Fighting the Fear of a Changing Job Market

A three-session seminar led by adjunct professor Kevin Murnane gave MEM students a new approach to igniting their career amidst a sea of layoffs and belt-tightening.

As news of mass layoffs in the tech sector stoked fear last fall in soon-to-be graduates, a three-part seminar aimed to show students how to launch their careers in a challenging job market.  

The “Practical Job Search Tools for Challenging Times” seminar was offered to students in Northwestern's Master of Engineering Management (MEM) program and select students in the Kellogg School of Management. It was led by Kevin Murnane, an adjunct professor of leadership with more than two decades of experience coaching executives in change management and human resources.  

Kevin MurnaneThe goal was to help students reduce the fear by providing a systematic, scientific approach to finding a job in a market now far less employee-friendly than even a year ago.   

More than 90,000 workers in the U.S. tech sector were laid off in 2022.  

“I was hearing from students everyday, ‘We need to get a job. We need to have better tools. Can you help us?” Murnane said. “Day after day, you’d hear about another large technology company going through a layoff, so the seminars were really to provide practical tools and appropriately reduce the fears.”  

Each session added a new tool, skill, or focus for students to leverage as they search for a job. The first focused on an overall model to ensure students search for the type of job that fits who each is as a person and a professional. It centered around the acronym DADE. 

  • Define who you are and your strengths.  
  • Align your search by creating a statement about who you are based on those strengths.  
  • Design a process based on that statement and those strengths to search for the type of job that you actually want.  
  • Execute your search and find that job.  

The second session featured Jamie Winter, who led a team of talent acquisition consultants that helped discover flaws in Google’s hiring processes. The company was asking candidates questions that weren't predicting who would make a successful Google employee.  

The process Winter and his team implemented in its place at Google was shared with students in the MEM seminar. The lesson — based on the more predictive questions Google asks in interviews today — showed how candidates can determine how their responses showcase their true talents to prospective employers.   

“It’s basically reverse-engineering a job interview,” Murnane said.  

The third session focused on how students should go about researching companies and executing their search plan to find the job they want. Much of the session focused on how students can effectively leverage their networks, including those they have met while in the MEM program and those they know from previous jobs.  

All three sessions addressed students’ mental health and worry from the tightening job market. That worry is especially pronounced in international students, whose ability to stay in the United States after graduation is linked to finding a job within a certain amount of time.  

Murnane said the series went well and that it accomplished its mission of helping students lessen the fear while giving them actionable skills to improve the efficiency of their job search.   

“You’re going to be a little overwhelmed by this job market and by this entire global change post-COVID, because we’re all a little afraid,” Murnane said. “The main takeaway is that this is a great practice of the muscle of resilience. Be afraid, yes, but take the right action anyway.”  

McCormick News Article