How much of a stretch is right for your next job?
If you feel you have 100% of the skills and capabilities for your next role, don’t take it.
Sound irrational?
People ask how much of a stretch is ideal when taking the next step in their career?
In my view, the ideal is to have 60% to 90% of the skills and capabilities for your next role. This leaves a 10% to 40% stretch.
“Stretch” gives you space and room for growth.
If you are a 100% fit for your next role, as soon as you step into it, there will be nothing for you to learn.
Consider It An Investment, In Yourself
Think of it this way.
We evaluate investments by the rate of return. A rate of return for bank interest rates is, say, 1 – 4%. That’s the baseline. A good rate of return would be 5 – 10%. A great rate of return would be 10 – 20%.
If you walk into a role and you’ve 100% of the skills, there’s little to no possibility for growth.
Growth is one of the very best investment returns you can receive from taking your next job.
At 0% professional growth, this is way less than what a bank returns for investing cash. And, we should consider professional growth more valuable than money.
This is why it’s an unwise career decision to take on a role you’re 100% ready for.
This is also why I say 60% to 90% is the sweet spot. At 90%, you’re assuming there is potential for at least 10% growth in a role. This is a modest, but still favourable, return for your professional growth. If you’re risk averse, it’s also a comfortable place to start for your next challenge.
If you step into a role where you’ve got 60% of the skills, there will be a steeper learning curve from the get-go.
It will be more demanding on you, especially in the first six months of the role (maybe a year). But, there will be higher return in your professional growth. Just think of how much you could learn?
Of course, we may be less likely to be hired for a role where we’ve 60% of the required skills. But it is not unheard of and we’ll never know if we don’t try.
5 Questions To Assess Stretch Level For Any Role
Given these things, how can you assess stretch?
I see stretch as a combination of 5 factors:
- Leadership – do you have the necessary leadership skills to fulfil the role? Leadership might be a considered a combination of working with senior stakeholders, setting directions for a team, leading initiatives, managing budgets.
- People Management – do you have the required people management skills to fulfil the role? If the role oversees five people, it will have less demanding requirements than if the role oversees fifty. Make no mistake, people management is very important, whether you manage one person or a hundred.
- Skills / Capabilities – all roles require a specific set of specialist and/or generalist skills and capabilities. These are also the requirements that are most clearly defined in any role description. As a result, the best way to uncover these is to work through the position description or look at equivalent roles in similar industries. You can gauge this factor by dot-pointing all of the skill requirements for the role, and thinking about whether you possess them.
- Experience – it’s important to think about experience. Do you have direct, hands-on experience, working with the issues and subjects that are relevant to this role? Often we don’t consider this element (thinking instead only about our specific skills), but experience counts, especially when we’re faced with challenges in the early days of starting a new job.
- Life Circumstance – the final element to consider are life circumstances. The question here is, do you have the environment and circumstances that will help you ti excel in this role? And, if you don’t, can you see a way to put these support structures in place? For example, if the role requires travel twenty times a year and you have a young family, are you able to commit to this? This is just one example. Others will be based on your particular circumstances and what’s important to you.
While Life Circumstance is not strictly a requirement of a role, it does impact our likely success in any job. I like to include this question because even if we score highly in the other four, if we don’t have the right circumstances supporting us in a role, we’ll not perform at our best.
With these five factors in mind, think about the role you’re interested in, and mark yourself out of 10 for each of these factors.
When you’re done, add your scores and multiply by 2. Then minus from 100.
The figure you end up with is the stretch for the role.
Why Gut Is Sometimes More Important Than Science
You might be reading this and thinking, “that’s not all that scientific.”
Well, it’s not. It’s also not intended to be. It’s meant to be quick and based on your gut responses to the questions above.
Even though this a simple exercise, many people will not go to this effort when assessing a new role.
The majority of people will only think about whether they possess the skills for a role. Few people would think about all five question areas. Even fewer still would rank themselves out of 100 and then define how much of the job is a stretch.
So why is this worth doing?
Because going into a new role, these insights can be incredibly useful. They can:
- give you a clear sense of just how big the gap is for a new role.
