"What's your criteria for choosing a company?" It's the question I get most often in coffee chats these days. There's only one honest answer: the place in that industry where people work with the most fire.
Since posting "open to work" on LinkedIn for the first time, I've been grateful to receive coffee chat invitations from a lot of people.
In those conversations, I usually answer that I look at which domain the company is in, and whether it's delivering meaningful value to its customers. That's certainly true. But if I make the final decision in this journey, which might take months, that place will probably be 'the company in its industry where people work the most intensely.' It's a slightly sentimental criterion.
By intensity, I don't mean working long hours. I mean everyone genuinely immersed in the same problem.
This criterion comes from three and a half years at my previous job. Especially in the last year or two, I handled business development and operations on top of marketing, and it was a truly grueling time. But I grew through it, and I ran into moments when I felt certain I was genuinely helping customers.
One of those was solving a problem that had been stuck for half a year, together with the person in charge at a client I really wanted to help. We took that company's influencer marketing, which had been stuck at around 30 campaigns a month, to over 100 a month, and that led to a contract renewal. The sense of achievement I felt then is still the reason I work today.
Going through that time, I became sure of two things.
- To make a truly meaningful amount of money, I need my own business, not a job.
- For me, the time I spent working intensely at a company that was a little less put-together taught me the most.
So I don't think I'll choose where to go based on salary or the company's stability alone anymore. I look at the market, of course, but nobody can guarantee what the world will look like in five years.
What I can be sure of is this. Finding a place where I can work intensely in a way that plays to my aptitude. And building up enough experience and knowledge there to earn the trust of "you can leave this to that person."
At what may well be my last job, what I want to gain is a single experience.
That a person like me, stubborn and sometimes led by emotion,
in a market full of customers I truly want to help,
with the teammates beside me,
produces meaningful results not once, but again and again.
Right now, I'm looking for the hottest place.
And I hope I can burn hot there once more.
