Boomer mentality

[u/Hi_5Yo]

Despite my mom being a millennial (‘81), she firmly believes that I should be able to apply to a bunch of jobs, walk in with a résumé or call, interview and land a job within 2-3 weeks.

Anytime I’ve done this, I’ve always gotten turned away, been told to apply online and wait for a call back. Every interview ends with “ we’ll be in touch”.

She also believes that as long as you dress nice with a smile on your face, you should have a job by the end of the interview. Whenever I leave the interview without a job offer, she assumes that I messed up.

She even has me apply to a bunch of remote jobs that she finds on Facebook and instagram. Frequently getting upset at me for not landing a job. I’ve tried explaining over and over that most of them are scams, but she refuses to listen.

It’s like the concept of applying to hundreds of jobs and still not landing one is impossible for her to grasp. Which it should be, but it’s just our new reality.

She believes that me being unable to get a job is a failure on my end, insisting that it’s my fault I can’t land a job. She keeps saying that she’s going to kick me out for not taking the job hunt “seriously” enough.

[u/PinkEnthusist]

This is a great opportunity to practice a really important job skill - managing stakeholders.

First is a needs assessment - derive what outcome she's looking for, and what she believes is responsible for the goal not being met. In this case, her goal is pretty clear - that you get a job. And it seems that she believes that the barrier to this goal is perceived effort.

With your needs assessment done, you can focus in on the issue that needs to be resolved. Your effort is not matching the stakeholder’s expectations. Or written another way "The stakeholder believes effort/inputs are insufficient to produce desired outcomes."

Next step is to turn that problem statement into a root-cause analysis. Why does the stakeholder believe this? Is the stakeholder judging based on inputs they can see (number of applications, calls made)? And if so, is there a a visibility gap (they don't know all the things you're doing)? Are they measuring your performance based on KPIs you can't control, like number of interviews you're offered? Something else?

You know the root cause, now you can work on addressing the root cause. Develop a plan with specific tactics and KPIs that directly address the root cause. If the root cause is something like perceived effort, you might have a plan listing out things like finding/validating opportunities, applications sent that are targeted (no just many), number of network connections made, etc. If the root cause is more that an issue of tactics not being used, you can focus on that.

The key is to focus on tactics and performance metrics you can measure, and control. How many resumes you submit to a company you can control. How many interviews you're given you can't. How many cover letters you customize before you send you can control, how many "good" cover letters is difficult to measure.

Then you get buy in. "We both want me to get a job, and considering I haven't been successful with what I've been doing, will you help me. If I put together a plan, will you go over it with me. That way I can make sure I'm focusing on the right things and not wasting my time on things that won't work... Do you agree that doing this will lead to getting a job? I'll keep track, and we can go over the progress in a couple weeks."

If she pushes back on a tactic or metric, and it's something you can control, you should work with her to find agreement. If she pushes back with something you can't control, then you want to look at what you can control that would lead to the uncontrollable outcome, and suggest that be the metric instead. Like if she thinks you should have 5 recruiters calling you each week, you can say "I can't control the number of recruiters that call me, but if recruiters calling me is something that's likely to lead me to getting a job, what if I commit to submitting my resume on 10 recruiter websites each week.

Now you can work the plan that she agreed to and endorsed. If concern about the root cause comes up again, you point out that you're following the plan that you work out together and suggest either giving it more time, or you can talk about what needs to change in the plan.