people think, Clearly, women just don't want to work in those fields. Or worse: Women are bad at STEM. But it isn't as simple as that.

In fact, it isn't simple at all. Because when we look at the impact of stereotypes, representation, support, and access, it becomes clear that succeeding in your career is not as simple as following your "dreams."

Stereotype Threat

Our dreams for our future start with our self-concept from an early age, even as early as elementary and middle school. Studies suggest that about 74 percent of middle-school girls have an interest in STEM subjects but that this number significantly drops when they reach high school. Why? For starters, there is a stereotype that math and science are inherently masculine and that boys are naturally better at these things. These stereotypes impact the way young girls see themselves at such a formative age that it directly impacts their academic performance.

A study conducted by UCLA and Xiamen University aimed to challenge the belief that boys are better than girls at math across eight thousand middle-school students in China. It found that middle-school girls typically scored better than boys on a math test both groups were given. (Slay.) However, the higher the proportion of students who believed that boys were better at math, the worse the girls performed on the test.

This phenomenon is known as stereotype threat. It tells us that how well girls tend to do in STEM is directly related to how well they believe they can do. Similarly, we only chase careers we think we will succeed in. See where I'm going? If we believe from a young age that we can't be good at certain jobs, those career dreams will be dead before we even imagine them.

The Impor…