← Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel
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The job market is ugly. The job market is scary. Your job can be taken away from you at any time. Your craft never can. If you find a craft that you're really good at and that you love and that fills a need in the world, that craft is going to belong to you forever.
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From LinkedIn News, I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is hello Monday. This is the time of year when people who have already had a great measure of success stand up in front of new grads and deliver speeches intended to inspire all of us. Honestly, though, the messages we have for younger people aren't great right now. It's a hard job market, and that has translated to a tough path to employment for a lot of younger folks. And I guess that's why Jodi Kanter's speech last year to Columbia's Class of 2025 really stood out to me here. Let me share a little bit with you.
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Do not be the people who fail to understand the opportunities that this moment presents. And they are massive opportunities precisely because everything is in question. And rather than guessing about the career markets, think about remaking them.
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Now, you might know Jody as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who broke the Harvey Weinstein story and and inspired the MeToo movement. She has had a robust career of her own. So far this spring, Jody has expanded on last year's commencement speech with a lot of solid reporting in a book for those just heading out into the world. It's called how to Start. It's a powerful guide to finding a meaningful career. And whether you're just starting out or changing direction or helping a young person in your life, figure it all out. Jodi Kanter has something we all can learn from. Here's Jody. It is great to have you in the studio to talk about your new book, how to Start, which is really a call to action to young people on the verge of starting a career, wherever exactly that may be, and hopefully
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reassuring because things are rough out there. Jesse I mean, one of the things I've been talking to young people about lately are these AI interviews. Like, you know, people our age have a conception of what it means to apply for a job. Increasingly, our conception is wrong. Students and people in their early 20s are seeing that they're actually being interviewed by AI instead of real human beings and that applying for a job now is incredibly lonely. So not only do we know that the job market has problems at the entry level, but but the process of trying to find a job is much harder than it used to be.
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Okay, Jodi, you're starting right off with the bad news bear scenario. And I just wanna say so is everybody all that we tell young people these days? I just said young people these days, like the 50 year old woman that I am, I wanna acknowledge that you and I are in the middle of our lives looking backwards as we have this conversation. But here I am at LinkedIn looking at and talking to people, looking for opportunity all the time. And you, you have spent a good part of the last couple of years on college campuses doing the same and raising a daughter who is solidly within this demographic. The thing that I liked about your book is actually that you started with a very different message, which is that I'm gonna summarize here. It's real tough for young people at the beginning of their career finding their way. And you could choose to approach it with the cynicism that, that a generation has been labeled with, or you could choose to run at it and make something of it. And if you choose to go in that direction, there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic and hopeful about what's ahead.
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So there's a reason why the COVID of the book is a rising sun, not because we're going with false hollow hearts and roses, sunshiny optimism. This is obviously not the time for that. But I think young people need encouragement. And what I want to tell them is that this stage in life always involves a lot of struggle. I do think the struggle is harder now, but I want them to have a great struggle. I want them to have a fruitful struggle. I want them to struggle in a way that is going to produce results to last and sustain their entire careers. And most importantly, I don't want them to give up. But before they start, if they abandon the search for job satisfaction now, they're only putting themselves further behind in terms of potential happiness.
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I feel like our listeners need to understand why you sit in a moment where you would have something to say on this topic. So, Judy, let's just take a few minutes to talk about your own background and how it brought you to being the speaker at Columbia's commencement last year. You, you began your life thinking that you would be a lawyer, right?
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Yeah, I kind of secretly pined to be a journalist, but I wouldn't admit it to myself. I was too scared. I grew up in Staten island in New Jersey. I didn't know any authors or journalists growing up. You know, even back then, people said that going into journalism was a disaster. I thought it was a flaky thing to do, like trying to become an actor, like, the likelihood of success was just so small. But. And also I think I had internalized this kind of dutifulness that said, like, you have to go out, you have to get a professional degree. You know, you always have to do the responsible thing. And I wasn't in touch with, you know, what I learned later was that the measure of a career is not, you know, what you spent years doing, what you spent decades doing. But really, are you happy in your minutes and hours? Like, if we drop in on you at 11:30 on a Thursday, do you feel connected to the task before you? And the tasks that a journalist does, like the interviewing, the writing, the editing, those are the tasks that I feel most connected to. But I did not understand that in my younger self. I didn't know how to pay attention to myself in that way.
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We rarely do when we're in our early 20s and making our way in life. It also can be very difficult to tell the difference between what is uniquely our voice, what is our gift, and what is a message that we're getting from culture, from our parents, from people who legitimately care about us and therefore try to influence our decisions. My guess is probably all of that had something to do with how you found yourself at law school.
