My Sourdough Theory of Job Hunting
In a jar on my kitchen counter sits a combination of flour and water, with small bubbles throughout the cream-coloured mixture. After five days of routinely adding to an equal mixture of flour and water, I am waiting for the yeast to activate and then this concoction – I hope – will become a sourdough starter.
How can you tell? The mixture should double in size from where it was on day five. So, diligently (and on the advice of the chef at a baking course I attended) I drew a line on the side of the jar indicating where the mixture sat and another to indicate where it needs to grow to before I can start using it.
It looks healthy too, with no separation of liquid from the starter, and has that distinctive, pleasantly sour smell when you take the lid off.
There is however one potential problem: it’s continuing to hover stubbornly around that initial line, making no headway towards doubling in size and being active and becoming useable. This process, the chef informed us, could take anywhere from ten to fifteen days, depending on a variety of conditions such as temperature and humidity.
So far, it’s only been eight days, though it feels much longer since I started the process from scratch almost two weeks ago. I have to remind myself that good things come to those who wait, and that patience is, after all, a virtue (insert your own cliché here too if you wish).
It got me thinking about another process I’ve been spending a lot of time on recently: applying for a new job. And I think I need to apply the lessons I’ve learnt from baking.
We spend a lot of energy and time trying to find a new job, just as I spent energy and time creating my sourdough starter. We search for roles, refine our CV and draft cover letters, and then, for a period of time, hear absolutely nothing.
But like my sourdough starter, our applications must rest, develop, grow.
It’s important to not be too fixated on the process either, and as I check daily on my starter’s progress, I have been doing the same for the applications I’ve submitted. Because I know that on the other side is a recruitment team and hiring managers who are juggling this with so many other priorities. It simply takes time.
So far, around 20% of the applications I’ve submitted haven’t progressed, with most of these letting me know within 48 hours. My application didn’t hit the specific criteria the team were looking for, and that’s okay.
The good news is that around 80% of applications I’ve submitted are still live: they’re still resting, developing and, hopefully, growing into something. They’re sat in a little jar on the kitchen counter waiting patiently and optimistically to grow into something new, something reliable, something useful.
Therefore I have a choice to make: Do I keep checking my starter and getting frustrated that it’s not where I’d hoped it would be? Or do I continue to trust the process, that hiring managers will let me know as soon as they can, and that when the right opportunity comes my way, I’ll be ready?
As with my sourdough starter, I’ll keep letting the process do its work, feeding and nurturing my applications, and looking for all the signs that I’m making progress, so that I end up in the right role for the next chapter in my career.