My Ideal Job Criteria

A few sum­mers ago, when between jobs, I star­ted think­ing about what I en­joyed about work. What did I need to be suc­cess­ful? What made me love my job? What drove me ab­so­lutely crazy? I used that list when eval­u­at­ing op­tions for my next job.

Over the last few years, I learned a few more things I needed to factor in, so up­dated my list. I’ve had reas­on to refer to it and up­date it again in the last few months. It’s be­gin­ning to feel fairly stable and use­ful to me, so here it is.

A big cau­tion - this is a Remy-cent­ric list. This isn’t the defin­i­tion of an ideal job, this is just the list of stuff I’m look­ing for in a job to max­im­ize the odds of me be­ing suc­cess­ful and en­joy­ing it. You, no doubt, have a dif­fer­ent list. But you’re cer­tainly wel­come to start with this list if that’s use­ful.

  • Com­pel­ling com­pany mis­sion. What the com­pany is try­ing to do is im­port­ant and must mat­ter to me. It needs to be mak­ing a pos­it­ive con­tri­bu­tion to this plan­et or to so­ci­ety.
  • Im­pact­ful con­tri­bu­tion. Nearly the same point - my in­di­vidu­al role needs to be some­thing I feel is im­port­ant to be do­ing.
  • Autonomy and lat­it­ude. I need to be able to set strategy, make de­cisions and ex­ecute in my space without con­tinu­ally seek­ing ap­prov­al or re­sources. Some of that is fine and fully ex­pec­ted, and I am fine with hav­ing to demon­strate that I can be trus­ted… but if every move must be en­dorsed by someone else, I will not be ef­fect­ive. (Many of my best friends would ar­gue this is prob­ably num­ber one on this list; I still put ‘pur­pose’ first.)
  • In­put in­to com­pany dir­ec­tion. I need to be able to have a voice in com­pany strategy and im­ple­ment­a­tion. Ideally, I will be a part of the lead­er­ship, but at the very least, I should be aware of and be able to in­flu­ence activ­it­ies tak­ing place at the top. Be­ing told to shut up and just fol­low dir­ec­tions - that’s a non-starter.
  • Op­er­a­tion­ally sound. The com­pany must have a co­her­ent ap­proach to vis­ion, eth­ics, goals, cul­ture, man­age­ment, in­sti­tu­tion­al learn­ing and op­er­a­tions. It’s amaz­ing to me how few com­pan­ies are like this. I’ve learned the hard way that this is im­port­ant to me.
  • Cul­tur­al align­ment with lead­er­ship. I need to have a fairly com­mon set of val­ues as the people at the com­pany who make key de­cisions and set the baseline for the com­pany cul­ture.
  • Men­tally chal­len­ging. The job needs to be in­tel­lec­tu­ally stim­u­lat­ing and dif­fi­cult.
  • Pro­fes­sion­al learn­ing. The job needs to provide me with chal­lenges and situ­ations that en­able me to con­tinu­ally learn new things.
  • Lead­er­ship role. I’ve found I like to lead teams to­wards a col­lect­ive goal.
  • Fin­an­cially re­ward­ing at the level of my con­tri­bu­tion. I’m not look­ing for a job that lets me buy a private plane. Get­ting wealthy would be fine, but I just haven’t found that aim­ing for that mo­tiv­ates me. I do want to be re­cog­nized fairly for my part of the or­gan­iz­a­tion’s suc­cess.
  • Al­lows a bal­anced, healthy life­style. It has to be pos­sible, and cul­tur­ally ac­cept­able, to take time for fam­ily, reg­u­lar ex­er­cise, and ex­ten­ded out­ings. I’m more pro­duct­ive and cre­at­ive at work when I’m bal­anced (as is nearly every­one), and will be hap­pi­er at a place that re­cog­nizes this.
  • Not shrink­ing. I’ve learned I don’t like to be fo­cus­ing ex­clus­ively on spend re­duc­tion.

I wish this was a check­list I could take in­to an in­ter­view. Un­for­tu­nately, while you can learn where a com­pany is on some of these when in­ter­view­ing or via due di­li­gence, there are oth­ers that can’t be learned un­til you’re in­side and in the role.

Also: I view this as some­thing of a to-do list for my own or­gan­iz­a­tion: since these are im­port­ant to me, I feel that I should do all I can to en­sure same cri­ter­ia are met for mem­bers of my team, while also learn­ing where they may have dif­fer­ent pri­or­it­ies.