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Yes. I had the opportunity to go to law school in a way that people in my family hadn't before. I admired what lawyers did, like on an existential level in society. And then they gave out this big brick of a book about summer jobs. And I spent a very long night looking through the entire book. I didn't want any of the jobs. I realized that I had to be honest with myself, and I really wanted to be a journalist. And I was also scared, Jesse, because I was kicked off my college paper.
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Yes.
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So I didn't have any evidence that I could succeed. I had evidence to the contrary.
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And you were also a middle class kid. Right. It wasn't like your parents were going to pay your rent for a very long time or you figured out what you were going to do. And yet you did become a journalist. And in fact, you rose to write for the New York Times, where you've spent a lot of your career. But you've been a journalist over a very turbulent time in our profession and in our industry. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you have needed to shift and what you have needed to shift in order to continue to stay relevant through that change.
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You know, what I tell students now is my profession has been in existential and business crisis. The Entire time I've been in it. And I'm happy because everything is like journalism now, right? Everything feels topsy turvy. It's in a period of digital transformation. We don't know exactly where it's going. There's a lot of negativity in the air. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't go into a particular field. Like the art of trying to game the system to figure out what's going to be hot or what's going to be stable. Like, we can see that it doesn't work that well. Right? I mean, how many people right now have computer science degrees that they are not able to take full advantage of because they followed the conventional wisdom and got the so called golden ticket? And then it turns out not to be so golden?
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Yes, that is all true. Here's another thing that's true, Jodi. When I look at your career, there must be something that allowed you to weather the change. And I wonder if you might think a little bit with me about what that skill was that allowed you to work in a newsroom in 2000 and also be successful in 2010 and also be successful in 2020.
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I think it's devotion to craft. If there is one thing I can tell young people right now, I would say that what everyone should really be after as a craft, what is the special thing that you're gonna know how to do that not everybody else knows how to do? Surgeons are practicing a craft. There's a craft of producing a really terrific show like this one. The craft of crafting an advertising campaign. Chefs have a craft, right? Successful restaurateurs are master craf in terms of figuring out how a restaurant should work on a given night. And I think that the struggle of being young should be about exploring different crafts and figuring out which one is yours. Because if you find a craft that you're really good at and that you love and that fills a need in the world, that craft is going to belong to you forever. The job market is ugly. The job market is scary. Your job can be taken away from you at any time. Your craft never can.
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Okay, well, we're in a moment where we are at least getting the message from culture that technology is even coming for craft. Technology may be able to write that article. And here as I listen to you talk about craft, I also can feel the love of craft in it that you're asking us to actually go out and look for not just something that the world needs, but something that the world needs that we uniquely feel called to do. Should we also be worried that it is not something that technology can take from us?
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So we don't know what's going to happen with AI? Right. Like I read the stories every day and experts are fighting with each other. Like it's kind of fascinating, right? There's a group that thinks it's a revolution, there's a group that thinks it's a red herring. A bunch of people seem like very sure of themselves in terms of what's going to happen. I think we don't know. I think it's way too early to tell. But certain crafts can never be replaced by AI, Right? I mean, could AI ever replace the craft of a really good therapist leading somebody through something truly difficult? Would we ever entrust surgery to AI? We do part of it to robots.
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Sure.
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But like would we ever truly relinquish a surgeon's power? Every piece of AI writing I've ever read has a hollow voice that may present, sometimes presents facts, not always. When it does, does it have an author's power to grip attention? No. So I see craft as a bit of a refuge and an area of safety from AI. Not that anything is absolute and not that AI is necessarily bad. But one of the best pieces of advice I can give young people right now is learn to do something that AI can't do. Yeah. Also don't let AI determine the parameters of your relationships. Like Jesse, one thing I'm worried about is mentorship. Like I see some real threats to mentorship right now. Right. We've got the hollowing out of entry level jobs by AI, meaning that like you may just have fewer 24 year olds in the workplace to get that mentorship from older people. I see people interfacing digitally and on screens. Like we talked about these AI interviews, you know, interviewing can be a form of mentorship. Like when you and I were young in the workplace, we would walk into interviews and even if we didn't get the job, the interviewer might say, kid, let me tell you this, or let me give you some feedback on something. An AI interviewing agent is not going to do that. What I want to suggest is that we need a call to action, certainly for young people to rally, you know, to give them encouragement and backing in the face of everything they're facing. But that's really about people. You're in my age too. Like I would say, if you have 15 minutes to talk to somebody younger, if you're willing to see somebody for an informational interview, it's really a great thing to do. Right now, because young people are craving the human contact, the connection, the trust that these career conversations really can involve.
