Did you know there’s a Wikipedia entry on job security? Strange as it is, there is data in the article that discusses the probability you might lose your job in 2012 based on where you live. The United States was ranked 24/36 countries back then, with a probability of 6.3% as its score. Said another way, if you had 16 job offers in 2012, one of them would have ended up separating from you on average.
In this article, I want to discuss some general research approaches so you can minimize those chances while also touching on the importance of being always marketable.
Three signs of a stable role
Watch for these critical signs to help you understand the position’s stability.
The job description
A good job description should cover three things:
Information about the company (why)
The responsibilities of the job (what)
The work to be done (how)
Most job descriptions will cover the first two points, but often job descriptions do not cover the work to be done. Descriptions like this are problematic for several reasons, including but not limited to the following:
The manager is not involved or inexperienced
The job is a “fake” job designed to feed into a bunch of different managers
The work to be done is undefined
A job description missing a how should be a red flag for you and one that you’ll need to clarify with the hiring manager.
When a job description does provide a how the description tells you how stable the role is. Unstable terms include:
zero to one, a start-up in a start-up
build a team from scratch, founding member, new team, etc.
While these are often the most exciting roles in a company, they also tend to be poorly defined. On the contrary, descriptions that have “boring” descriptions are often more stable:
core product, platform
growing the team, join our existing team, etc.
I am all for the exciting work, but I mention this because you should understand the risk varying roles entail.
6-month hiring rate
The hiring rate of a company is a telling statistic available to you if you have a LinkedIn premium account. To view this information for any company, navigate to the company page and select the “Insights” tab.
The data below shows the trajectory for ServiceTitan, a promising unicorn in the SMB space. In the last six months, the company grew from an employee size of 1772 to 1917. Despite the economic downturn, ServiceTitan appears unimpacted and accelerated its hiring efforts.
Note that I am generally less focused on tenure and 1y and 2y growth rates because these are poor proxies for what’s happening right now, which is why I narrowed the aperture to the last six months. Many companies raised significant amounts of money in the previous year or two and still ended up in a situation where they had to make difficult decisions. I argue that 6 months is an appropriate aperture that is neither too broad nor too narrow.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that a company may not be adding new employees for reasonable reasons - they may have all the people they need for one. However, if a company has been growing in the last year and suddenly slowed its hiring, this could be problematic. In the case of ServiceTitan, there was a surge in hiring just in the previous quarter (a great sign):
If you don’t have access to LinkedIn premium, you can get a sense of where the company is by simply looking at the number of available jobs on its careers page. My one caveat is that the roles available on career pages are often not actively being worked on, which is why the actual start data from LinkedIn is so valuable.
Organizational headcount growth
An organization that is growing is experiencing a need. In turn, the organizational leader in charge of that function likely has more budget and attention from the recruiting team. In the case of ServiceTitan:
Notice a few things:
Engineering headcount growth has accelerated
Support headcount growth is accelerating
Sales headcount growth is decelerating
While I wouldn’t read too much into why the numbers are the way they are, the data does, at minimum, suggest that Engineering and Support are ongoing areas where the company has been investing and is accelerating its investment. If you are in sales and are applying for a sales role, realize that the department isn’t necessarily growing, so you should ask why if you are interviewing for a position.
My definition of job security
If you’ve been in the game long enough, you realize:
economies go up and down
companies thrive and whither
roles appear and disappear
industries grow and shrink
These significant macro changes are primarily out of our control as individuals, and having so much of our professional lives impacted by matters outside our control feels disempowering.
Did you know that the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company, some of the largest companies in the world, has been shrinking for over 40 years? Your career will last longer than most large companies. Job security in the Wikipedia sense is, by definition shrinking.
It turns out that it doesn’t have to be that way. While any given position might have some chance of being eliminated, as the CEO of your life, there are steps that you can take that will ensure that you have a job when you want one. True job security for us individuals has less to do with what company we work for but with whether or not we can get a job when we want to.
You achieve this secure feeling when you have the skills employers want and can do the work where the open positions exist. If you fail to invest in yourself this way, you may be able to keep a job for years and then find yourself ultimately unemployable. I’ve seen this tragic fate happen to ex-colleagues for decades, don’t let that be you.
While it’s not ideal that you’re looking for work unexpectedly, now is a great time to evaluate the skills you need to develop, the industries you want to enter, and the roles you want to pursue so that your profile will always be in demand.
Activity for today
Write down three skills you wished you had developed further in your last role
Use this information to guide your daily curriculum
Write down three jobs adjacent to your job that you would be willing to try
Use this information as part of your job search to expand the types of roles you’re applying for
Seek out friends who have these roles to ask for job leads and advice on what the role entails and what is needed to land one
Write down three industries adjacent to e-commerce that you would be willing to try
Use this information as part of your job search to expand the types of companies you’re applying for
Seek out friends who are in these industries to ask for job leads and advice on how to break into the industry