The COVID-19 pandemic may have subsided in some countries, but the “great resignation” trend is still causing major staffing and hiring difficulties for many companies. Matching employees with the right job can bring about numerous benefits, including increased motivation. What are the effective ways for businesses to connect with job candidates during the hiring process?
Join me as I sit down with Metier Executive Management Co-Founder, Andrea Berkholtz. She is an expert in finding exceptional jobs for exceptional people. With her skills in interpersonal and social skills, Andrea has helped both clients and candidates find the perfect match for the position, salary, and company culture.
Whether you are looking to build the perfect team for your company, this podcast has something to offer you.
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Hiring Process and Matchmaking in the Workplace with Andrea Berkholtz
Welcome to Actions Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the most interesting things about our current time is that we live in a world that’s more connected than ever yet making those connections seems harder than ever before. The internet connected everyone to everything but anyone that’s tried to find some of the staples of life, a job, a romantic partner, even friendships and certain experiences, knows that sometimes this overload of different options out there has created a challenge for a lot of people, especially people who don’t know exactly what they want. My guest today, Andrea Berkholtz is an executive recruiter for a lot of small businesses and startups with her company, Metier Executive Management.
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Andrea, welcome to the program.
Hi, how you doin’?
Good, and I hope I said that right. As someone who speaks English and some Spanish, the French phrase, metier, can sometimes trip me up so hopefully I got it right.
You know, you’re not alone in that. When we originally started our company, the idea was Metier is a French word that means the occupation that one was born to do or excels and it’s the perfect word for what we’re doing but it does sometimes trip people up a little with pronunciation. So, I have no problem with however it gets said, it gets said.
Yeah, but metier is like an important aspect of your business, right? I mean, it’s like what you’re actually trying to do.
We help build tech teams for startups. So, for us, it was a word that really translated what we do, which is we are looking to find the right perfect people who were born to do that role that these companies are looking for.
What goes wrong in a lot of these recruiting processes with the record lengths of time and number of applications it takes people to find a job and still get people, in a lot of situations, not satisfied with their hires, a lot of turnovers, a lot of things that don’t work out?
Sure. I mean, there’s a lot of ways that the process can go awry.
So a lot of times, perhaps, if the client takes a bit too long to get back to me with feedback, then the candidates can sometimes feel ignored or they’re more in the hot of the moment, like they need the job now so they need answers now so, sometimes, that’s something that happens quite frequently is a lack of communication, I suppose, on expected timelines. So, we’re always trying to make that really clear for all parties when we start a project together, but that’s definitely one of the things that pops up.
Yeah, so there’s like a timing mismatch. And one of the things as someone who’s done a good amount of job searching in my time, every company acts differently. One, you’ll hear from 15 minutes after the end of the interview was the most extreme example that I’ve gotten, and another where, four months later, you’ll suddenly get a job offer out of the blue when you’ve already moved on and like written that off because you didn’t hear anything from them, even from your two weeks later follow-up note.
Yeah. And I always think that’s so ridiculous. So, for me, one of my main points of pride is the communication, to both clients and candidates, but especially candidates, because people need to be engaged to feel interested in the process and there’s nothing worse than spending all this time applying for a job, filling everything out, talking to me or some other recruiter just to get ghosted or not hear anything. So, that’s a big complaint in our industry and that’s something that doesn’t stand for me, both in my personal life and my professional life.
I think we hear a lot about the difficulty in finding a job as a candidate but what about people who are looking for a candidate, the company, and they have a candidate they really like, do they ever get ghosted by the candidate?
Sometimes, that does happen and then, of course, I’m sitting there screaming with my hair on fire, like, “Oh, my gosh, what just happened?” You know, I myself get ghosted a lot too, which is frustrating because you set aside times to speak with people, I typically give a five-minute grace window and then if somebody doesn’t show up, I’ll reach out and say, “Hey, what happened?” but it is kind of shocking how prevalent ghosting has become in today’s world. I think that’s one of the downfalls of having so much technology is it’s easy to hide behind your screen or sometimes people forget things and it just happens and that’s totally fine. But, yeah, there’s ghosting all around the world right now.
I was reading an article about someone who had written letters in the 1890s and started writing letters about why they weren’t getting like response letters back from their — I think it was called pen pals back before the internet, you’d write letters back and forth, and I realized, okay, well, maybe ghosting isn’t exactly new but it definitely exploded somewhere around 2008 to 2012, the beginning of an era that I don’t necessarily always appreciate. One thing I tried to reflect on at the end of last year as the New Year happened was that most people who ghost someone are doing so because they’re overwhelmed in some kind of way because of life. But is there a solution? Is there some way that we can get beyond this? Because ghosting does represent a pretty poor communication pattern and it does represent something is like not really respectful so there has to be a better way to go about exiting a situation or whatever without ghosting.