- identity what level of professional growth the role may provide you, which is an important measure of return.
- help you identify and setup systems and processes when you start the new role to close the gap, as quickly as possible.
The goal of the exercise is not to think about why you are not qualified (ie. the gap) for a role.
The goal is to help you think about “stretch” as something that is attractive (because it represents growth) and to encourage you to apply because of this stretch, not despite it.
So if stretch is such a great thing, why don’t we actively look for it?
Not only do we not look for it as positive, but some research suggests that we look for stretch in different ways.
The Gender Imbalance
There is an often quoted study by HP which suggested that men apply for a job when they meet 60% of the qualifications, and women only apply when they meet 100% of them. The study suggested that this is due to different perceptions of confidence; men are more prepared to back themselves to address any gaps than women.
However, further research has looked at this more deeply, including a survey by Tara Mohr of a further thousand men and women.
Mohr’s results suggest confidence is not the most significant barrier to applying for roles. Mohr’s study found that in applying for a new role, a significant barrier is that women perceive that the “the job qualifications are real requirements, and see the hiring process as more by-the-book.”
In other words, it is not lack of confidence that creates the imbalance, but differences in how genders perceive whether the requirements and hiring processes are flexible and/or open to further influence.
The take away of this research is, regardless of gender, we should always consider throwing our hat in the ring, even if we perceive the gap in our qualifications to be significant.
While you will have a better chance at securing a role when you have 90% of the required capabilities, people with 60% of the skills do occasionally get the job!
I have known star performers in one industry who have switched careers and started new jobs. On paper, they held only 60% of the skills. Yet, they still got the role. Their hiring manager perceived that the skills they had from other industries were transferable. When they started in the new job, they were able to rapidly translate these skills to the role and succeed.
What is important when filling a larger gap in skills, is how we plan to fill these gaps. This is where having a great mentor, advisor or coach can give you an edge. Mentors, advisors and coaches are especially powerful when they’re working within the company where you are seeking a role.
Another consideration is whether the role is even right for you. I’ve known many people who’ve been attracted to new roles by big pay jumps, only to find these roles unfulfilling. You might consider other factors ahead of pay, such as whether the role gives you strong career prospects, access to leaders you respect, and fulfils your sense of purpose.
A Word For Hiring Managers and Leaders
It’s not only candidates that have responsibilities during a hiring process. As leaders and hiring managers, we can do a lot to make the hiring process fair.
Just as people going for a role have to think about the level of stretch the role requires of them, we have to face some realities in our hiring decisions.
We have to be open to those candidates who do not match the role 100%. Just because a candidate isn’t a 100% match for a role, doesn’t mean they do not have a great deal to offer.
Over the last ten years recruitment services provided by sites such as LinkedIn have provided incredible features to help match candidates to role requirements. Often though, this has reinforced specialization (not generalization) in career pathways.
The world needs both specialists and generalists. If we are only ever hiring specialists, we will miss the skill-set many generalists have, which is to build connection and meaning from subjects that appear seperate, but are actually related.
So if you have influence over hiring decisions, I encourage you to also consider those candidates who do not appear a 100% match for a role, but will bring other skills and experiences that may actually be more valuable.
As leaders and managers, we also have to acknowledge the unconscious bias that still exists in hiring decisions.
For every 100 men promoted and hired to a management position, only 72 are women. Unconscious bias, including performance bias, is still a reality that influences hiring decisions. Ensuring we have not only a mix of gender in our hiring process (and not only gender diversity, but all aspects of diversity), but that we’re considering the role of unconscious bias in how we hear and appoint candidates, is a step we can take.
Unconscious bias affects career prospects beyond hiring decisions. It also affects how people get access to leaders when they’re exploring career directions.
Women are 24% less likely to receive advice from senior leaders than men. And advice from senior leaders can be the crucial step in helping someone go for a role where there is more stretch and growth potential for their skills.
Mentors in particular help people gain access to skills, build confidence in their abilities and provide advocacy and support.
So if you are in a position where you give guidance to others, an important consideration is whether there is diversity and equity in those who have access to your advice.