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So this makes me want to stay on the relationship for just a moment. Looked at from both sides. So a lot of what you advocate for in how to Start is it's a frank acknowledgement that these AI systems that review your resumes are less of a path to a job than they have ever been over the course of my own career. But at the same time, there is a path to the job. And often that path starts with relationships, which, by the way, is the same advice that I got in the late 90s when I went into my career. Right. And the relationships bear responsibility. And it is the responsibility of those of us who are a little bit further ahead in our careers. And by the way, I don't mean 50, I mean 25, 26. Those of us who have a foot in the door to make the time to talk to people, even if you don't know what you have to give to them. And it is similarly the opportunity of young people who don't really see a path forward to go out and forge those relationships.
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Yeah. And I really want to give people courage about forcing those relationships, because it's hard. Like, it's daunting when you're young to do cold contact, to reach out to people, to use LinkedIn or another advice to, you know, write a. Like, writing a letter asking for something is hard. Nobody likes to be a supplicant. But you and I are journalists, so we can help these young people, Jesse, because we have, like, contacted everybody and anybody over the years. Right. We are specialists in the art of the cold email. And so I want to give people confidence that they can write really great messages, human messages that will cut through, that will appeal to people, and that they can start to forge these relationships. Relationships. They create a kind of back door to jobs. You know, what's happening now, as you know, is that employers are totally overwhelmed with resumes because technology makes it easier to apply for jobs. So even as we, like, might cast some blame on employers, saying, like, why are you using AI to do interviews? That's pretty dehumanizing. The truth is, there's a sympathetic reason, which is they are overwhelmed.
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Totally overwhelmed. They are.
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They are. They're saying to themselves, how can I distinguish between a thousand candidates? And also, Brandon Grimet, who's sort of the head career counselor at Emory, just told me this the other day, and I thought it was so smart. He said AI is having a homogenizing effect on Candidates because there are kind of certain goals. You have to hit certain keywords. So everybody starts putting in the same keywords and everybody looks alike. The things that are really unique about you can get lost. And so the play now is to, you know, respect the technological front door. Obviously everybody has to go through those steps. But to find as many back doors as you can in terms of connecting with the real people who are hiring, forging some sort of human relationship that will be a contrast with all the technology. And then the golden thing you can do is try to get some real intel on the job that goes beyond the job.
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You say as if it's an easy thing to do, just reach out and make connections. I as a 20 year old look out and I don't even know what I want to do. I don't even know what these jobs are. Why would so and so want to talk to me? And what would I even have to say to them? I feel like it is a useful thing to remind our audience that you don't have to be contacting somebody in search of an opportunity. In fact, that might be the worst way to begin contact with someone. That your goal should probably be to begin to build relationships so that people can show you where opportunity is. And that a better first question might be, do you have 15 minutes to spend with me to tell me how you got to where you are? That still feels like a very hard thing to ask when you haven't done it before.
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Yes, but that's why I want to encourage people. Because I am a reporter who calls people out of the blue all the time and I get rejected. I'm 50 years old. I have been doing this a very long time. It is still painful when somebody doesn't return an email or even slams down the phone on me. And yet it is part of my job and it is part of working and it is part of being human. And the thing I can can tell you is that it gets much, much, much, much easier with practice.
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It does, it absolutely does. And by the way, you're planting seeds and then eventually the seeds do start to grow. You might have a dozen meetings in July and all of August and all of September and all of October may go by and you think, oh, it was worth nothing. And then you receive a note in November because things take time to play out. And so it's important too that I think that like we think about how to help the young people in our lives approach these conversations not just as one offs, but as continually planting, seeding and growing a Garden of relationships so that something pays off well.
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Also because it's such a job, a hard job market. And because. Listen, Jesse, there really are stories right now of students who have done everything right and yet they can't get a job. They've applied for 400 jobs and they're barely getting a bite. And because it's such a depersonalized atmosphere, barely even getting engagement. So what I want for those people are two things. First of all, to hold onto some sense of aspiration about work. Right? Like, because the. The problem is not them. The problem is structural with the job market. I don't want them to lose the ideal that work can be fulfilling and satisfying and remunerative and the source of some of your closest relationships and all of that great stuff. I want to show them that that is how work is supposed to be and that they can still reach for it, even if it's not immediately attainable. And then the other thing is, I just want to be cheering them on as they do it. I don't know who's going to get back to them. I don't know when they'll eventually land a job or whether they'll have to settle. But I want them to feel a sense of good job on the trying. You know, I recently asked a bunch of students to kind of characterize finding a job, looking for a job in 2026. For me, it was so remarkable. Jesse, they all used the same word. They all used the word lonely. It's lonely. It's lonely.
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So many things are lonely right now.
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Exactly.
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And certainly finding a job has to be among the loneliest because we have so much pressure, so much pressure that's perceived and that's fabricated around it. And you're right, you are asking, we are asking young people to advance their careers within a structural issue that they cannot solve alone. The structural issue will play out the way that it does, and young people's careers will grow the way that they will. But they're not going to be able to just fix this on their own.