Sure. And to me, it can be so simple. It can just be a one liner in a LinkedIn message or an email, all you really got to do if you can’t make it is just send an apology or just one sentence on why you may not be there. You don’t need to tell me your life story, unless you want to. But I think it’s just so simple as taking 10 seconds just to type out a message that says, “Hey, I’m really sorry, I’ve changed my mind,” or, “Hey, I’m sorry, this is not a good time,” just opening the communication channels really is all it takes.
Yeah, so just saying to someone, “I’m not interested.” I sometimes get LinkedIn messages about jobs and, every once in a while, I try to be 100 percent upfront, like I got a LinkedIn message about a job that the recruiter thought was right for me but it required five days a week on site, which I’m not looking to go back to that rigid work schedule of the past where some companies still have that. I don’t know if this would be respectful or not, I just said, “Look, I’m just not ready to do five days on site right now,” and kind of just gave them a little hinting of a reason as well as communication that this was the end of this correspondence.
Sure, and you know what, that’s totally fine because, to be frank, that’s actually really helpful because that not only lets us as recruiters know, “Hey, this person’s not interested,” and that’s fine, I appreciate that, I like candor. But also it gives us the weapons to go back to the client and say, “Look, we’re getting a lot of pushback. People don’t want to come into the office all the time and I’ve heard this from numerous people who are qualified for the position,” so actually, really, at the end of the day, honesty is the best policy and, frankly, I’d rather be told, I appreciate that, I respect it as opposed to just silence.
And what do you think prevents people from being honest? Do you think people are just being selfish and not willing to take out 30 seconds of their time to write out that sort of thought-out one-line email or do you think people are actually afraid of some sort of response they’re going to get?
I think with the way — you know, I love LinkedIn but, to a certain degree, it is becoming a little more Facebook-ish and everything because people are sharing personal things about themselves, which I think is great because it helps make bigger, better, stronger connections. I do think people are afraid to respond, just in case, you know, they don’t want to burn a bridge, which, actually, they’re ending up burning the bridge by not responding sometimes, but I think it’s a fear of saying the wrong thing and upsetting the wrong person in case that is someone that you may need to reach out to again at some point.
Ah. So would you then say that someone might be afraid, okay, I might upset the wrong person, but that it is more upsetting to just be ghosted than it is to have that one line of candor say, even if it is like, “Sorry, this job doesn’t match what I want,” even if they don’t want to put all the details in of saying like, well, this responsibility, that responsibility, that type of thing, just providing that one little bit would provide, at least from the recruiter and even the hiring manager standpoint, would have a little bit of respect, if they’re decent people, that is, for how that was gone about, the honest, open communication saying don’t waste any more time looking into me as a candidate, essentially.
Yeah, and I actually light up when I get responses like that. Of course, the best responses are people who are interested but it’s a numbers game here and to do recruitment, you kind of have to have thick skin because the rejections are constant from every angle and that’s okay. But when I get a message from someone that says, “No, thanks, I’m not interested,” even if it’s just that, I actually respect and enjoy that because it also on a human level shows me that they read what I said so they took the time to acknowledge it and it’s okay if it’s not a good fit because that’s what I’m looking for at the end of the day. So, I’m actually a fan of, “No thanks, not interested.” I’ll take that.
Yeah. Also, how does it work when you have candidates that come in unsolicited? Because, sometimes, you’ll get candidates and if they’re in the hot seat, I don’t remember exactly how you put it, they want to know, maybe they’ll follow up every few weeks, “Hey, have you found something that matches my profile?” and sometimes it takes a while. What’s the best way to handle — can that get overloading sometimes?
So that’s actually funny because I got a nasty message yesterday, actually.
Oh, wow.
With all of the influx of the layoffs in tech, I have an inordinate amount of people sending me their resumes, either they’ve been laid off or they can smell it coming or whatever but there’s a lot of people who are looking for new positions and the inbox is flooded, so to speak. So it can be really difficult because, typically, at our company, we focus on relationships with clients. So generally how it works for us is we have a client, they’ve got job orders, and then we find the people to fill those jobs. Now, doing it the other way around is pretty tricky when I’ve got, shoot, 80 pretty well qualified people messaging me asking for my help, I have to kind of pick and choose who is realistic that I think I might actually be able to help. And you’re right, it does take a long time. Back to the nasty message real quick, and I don’t blame the guy, I screwed up. So I had a message from a candidate, he had sent me his email and his resume and everything last year and it just got buried in my inbox and I forgot to respond. And, as part of my business planning for this year, I’ve started some new outreach campaigns and he got one of my messages and so he was like, “Why should I do anything to help you if you’ve never responded to me?” and so the best thing to do in that situation is I read that message, I knew I screwed up right away, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, you are right. I apologize. I’ve been flooded with a lot of messages. That’s not an excuse and I appreciate your standpoint and wish you the best.”
