How to Figure Out If You’ll Be a Good Fit for a Role
Job descriptions can be confusing. Setting aside bad job titles, confusing skills requirements, and meaningless jargon, it can still be difficult to tell what the role even is, let alone whether it might be a good match for you.
There are tips online such as this one that you can find to see if a general job is a good fit. I am no recruitment expert, but here are some under-discussed tips I wish I knew earlier to figure out if you’d be a good fit.
Analyse your goals
Consider your career goals, and whether this job would be a step in the right direction. Will this job provide opportunities and growth you are looking for? Will it help you acquire new skills and experiences? Will it help you gain the transferable and specialist career capital that you want?
To help you figure out your career goals and next steps, you can read through our resources and book a career conversation with the HI-Eng team.
What problem are you being hired to solve?
When an organisation is looking to hire, they often have a particular problem or set of problems that they need someone to work on. This can be pieced together from the job description, responsibilities, and skills required.
Make sure you keep a critical eye on “required skills”. This Harvard Business Review article suggests approaching the hiring process “as one where advocacy, relationships, or a creative approach to framing one’s expertise could overcome not having the skills and experiences outlined in the job qualifications.” The hiring process is often less “by-the-book” than people believe, and more about finding the person who would best solve the problem the business is facing.
Review the skills, qualifications, and experience listed as “required” in the job description, and think carefully and creatively about how your own experience has boosted your skills in the area they are looking for.
Speak to someone
Ideally, speak to someone in that company – more often than not, they’re keen to find more applicants to the job so are often happy to tell you about what they’re looking for. If that’s not possible, speak to someone in the industry you’re applying for to understand more about the bottlenecks most companies in the industry are facing. This can help you identify what problem you’re being hired to solve (see above).
High Impact Engineers has a directory of engineers in a myriad of different industries to whom you can reach out. In our experience, our members are all lovely and more than willing to help you find a more impactful job!
Research the company
Research the company culture, mission, and values through their website and social media channels. You can find out the experience of employees at the company through reviews on sites like Glassdoor. Think about your work style and personality traits. Some considerations include:
Do you share the same values? Is the organisation actually doing high-impact work? Are you passionate about the company’s mission and goals?
Are you comfortable working independently or in a team environment?
Do you thrive in a fast-paced or a more structured environment?
How do your work style and personality traits fit with the job’s demands and company culture?
Deciding between multiple roles/careers?
If you’re deciding between multiple roles that have their own set of benefits and drawbacks, it can be difficult to compare them. A useful tool to help you with your thinking is a Weighted Factor Model (WFM), where you list your considerations, compare how important they are compared to each other, and assess each option against these considerations. The final outcome can help bring some clarity to your comparison.
A note on counterfactual impact and replaceability
Existing advice on social impact careers focuses mostly on direct impact, which is a shallow analysis at best – if you perform less well than the person who would replace you, your true counterfactual impact could be near zero or even negative. However, it’s hard to know what would happen if you don’t take the job, so it’s hard to quantify your replaceability in the role. 80,000 Hours gives 3 examples:
If you don’t take the job, there’s some chance they can’t hire anyone else instead at the same salary. So you’re not replaceable at all. (If you have good personal fit for the position, you’re probably not especially replaceable.)
If you take the job, we’d expect you to perform better than the person who would have been hired otherwise because you’re the top candidate, and again this could be a significant difference. Real organisations often say they find it really hard to hire, so the top candidate is often a much better fit than the next best.
If you take the job, the person who would have taken it otherwise is now free to go and work at another socially positive organisation, so there are complicated ripple effects.
You can find out more about how to analyse replaceability in practice in this 80,000 Hours podcast episode with Benjamin Todd.
Did you find this blog post useful? How did it help you make your career decisions? Let us know by emailing us at team@highimpactengineers.org.