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And yet I don't want them to lose that ideal of what work can be. We need it. We need. We need. They need it. They need it for themselves. Like, listen, maybe there's somebody out there who's a really happy person despite being miserable at work. I have never met anybody like that. For most of us, being reasonably satisfied at work is a criteria for overall life satisfaction. But then the other thing is, we need it collectively. Like, society is not gonna move forward through anybod. Staying home and Watching Netflix, Right? No disrespect to Netflix, but work is our collective endeavor, whether it's new medicines or social progress or helping other people or founding businesses that meet really important needs or supplying information as journalists do. Work is how collectively, it's one of the main avenues through which collectively, we try to make a better life together. And so those are the stakes for me. I mean, that's why I was getting up at, you know, six in the morning to write this book before my day job. Because I felt like this idea of what work can be is. It's essential to all of our well being, individually and collectively.
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I could not agree more with that. And I think that if you are looking out at a broken system and experiencing rejection, one thing that our culture shows you is quick wins.
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Right?
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You see the person on Instagram who nailed it. You see the cryptocurrency bet that paid off. You see influencer Silicon Valley made a million dollars off that company in like two weeks. And you think, well, none of this traditional stuff is working. Like, what's my play here? What's my fast path? And I think that that's some dangerous thinking too. And one thing that I appreciate that you highlight is. But what is not specific to this moment, but actually just historically, a fact of the beginning of one's career is that it's usually pretty messy.
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It's usually pretty messy. And also careers are often built like great happiness and meaning, and success is often built on a foundation of work that is repetitive or low paid or unglamorous. Right. Or that doesn't seem to be yielding. One of the people I spoke to for the book is this marvelously successful restaurateur named Arjav Ezekiel. It was through like a decade of being a waiter in restaurants. Right. And the wiping of tables and the pouring of wine and the kind of psychology of watching customers and watching what they order. The word he used was wraps. He said, I just did the reps again and again and again. And he began to understand in his bones what a restaurant is and how it works. And that totally became the platform for the massive success.
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I love the Arjun story. I love the Arjun story. The other thing that I love about it is that it originated from a constraint.
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Yeah.
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That he, because of a citizenship issue, didn't have access to some of the paths that one might look at as more traditionally successful. And he had to find his own way. And I think too that at the beginning of one's career, one looks at one's constraints as weights to carry I mean, for me, it was. I came out of school with tremendous student loan, and that was a huge constraint for me. But much later, when we look back, we often see those constraints. If we're able to work with them, it's not always the case. But if we are, we also often able to see them as the gifts they are.
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I think the biggest example of what you're talking about is the constraint of this time. If we look at what's going on right now, right, We've got political strife in this country, we've got violence, we have a pretty depressing job picture. We have technological transformation that is making us all feel upside down. Those are massive constraints. And yet we know from history that we may look back at this time and really see wellsprings of opportunity. And because things are so dark and because there are all these negative news articles, I don't want young people to fail to see the massive opportunities that this moment represents. Because everything is up for grabs now. Like, what is a law firm? What is the relationship between humans and machines? What is our relationship to our government? Like these questions, what is public health? You know, these questions all need to be revisited kind of from the ground up. And that means that the people who figure out how to take advantage of this moment are going to be very successful.
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I think that's right. And that brings us back to kind of where you begin, which is that in order to be able to realize that success, we need both hope and imagination. We cannot create anything that we cannot imagine. And so while we are grounded in the kind of cynicism that it is too easy to conjure, we don't even have the tools to stoke our imagination to the wonder of what the future can be.
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Yeah. And what I would ask if you are under 30 and you are feeling dejected about the job market, which is a rational response. And if you are listening to this, I would probe you and say, is the cynicism you feel a little bit of self protection? Right. We're all afraid of failure.
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We're all afraid of failure.
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And I talk to college students now who tell me how terrible everything is, and I listen to them and I'm like, this is a kind of insulation against trying. You're not wrong. I get what you're saying. But if I feel underneath the surface for it, it's a way of protecting yourself against your fear of failure.
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Yeah, that's so true. That was bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jodi Kanter. You can find her book, how to Start wherever books are sold. I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is hello Monday. Thanks for joining us. I'll see you next week. Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Ava Ahmad Beggi, Rachel Karp and Adam Yates. Sarah Storm is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Assaf Gidron. The show is mixed by Tim Boland. Our theme music was composed just for us by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Michaela Greer is a friend of the show forever, as is Victoria Taylor. Kyle Ranson Walsh is editor at large of Editorial Graphics. Dave Pond is head of production and creative operations. Courtney Koop is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. I'm Jesse Hempel. This is hello Monday. See you next week.