It’s always best to acknowledge when you screw up, just apologize. Do what you can to make it right, you might have burnt the bridge and that’s okay but you learn from it, you move on. Click To TweetSo it is difficult, though, the amount of messages I’m getting from people right now because I just can’t help everybody. And people need jobs yesterday. So I just try, again, going back to communication, leaving those channels open, giving these candidates my cell phone number and saying, “Hey, text me or message me if you have any questions,” and they begin to trust me because as soon as I know something, I will tell them. So it takes away the fear from them of like, “Oh, God is something happening and I don’t know about it?” Open communication for me, I will tell you the second I know so that helps curb some of the fear over timelines and things.
It’s a new territory that we entered sometime, probably mid to late last fall, when this big tech, I would say big tech layoffs kind of really started in earnest and it seems like a lot of them did come from these really big companies. Now, I know for pretty much the 7-, maybe even 10-year period before this round of big tech layoffs, most tech employees could pretty much get a job like this instantaneously, as soon as they want something, as soon as their boss says something that they don’t like, they’re like, “Okay, screw this, I’m out of here,” go somewhere, get a new job in like a week, right? Has this changed the landscape of how this is working for people in, say, software development?
it’s different. If you look at it like real estate, there’s buyer and seller markets, and as of right now, those markets have flipped and there’s just an influx of so many people that it’s going to be a tricky year but I think, at the end of the day, companies are going to have to — I posted about this I think the other day on LinkedIn where I said, essentially, you need to pay more and hire less. A lot of people, unfortunately, are being laid off but if you’re going to make any hiring decisions this year, everybody’s got to be aligned and you have to pay people what they’re worth. Otherwise, they’re going to keep jumping, even in this tough market. Now, we have a ton of people who are looking for jobs and it’s the flip side of the buyer-seller so I like to look at everything as cyclical. Every industry, and in fact, that’s how I live my life. I look at my life as a wheel.
Oh, wow, okay.
Yeah, my life is a wheel. I know I’m not going to make it to 90 without having some pretty bad days. I always think of it as you ride the wheel up for a while and you have a great hopefully couple of years or a long period and then, inevitably, you got to go back down through the water again. But it goes around and around and it’s the same thing with tech, I think.
In this world that moves a lot faster, you can kind of ride something you learned for a couple years but then there’s going to be a period of time we’re going to have to learn something else, like whatever technology gets stale after a few years, maybe people aren’t using this program, this language, this thing like that.
Absolutely. nailed it.
Now, you also do recruiting for C-suite or executive suite personnel. Is that also with this general startup- to medium-sized company area or is this something for larger companies?
I like to focus my entire effort strictly on startups because it’s always better to be an expert in your field than to try and cast the net super far and wide. I do think it would be easier for business to work with larger-sized companies just because they’re more established and they have clear game plans. However, I just cannot pull myself away from the excitement. I am seeing a bit of a difference for the C-suites right now than for a lot of the other positions because C-suites in general aren’t necessarily the ones that are being let go at this point so that part of the market has remained somewhat steady, which is nice, but we need to get all of our fellow friends and even recruiters into new positions this year.
Yeah. And so one of the things I’m wondering is what is the difference between what someone is looking for in a C-suite at a, say, medium- to large-sized company, big organization, big org chart, and what someone’s looking for in a C-suite for a startup, say you only have 40 people at this point in time and you just need a COO or a CTO or something like that?
Sure, yeah. And most of the groups I work with are either seed stage or Series A so at this point, they’re probably 10 or less employees.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. The big difference that I see is the C-suites for tech startups need to wear a lot of hats, which I know is a very common expression but I think there’s more expected of C-suites at startups because the lines aren’t so clear yet, everybody’s building things as they go so these C-suites need to be ultra-adaptive. They also need to have better personal skills because they will be interacting with these small groups of employees from the onset. They’re not hiding away in an office like at a large company with 5,000 people, they’re literally a part of this team, so I think great people skills and super adaptability are probably the main differences.
So is this also the case for tech employees at smaller companies like at the startup stage?
Yeah, I would say absolutely. I mean, you have your defined role, right? But at the same token, with startups, there’s always things coming out of left field that weren’t expected or rushing of beta tests or there’s things that just kind of light your hair on fire all the time so it’s sort of an all hands on deck approach. So, yeah, it certainly applies for all the employees at a startup. You got to have a certain spice and fire to be able to thrive in that environment.
Now, with the candidates in your database and the people that contact you about finding a job, do you ever find someone that you really just don’t think is startup material for these reasons or maybe other reasons, expecting uncertainty, being able to roll with some ups and downs, where you’ll just tell them, “Hey, I do startups, I don’t do bigger companies and your personality, your job desires just seems like it’s more fit for a larger organization”?
Yeah. For me, because I’m such a people person, that’s one of the harder conversations for me to have but I’ve gotten comfortable having it over the last two years, which is, essentially, at the end of the day, this isn’t necessarily a good fit. And I’d like to also come at it from their perspective too which is, hey, based on what you’ve told me, I’m not sure this would be a great fit for you either.
