The Right Way to Look for a New Job

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“My job is a Kafkaesque nightmare,” a young friend told me. I understood him to  be referring to Franz Kafka’s famous 1915 surrealist novella, The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is trapped in a life as a traveling salesman that he finds monotonous and meaningless. “Day in, day out—on the road,” Gregor reflects. “I’ve got the torture of traveling, worrying about changing trains, eating miserable food at all hours, constantly seeing new faces, no relationships that last or get more intimate.” His life seems no more significant than that of, well, maybe a cockroach that mindlessly scurries from place to place and ultimately dies in complete obscurity. And this is where the author’s surreal genius enters: Gregor actually turns into a giant bug (often rendered in pictorial adaptations as a cockroach).

I assumed that my friend was making a figurative comparison—and didn’t think I needed to check whether he had met Gregor’s fate. Instead, I judged that he needed to change his situation and offered some social-science-based advice on the best way to hit the job market. Perhaps you in your working life can relate to my friend’s feeling of alienation and helplessness. Or perhaps you would simply like to be earning more. Either way, you are not alone: At any given time, a substantial proportion of American workers are looking for a better job.

Even so, you may be hesitant to take the leap, in an uncertain economic environment, out of doubt about whether a change will make things better or worse. So let me share the advice I gave my friend, as a way to help you structure the search for a job that suits you better by understanding your fears and facing them logically.

[From the July/August 2024 issue: Stop trying to understand Kafka]

For most people, changing jobs is a significant cause of stress. According to a study that used the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory standard assessment tool, altering your employment creates on average about a third as much stress as the death of a spouse, half as much as divorce, about the same amount as the death of a close friend, and 50 percent more than quitting smoking. No surprise, then, that normal people with steady jobs are reluctant to quit them, even when their work-life experience is not great.

People resist big life changes, such as finding a new job, partly for biological reasons. For example, the brain is more efficient, using less energy, when it can rely on consolidated memory—when it does not have to process too much new information. One neuroscientific hypothesis is that this explains why some people are dogmatic and closed-minded; it also explains people’s resistance to novelty—why they can be reluctant to learn new job skills, meet a group of new colleagues, figure out how to stay on the right side of a new boss, and work out a faster new commute.

Psychologists have studied the characteristics of people who are most reluctant to quit. As expected, they found that this applies to those who have risk-averse personalities. In a 2015 study of German IT employees, for example, researchers showed that even when the employees had an equally high intention to quit their job, those resistant to change were about a third as likely to jump, compared with those open to change.

My late father belonged to this resistant category. I remember him looking once at employment listings for his profession and saying, “I would love to apply for one of these jobs.” “Why don’t you?” I asked. He looked at me as if I were insane to even suggest such a thing. But my dad had another characteristic, which explains his reluctance to change jobs even better: high conscientiousness. Psychologists in 2016 theorized that people high in this positive personality trait may be especially reluctant to be seen as job hoppers and are more likely to make the best of the position they have.

Given such resistance, what people really want to know is whether a job change, with all the disruption and uncertainty, is likely to lead to greater happiness. The answer is probably. Obviously, a final determination depends on how miserable you are in the old gig and the quality of the new one. But as I have written in a previous column, according to one study, job changers typically rated their satisfaction with the position they’re leaving at 4.5 on a 1 to 7 scale. The new job earned a 6 during the first six weeks, but that tended to decay over the next six months to about 5.5. Still, a long-term net gain of one satisfaction point is nothing to sneeze at.

Much more interesting to the Gregor Samsas in the workforce is what happens if you don’t quit your job. Although you can probably count on not turning into a cockroach, chronically low job satisfaction has been shown in research to provoke mental-health problems. In a 2019 study of Japanese civil servants, psychologists looked at the effects on workers’ mood a year after they reported job dissatisfaction. They found that job dissatisfaction was significantly related to depression at the one-year follow-up.

Not surprisingly, the quality of one’s work suffers as well. Researchers studying “off-the-job embeddedness”—when a person stays in a particular employment because of such extrinsic factors as convenience for a child’s school or a home-purchase location—found in 2017 that this behavior lowers job performance and commitment, and increases absenteeism.

[Rogé Karma: The California job-killer that wasn’t]

If the American labor market were in recession, any worries you might have about quitting could be well justified. In present conditions, however, you might want to find a way to deal with your anxiety and take the plunge. The best way to do this is by starting with the recognition that worrying is a form of unfocused fear. To make good decisions in an uncertain situation with less anxiety, you need to focus your attention on exactly why you are unhappy and on exactly what you want instead. This way, the whole job-switching process is less amorphous and frightening.

A helpful guide for doing so comes from my Harvard colleague Ethan Bernstein and his co-authors Michael B. Horn and Bob Moesta. Their new book, Job Moves, documents the experiences of hundreds of job changers, and finds that their switches are motivated largely by one of four “quests.” Your principal job dissatisfaction probably falls under their schema—just as one of their quests may fit how you should assess a new opportunity.

Quest 1: Get out.
Your job feels like a dead end, and your future looks very cockroach-like as a result. This may be because you see no room for advancement or change, and that may include a boss who makes progress impossible. The aim here is to look for a new job in which you believe you can be both supported and challenged. Make a point of asking about that opportunity when you are interviewed for a position.

Quest 2: Regain control.
Here, the problem is that you don’t have any say in the way you work. The zoological metaphor is less cockroach, more hamster. Generally, this indicates a rigid company culture or a controlling boss. The goal in your employment search is to find a new spot that will allow you more of a voice in how, when, and where you work.

Quest 3: Regain alignment.
Your dissatisfaction may instead stem from being misunderstood, disrespected, or undervalued. This almost always reflects a management problem and is extremely common. According to the Harvard Business Review, 54 percent of American workers report that they don’t get enough respect from their boss. The way to find a better match is not just to assess your potential manager in an interview, but also talk with employees of the organization. When you do so, be sure to ask specifically about whether the institution fosters a culture of respect and recognition.

Quest 4: Take the next step.
In this case, your job dissatisfaction is not your employer’s fault; you have simply outgrown your old job or career path. This realization tends to occur when you hit a life milestone, such as turning 50 or when your kids leave home. The telltale sign here is low-level boredom with the status quo. Diagnosing this requires some discernment: You will need to listen carefully to your gut feeling to figure out some different options.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The secret to happiness at work]

The authors of Job Moves urge their readers to keep one especially important point in mind as they change employment: Look for improvement, not perfection. When you are feeling stuck in life, it is easy to see a job change as a panacea for all of your troubles. Of course, things are rarely as simple as that. As we saw earlier, the realistic scenario is that, over the first year of a job move, you will go from a 4.5 to a 5.5, not all the way to a 7, on the satisfaction scale. A new job won’t fix your marriage or help me grow hair. And you should probably expect to find some things you like less in a new position—a better job can be a more demanding one, for instance.

When you think about it, finding a new job that is perfect in every way would actually be rather surreal. Like turning into a roach.