Words matter. These are the best Kathryn Minshew Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Starting with the values that feel authentic to who you are can serve as a compass to find more meaningful, fulfilling work.
If you’re able to arrange a trial period with a new hire, do it. It will give both of you a chance to make sure the position is a good fit – and can help you avoid being in the awkward situation of wanting to fire someone three or four weeks in.
Being able to hear someone say, ‘I found an incredible job on The Muse,’ or ‘It gave me courage to make a career change,’ that’s the motivating factor.
I know, being the odd one out can feel brutal. But, rest assured, it’s also wonderful – because your desire to do things differently isn’t ‘uncool.’ In fact, it’s the exact opposite.
We knew when we started the Daily Muse, we wanted a recruiting-focused business model rather than an advertising-focused one. We felt like publishers were being forced to go to more and more extreme lengths to monetize through advertising.
Most weeks, I work 100-plus hours on TheMuse.com. There are definitions of ‘work-life balance’ that would say I have none.
The first time you meet someone, they’re a new acquaintance, the second time you have a bit of an understanding, and the third time you meet them, you’re old hats.
It’s fantastic to be known as a company that responds quickly to users, shares great resources and friendly banter with them over Twitter, and forges relationships on Pinterest, Facebook, and every other social media site out there.
When I was still a bright-eyed McKinsey consultant, I remember hitting a point where I didn’t know what to do next, and someone gave me the book, ‘How Remarkable Women Lead,’ and I read it and scribbled in it, and it felt like a guide in helping me figure out my career.
It’s often said that if doing something was easy, everyone would be doing it. I think that’s particularly true when you’re trying to make your mark or architect your own career. There’s often not a path to follow.
I’m an entrepreneur, so I’ve got to be ruthless about ‘me’ time if I want to have any left to myself! I make myself leave the office by 8 or 9 P.M. most nights, even if I do curl up with my laptop and a glass of wine at home to get through email.
Something I’ve learned is that when people tell me I can’t do something, I immediately wonder why and then think it through. It only makes me more motivated to prove them wrong.
For almost the first year of The Muse’s life, I would do 5 to 8 networking events a week. And I don’t necessarily think that’s the right path for everyone, but I realized that as an entrepreneur, one of my strengths was finding the right people who could help us. I didn’t come into startups with any network.
Thinking big is only one part of being a successful entrepreneur.
It’s all too easy to forget that cultural fit is a two-way street. Yes, the candidate needs to gel well with your company’s vibe and mission. But, you also need to fit in with her desires, goals, and long-term career vision. It’s not a one-sided relationship.
I didn’t even know that there was a startup culture, that there were events with people who built businesses. When I started meeting those people and going in to that world, I felt like I was among my people for the first time in my life.
So many of my rookie mistakes could have been avoided by first-hand exposure to other, more experienced technology entrepreneurs.
As you move through the application process, keep refining the way you present yourself. Like any skill, you’ll only get better with practice, and you’ll only hurt yourself if you get discouraged too early. This is one race that’s definitely a marathon, not a sprint.
For me, I spent months on job boards in 2010 and was frustrated by the experience. It’s antiquated and clunky, and there was nothing about a particular job posting that helped me favor one company over another. You literally get a list of 5,000 jobs that look the same.
Know your career values: Not your parents’ values, not your friends’, but what you personally value in work. For me, it’s things like moving quickly and scrappily, ownership and authority over my work, and flexibility.
Sure, it’s fun to chat with people with interesting backgrounds who seem to have a passion for your company. But a job interview is not a friendly chat. You need to determine whether candidates, can they really do the job. So ask them to prove it.
Having a co-founder is incredible, but it has to be the right person: someone who shares your values and ethics, absolutely, but also someone who has a similar vision for the future in terms of their appetite for risk, for low salaries, for hard work.
For those working menial jobs or putting in 100-hour weeks for corporations, the lure of starting your own business can seem like a great way to get more flexibility, upside, and ownership.
Keeping a ‘CEO blog’ or ‘founder’s blog’ can be a great platform for engaging your users in a nontraditional way, reaching people outside of your product pitch and building rapport without selling them anything except a belief in your ideas.
Networking doesn’t have to be all about talking shop over appetizers and bad chardonnay – do it in a way that works for you.
When you start a new company, you have to do it all. Yes, all of it.
Previous experience, key skills, and education. They’re undoubtedly all important things you consider when filtering through applicants in order to make a new hire. But, what’s another major determining factor of whether or not that hopeful interviewee deserves an offer letter? Cultural fit.
You won’t be exiled to permanent unemployment just because there’s a picture somewhere of you holding a red Solo cup and looking underage. But, your Google results tell a story: Have you been in the news? Authored articles or blog posts? What types of topics do you frequently tweet about?
Work-life balance for founders doesn’t look like work-life balance for everyone else. Starting a company isn’t a nine-to-six job – or a nine-to-nine job, or a nine-to-midnight job.
The Muse should be a trusted destination for answers. A hand when you need one. Someone to talk you through tough decisions or situations. A starting point.
As we’ve grown ‘The Daily Muse’ and met contacts who want to collaborate with us, knowing who does what has helped us be clear on who we want our partners to connect with – and makes us look buttoned up, too. SEO firm? Talk to our COO. An editor from the ‘Huffington Post?’ Meet our Editor-in-Chief.
I work late nights catching up on emails, and then, in the mornings, I just hop on my laptop right away. Then, every other day, I’ll hop into the shower! My husband is horrified that I don’t shower every day.
I am a big advocate for having an open discussion about team norms and preferences. At The Muse, some of us like to start working at 7:30 A.M. Others focus best from 10 P.M. to 2 A.M. Create a culture where it’s acceptable not to be working when someone else is working.
As a cohort, millennials are unique in their social consciousness, and they make decisions based on that awareness. Keep them engaged at work by showcasing a culture of paying it forward and tying the day-to-day into the larger purpose of the organization.
As a general rule, most recent university graduates know far more about U.S. economic history and ‘The Lord of the Flies’ than about how the modern workplace functions and how to succeed in it. Yet come senior year of college, it couldn’t be more important or more timely to learn the basics of getting a job.