Yeah, for sure.
Because these aren’t really the conditions that you’re used to thriving in, kind of playing it both ways because, usually, that is true. If they’re not a good fit, it’s probably not a good fit for them.
I feel like a bad fit is a bad fit both ways, like even if an employer see someone and say, “Oh, this person’s a good fit,” but if they end up being unhappy, it’s going to become a bad fit.
Absolutely.
And become a bad fit for the employer too because they’re going to have to deal with this unhappy person on their staff or something like that. And especially for these smaller companies.
Yeah, and all that rolls downhill, right? That comes back on me because if they leave before the guarantee period is up or whatever, then, ultimately, I have to replace them for free. So that’s another incentive for me to get the job done right the first time is, (a), I want these companies to succeed, I want my people to succeed, and I don’t want to have to do the work twice so —
Yeah, for sure. You want to get it the first time. And it seems like those relationships, if you’re talking about a company with only 10 people, are far more crucial. I feel like there’s a stereotype in a big company, people will oftentimes have a work enemy and I’ve actually had those in the past too but you can still get by by skating around or maybe move into another group if it becomes really bad, but in a 10-person company, if there’s any risk of a conflict with one of the other people at the company, it becomes a really big deal.
And that’s totally true and that’s why personality is a huge factor when building startup teams because everybody’s really got to get along, you know, culture, which it’s a hard thing to do because when you’re just starting a company, it’s really hard to define your culture, but you have to do that. Otherwise, you’re going to attract a random spectrum of all kinds of people who may not get along together.
I can’t help but ask this but when it comes to these personality clashes, you probably are an expert on what leads to personality clashes. What are a couple of really common modes of combinations of people where you’ve just noticed like, “Okay, this person is ESFJ, or whatever metric you use, and that person’s this and I just know that this combination typically leads to some kind of a real clash between these two people”?
Sure, sure. So I’d say one that I’ve seen sometimes with founders, they started this company, they built this company and they’re incredibly intelligent, but a lot of the times there’s a book smarts versus street smarts kind of approach. They’re very intellectual but they don’t necessarily have some of the people skills that you need to be able to communicate with your employees. That can be a big clash is when the founder or the employees are very book smart and everyone else is kind of street smart. A big thing I see too that I know that usually doesn’t translate well to a fit is if somebody is characteristically humorous or funny and outgoing so it’s the extroverts versus the introverts thing. If somebody lives their life with humor and I’m trying to match them up with a company where it’s pretty serious business and they are very serious in the daily activities, then I generally know that probably is going to make everybody feel uncomfortable to have a jokester and then the jokester not landing any jokes, nobody’s going to be happy.
Yeah, exactly. There was this actually really, really weird experience, it was my freshman year in college. I was riding the bus home with my friend Lisa and we were discussing the book we were reading in class, which is The Power of Compassion by the Dalai Lama and we’ve had a few drinks so this wasn’t really necessarily the funniest book, you know, joke or whatever, but we were just going, “He’s my main Lama,” how that used to be a thing at the turn of the century, “My main this, my main that.” Well, anyway, this guy just walks up to us from the back of the bus and says, “He is the main Lama,” in like the most stoic, serious voice of all time. And we just looked at each other, like, “What the heck?” we know that, that’s not what this conversation is, that’s not the point what we’re saying.
Totally, and that’s a great example right there. We’re on the same page, i.e., the same bus even, but the statements just hit differently.
Yeah, and it just doesn’t hit. And so for these jokey, extroverted people, do they generally thrive at startups or do they generally need some sort of different type of environment? Because startups tend to be pretty go, go, go.
Sure, I actually think they do really well if they can keep shenanigans in line, so to speak. Everybody appreciates a charismatic, funny kind of person because it makes communicating easier, it makes talking about problems easier. That can go too far to the other end of the spectrum, though, where it begins to feel like chaos so that would be the thing that I say people need to look out for is, yes, you want charisma but there are some folks out there that are a little too charismatic and end up adding chaos to the mix.
Yeah, it may be better just doing some sort of like PR marketing department somewhere else where they can just be charismatic all day long and just live in that tiny charisma bucket in a company where people are doing serious work somewhere else.
Or standup comedy. That’s where I’d like to send some of the ones I’ve talked to.
Have you ever said that to someone? Have you ever been like, “You should just be a standup comedian. Forget learning the next Python package or anything”?
No, but I might have to. If I get close enough to a candidate, then, yeah, I might be like, “You know what, I think you missed your calling. Your metier is standup comedy.”
Your metier.
Yeah.
Glad we remind my audience again of that word, metier, you’re learning some linguistics today as well.
Yeah, I used to actually be a copywriter in advertising. I’ve always had a thing for words so it comes out apparently in company naming and just everyday life.
Speaking of the word metier, Andrea, is the recruiting business and your business, is that your metier?
Yes. Yes, which is why I’m still so stubbornly hanging on by my teeth, my nails, everything. So I’ve worked in a couple different fields over the last few years. I used to have an oil and gas company. I love running my own business but I never was able to really put my finger on or get into the right vein essentially. And I’ve always loved people too. So, the story of our company’s origins is somewhat of a sad one so I won’t go into that unless we want to discuss it, but once we started doing this, man, like I just feel the fire, especially with tech startups. I love my niche, I love my industry, and I love talking to people. Every time I go out, I’m on the plane, anywhere I go, I cannot help but talk to people. So I really do feel, yeah, I found metier well here.
Well, it seems like what you found is what a lot of people are looking for, which is this combination of the what and the why. The why is, of course, what I call purpose. That’s the working towards something you want to be working toward, and the what is what you do on a physically day-to-day basis alignment and how well that aligns with just who you are. So you’re doing the things that you want to be doing, talking to people, helping match people with the right job or the right candidate, but also doing it for something that you really want to be advancing as opposed to just for some other set of companies that you might not care quite as much about.
Absolutely. And the thing that stands out to me is discovering or realizing that I found metier is I used to hate Mondays, I used to get Sunday night anxiety, which I think is a very common thing.
The Sunday Scaries, as it’s said everywhere.
Sunday Scaries, yes, I used to get the Sunday Scaries. But, in a bizarre, freakish turn of events, I actually look forward to Mondays because I’m like, “What is the week gonna have? Who can I help? How much money can I make, frankly?” So I love it.
And that’s amazing because I think most studies say that somewhere around 16 percent are the amount of Americans that look forward to Mondays and that number, from what I’ve seen, is lower in most of the rest of the world so we’re actually better than most at that 16 percent so it’s always amazing to find those people that have beaten that, which is kind of why our entire culture is based around this idea of dreading work. “The Sunday Scaries,” “Oh, no, it’s Monday,” “Tuesday night, let’s give you a bunch of wing and beer specials so that you can get through the rest of the week,” “Wednesday is hump day,” “Thank God, it’s Friday,” all that stuff.
That, again, nailed it and I hadn’t really thought about that before, actually, but you’re right. We have all these platitudes and things to help Americans and people around the world survive the workweek and that’s just, to me, that’s so unappealing and that’s where I got at with my advertising job is I was there for, I think, seven years and, by the end, it was crying in the car in the parking lot and just dreading going and I realized, I’m like, “I’m gonna spend my life working. Is this really how I want to spend my life?”
Because it’s so much of it, right? I mean, work represents such a large portion of your life, as in 50 years or whatever, however long it is, from when you start after school to when you retire or whatever, and then for that entire time, I mean, for most people, it’s 1,800 hours every single year, it’s too much for it to be something that you genuinely don’t enjoy.
I agree and I think here in America too, compared to our European counterparts, I’m not sure how they got it all figured out but the lack of vacation time we get as Americans and almost our fear and hesitance to use that limited two weeks, there’s a strange culture here of feeling like we must work ourselves to death but, then again, we are a very entrepreneurial country. But I would like down the road to be able to see us to hopefully get to some point that more so resembles European vacation policies of actually having enough time to take off and take a vacation and enjoy yourself and recharge.
Whenever I hear about the debate about unlimited PTO policies, which I’m sure is a lot more common in the startups that you recruit for, and how there are some people that literally say, “I don’t support unlimited PTO because the average person is actually gonna take less vacation if it’s unlimited versus if I had this limit of 18 days of PTO that I have to take and I’m gonna like take the rest at Christmas before they run out.”
And that’s an interesting conundrum because I’m also not quite sure what the right answer is. I love the thought, frankly, as a recruiter, it makes a great selling point to have a company that says unlimited paid time off but I know statistically, you’re right, a lot of people then don’t even get their bare minimum two weeks so I don’t know if that’s a conversation that gets had once the person is hired, that’s like, “Look, you have unlimited paid time off. However, you are required to take the minimum two weeks at least,” as an effort, you assure them that they’re not going to be punished for taking time off.
Yeah. One of the challenges of our time is that we have a lot of challenges right now, just to get really meta with all this, where the answer is a lot more complicated than some of the challenges before because I think a lot of people are approaching a lot of the problems we have now from a policy perspective of like if we implement this policy versus that policy, whereas a lot of it is kind of this overall cultural values type of thing. One of the things I often talk about is that there are a lot of things that we really need in life. We need time to rest. We need time to take care of our fitness. We need time to form and develop a community. We need time to laugh with our friends. We need time to laugh with people in general. We need time to be in the sun. And our culture does not always really value that. And so whether it’s you only get two weeks of PTO a policy that directly reflects that set of values or whether it’s something like you got unlimited PTO but the culture from the top down is very looking down upon people and everyone’s afraid to take more vacation than their fair share, it reflects that overall value of what we’ve placed a lot of emphasis on and what we’ve undervalued for decades, for that matter.
Scrolling LinkedIn the other day, I saw a post that was about resting. I think it was resting or relaxing. But it’s not as simple as the amount of sleep you get, like you’re saying, it’s not just about physically resting, it’s emotionally resting, it’s socially resting. It’s taking time to focus more on mental health, which is I think one of the fantastic things to come out of the pandemic is a general or overall awareness of your mental health, like the amount of people who have started meditating. People are just more in tune with self-care now. And being open about communicating those needs too, which I think makes for happier, healthier people and certainly employees too.
So we’re replacing the Sunday Scaries with Self-Care Sundays.
Yes, Self-Care Sundays, I love that.
Yeah, I actually think I’m probably going to do a Self-Care Sunday, although going skiing on Saturday, it is winter in Colorado, most people are doing something like that, is kind of, in a way, self-care. Have you read the article on the seven types of rest?
I think that’s what I was talking about, yeah.
Yeah.
The seven types of rests. It was probably a couple of weeks ago so it’s clearly been buried a little but it is exactly that.
It’s so amazing that we can take something that’s horrible and there’s a lot of things about the pandemic that was horrible, we had a lot of fear that we are questioning some things. In my one statement I made and I don’t know if you’re observing this in what you’re seeing is that the one thing, the one positive thing the pandemic that I feel like is certainly going to happen is this idea that if you’re not feeling well, don’t come to work, don’t come into an office, don’t try to push through from your home desk in the other room. If you’re sick, you have to be sick. And the idea being that you’re going to not even be productive, it’s just only for show if you try to come in when you’re sick and it risks getting the other people sick.
And you’re right, I think that’s definitely something. So, previous the pandemic, my husband and I have traveled quite a bit, and we were in Asia and, shoot, this is probably 2011 and we saw everybody wearing masks there and we didn’t understand it at first. We were like, well, I don’t get it, and it was only later that we realized after we Googled it that those people were sick and they were trying to prevent others around them from getting sick. So, I think there’s been a swap in the respect hierarchy. It’s come more to the front of mind, like, “Hey, we need to take care of other people. This isn’t about you coming in and showing us your devotion to the company, it’s literally about keeping people safe by staying home.” and that shortens the recovery time too. So, ultimately, you’re taking off less time from work if you actually take care of yourself and just stay home.
Now in retrospect, I’m looking back and saying like where did that ever come from? Like to who didn’t make sense to threaten people even, in some of the really harsh situations in the past, that if you don’t come into work even though you’re sick, there’s going to be some kind of a write-up or a consequence or something like that, like I even think back to junior high in high school and wish they would just completely do away with the perfect attendance award forever, just to never raise people on those ideas.
I totally agree. I did not have perfect attendance and I turned out just fine.
No, but people would do that and all it would do is make sure that that flu season, which always spread and especially grade school, would just spread amongst every person in your town and every family would get it because the parents always get it when the kids get it.
Absolutely. One of my friends was actually just lamenting that the other day that someone brought the sick kid to daycare and now everybody, parents included, are hacking.
Oh my gosh, yeah. And not everyone can control it because there’s always that beginning period when you first get sick and you’re not so symptomatic yet but that’s when you’re the most contagious and that’s always going to happen. Otherwise, all viral things would go away.
Tough game but as long as you just do your best, you know?
As you kind of continue on your path with Metier, I’m making sure I’m pronouncing it — trying to pronounce it right, do you see yourself expanding to a larger operation to help more and more startups get the right staff?
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I have my vision and my goals printed out hung right above my computer and part of that is the goal of expansion. It’s a little bit of a tough year it seems so far in the beginning here but I’m hoping again things will be cyclical. And so, yeah, the goal for me is I originally started this company with one of my best friends and a fellow founder and then, unfortunately, she had to step away last year due to personal circumstances. I’ve found myself the captain of my own ship, which can be pretty scary sometimes and it’s hard to know what to focus on. So, to curb that, I’ve actually printed out my financial goals, my KPI goals, all the goals that I have for this year and, yes, expanding and hiring a team of three reliable recruiters is on that list.
Oh, nice. And this is to serve the startup community. What would you also say is your overall impact that you want to have? Is it mostly about getting people there metier or it about like the startup community, helping them expand, helping more businesses become realities?
Sure. It’s all of those things plus a few more.
I want people to find careers that they’re happy in because it’s beneficial for everybody. Click To TweetAnother big thing that I’m focusing on as part of my work is we need more women in tech and so, as a woman in control somewhat of the hiring process, I can help bring more females into this tech space, which is, frankly, pretty male dominated at this point still but there are so many smart women. I’m really proud of a lot of the female founders that I’ve connected with because they are just blazing trails, even though they are still being harassed on LinkedIn by males.
I saw that post a couple of weeks ago.
Yeah, I was pretty upset about that one.
What do you think, barrier wise, prevents a lot of women from getting into tech?
Sure. I think some of it is intimidation and kind of goes back to us, again, being in grade school where I remember when I was in grade school, we were literally told women aren’t as good as math — or good at math, and I’m terrible at math so that did nothing to bolster my confidence or my desire to try and I think, for women, all the success stories, a lot of them we hear about, are about males so it’s kind of just you’re getting that voice from society that says this is, and it is, a male-dominated industry so there’s a bit of fear and trepidation and fear of failure, like what happens if this doesn’t work? Did I make a mistake? Now, everybody has that but I do think — you know, it’s kind of like the old boy’s club. Like I said, I used to work in oil and gas and had my own company and that is another heavily male-dominated industry, full of sexual harassment and all kinds of things. I think there’s a fear of exclusion and fear of, I don’t know, just what can go wrong if I put myself in the mix with a bunch of men.
And what do you think would help yourself in the past, any of your candidates, or anyone listening out there that’s dealing with any kind of a fear, what will help overcome that? What would help get people through that? What’s the best technique that you found?
Sure. So when it comes to fear, I’ve actually been listening on some podcasts on that lately, and I think the best thing you can do is sit with your fear, not run from it. Because we are conditioned, we are flight or fight creatures, and when you hear fear, you feel it in your body, you tense up, your heart starts racing, and you kind of want to run. So I’ve learned the best way to overcome fear is to actually sit down and I think the acronym for this was RAIN. And it’s Realize, realize that you’re afraid, Acknowledge, Interpret or Investigate, which means sit with it, what are you feeling? And then the N — oh, gosh, what’s the N? It’s something to do with self-care — oh, Nurture. There it is.
Nurture.
But the end game being what you really should do when you’re afraid is sit down and think about it. Why am I afraid? What’s the worst that could happen? What’s also the best that could happen?
And just sitting with your fear and trying to understand it instead of hiding from it, to me, is the number one way to break through it and crush it and run over it. Click To TweetYeah, so it’s a matter of saying to yourself, my reaction is fear but this is what really is going on, this is what I really could potentially benefit from this, and this is like the real actual risk. Because one of the things I read in the past is that it’s like fear of ostracism in some kind of way being a broad term, meaning any kind of ridicule or someone telling you something you don’t want to hear, and that sometimes we overemphasize that and maybe, okay, if someone ostracizes you, one or two people, that doesn’t really have nearly the negative impact on your life that you think it’s going to have when you’re in that fear, freeze, fight, flight mode.
Yeah. And because we are social creatures, I’ve heard that too. It’s essentially fear of being kicked out of the herd, at a very primal level. It’s afraid of being kicked out of the herd and left to fend for yourself. I think we all were, but I was bullied really, really heavily in middle school, like, man.
Oh, middle school is such a shit show but, yeah.
Yeah, it was. So I got it pretty bad and then I realized when I got to college, I hadn’t changed a lot about myself, I was still the weird kid in the Looney Tunes high tops with the glasses and the whatever, but just by being myself, all of a sudden, people liked me. And so I think it’s important not to change who you are and to realize there’s always going to be people who don’t like you, like nobody’s ever going like you, just being okay with that and sitting with it and realizing, “Yeah, not everybody thinks I’m the best, that’s okay.” Stop listening, it’s kind of a stupid line, I think, but like, “Oh, don’t listen to the haters,” it’s more or less a little bit like that, which is their opinion, it doesn’t matter.
Well, it’s like even people who start their own businesses and they’ll look at their Yelp reviews and see 24 positive ones and one negative one and get fixated on that negative one because for whatever historical, evolutionary, psychological reason, that just kind of happens.
And it’s true, like I learned working in advertising, bad news travels faster than good news so it does carry heavier weight but part of the mental training to overcome it is just to learn to quiet that voice and focus on the good things, focus on gratitude. I mean, there’s so many great things we can do instead.
Yeah. And is that something that meditation and some of this other stuff that you’re talking about in self-care help with too?
Oh, absolutely. I think, for me, a big turning point in my life and my personal happiness was pre-pandemic, struggling, trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, and, to be honest, there was some depression involved there and it was really hard to clear my mind in order to even take action to get towards what I wanted. And, frankly, as soon as I started meditating, I downloaded Insight Timer and I started doing, I think like an hour a morning, which now is a lot for me, but I sat there, I listened to these things, and I learned how to calm my brain. I’ve also kept daily gratitude journals for the last six years now. Gratitude is so important because, I mean, shoot, there’s been a lot of things that have happened in the last six years that were not good. My dad had cancer, we got the pandemic, all these things are so terrifying, but it’s so comforting that, even on your worst day, you can find something to be grateful still for. You just have to retrain your brain to focus, like we said, on the good reviews and not the bad ones.
I mean, no matter whether it’s reviews or whatever happened in your day-to-day life, there’s always a choice of what to focus on in nearly every area, nearly everything has a good and a bad, and we all know that people out there in our lives that choose to always focus on the bad, always focus on the negative, and the people that find a way to focus on the gratitude so I’m glad you’ve been able to find a balance there.
Yeah, and I think it goes in line a little bit with the statement of you are what you eat and it’s sort of like you are what you think. If all you do is focus on negative things, you’re going to draw more of that into your life. It’s interesting, actually.
It makes perfect sense though. I know there’s a spiritual aspect of it. People who are spiritual think will say you’re manifesting it based on your thoughts and people who are more scientific oriented would say, “Well, what you think informs what you’re likely to notice.” You’re going to notice something if it’s on your mind and you’re going to not notice it if you’re ignoring it and then when you notice something, you’re more likely to draw that into your life just by virtue of the fact, like if you’re constantly thinking about travel and then that billboard for the annual travel expo shows up on the highway, you’re like, “Oh, I need to go there,” whereas if you are not thinking about travel, you would just not even notice that billboard or just go by, you’re like, “Huh,” and then move on.
Yeah. And I am thinking about travel so let’s manifest some good vacations.
Travel is just on so many people’s minds because so many people missed out or were apprehensive about traveling over the past nearly three years now.
Yeah. It’s wild. That’s one of the things I never thought would change because being self-employed for I think the last seven years, my husband is also self-employed, so we were travel maniacs, like that was our passion. We went to all these crazy places. And then the pandemic happened, I remember being stunned, thinking, “My God, of all the things that I’m so passionate about, being able to go somewhere is never something I thought would be taken away from me.”
Andrea, do you have any last messages for my audience about kind of getting from this path from where you were in a state where you were really struggling and now you’re in a path where you found your metier and grew self-care. Any last messages for my audience about how to get to that point?
At the end of the day, you have to be kind to yourself. You have to it — sounds so cheesy, but you have to love yourself and take care of yourself. If you only did an hour of work or went to the gym for 10 minutes, at the end of the day, be grateful that you at least did that. I think we need to be gentler and not lower our expectations but just realize life is peaks and valleys, none of us are getting out of here without some pretty crazy shenanigans going on, it’s just a matter of what shenanigan you get. So improving yourself, reading self-help, I know it gets a bad rap sometimes but, my God, if you can prepare your brain to deal with the valleys of life, they’re going to be a lot smoother and a lot less deeper.
Yeah. And I would also argue that reading self-help, although people have pointed out some of the problematics with it, it’s still so much better than just scrolling through your social media feeds or watching something on TV that’s literally doing nothing for your brain, some of these reality programming.
TikTok. Delete your TikTok, I mean, with all of my other advice, but delete your TikTok instead of getting sucked into the scrolling and read something else instead, even if it’s not self-help, try and get away the phone because it’s just a time suck.
Yeah, even if it’s a novel, read something like that, and that’s the thing that improvement is, an improvement is an improvement, right? So if you worked out 10 minutes but yesterday you did none. Or, this week, you did a total of 45 minutes for the whole week but last week you only did 20. Or get a little outside time. Any improvement, any little bit better, it’s hard to shock yourself to go from zero to 100 right away.
Right, and 1 percent is still 1 percent. Over a year, that adds up.
Atomic Habits, yep.
Totally.
Definitely. Well, Andrea, thank you so much for joining us today on Actions Antidotes, telling us all about how we can go about finding our metier as well as giving us some ideas about what we could see for possible better workplace setup in the future because I don’t think our traditional 20th century work setup has necessarily been the right one for humanity.
I totally agree. Thanks for having me on. It’s always fun to get on and kick around interesting questions, have good discussions and productive conversations with people so thanks for having me.
And I’d also like to thank everyone out there for listening today to Actions Antidotes, episode number 80, actually, today, so kind of a milestone, not a usually important number, and I’d like to encourage you all to tune into more episodes, whether you go back to the ones previously recorded in 2021 and 2022 or the ones I will be recording in the future with other interesting people finding their passions and living out something in alignment with what they want out of life.
I agree.
Have a fantastic day.
Important Links:
- The Power of Compassion by the Dalai Lama
- Metier Executive Management
- Andrea’s LinkedIn
- Schedule an appointment with Andrea
About Andrea Berkholtz
Andrea is a people person who enjoys networking, connecting with others, and utilizing her interpersonal skills to help both candidates and Founders find the perfect match for position, salary, and company culture.
She has a passion for working with people and co-founded Metier in June 2021 with the goal of finding exceptional jobs for exceptional people. Prior to Metier, Andrea worked for six years as at a global advertising agency, The Integer Group, and worked with brands including NASCAR, The NFL, Coors Light, Miller Lite, Pokémon, and Acuvue.
She lives in Denver, Colorado, with her dog and husband, and enjoys adventure travel to faraway places, hiking, and reading. She is also currently working to publish her first novel.