“If you want to take the time to really understand every human being you’re working with — that takes more time. And time is money. And that’s inherently anti-capitalistic.”
– Meg Rye
Hiring is a power system. Most people on both sides of it (candidates and companies alike) have just accepted that as a fact of life.
Meg Rye hasn’t.
Meg is the founder of Good Maven, a design recruitment and career coaching business built on a pretty radical premise: that recruiters can function as guardians rather than brokers. That the job isn’t to scoot humans through a pipeline as efficiently as possible; it’s to understand what each person actually needs, and make connections that honor that.
In this conversation, we get into the mechanics of what that looks like in practice: how Good Maven approaches underrepresented talent, why diverse pipelines don’t happen by accident, and what it actually takes to redesign hiring around care rather than conversion.
We also go deep on the structural side — B Corp certification, Employee Ownership Trusts, EMI shares — because Meg is building the values into the bones of the business itself, not just the pitch deck. (Janel will be the first to admit this part of the conversation made her head spin a little. Anna loved every second of it.)
We explore:
- Why “there just aren’t enough qualified candidates” is a load of hooey… and what actually widens the funnel
- What consent-based recruiting looks like in practice, from the first conversation to the final offer
- How to balance meaning and mortgage in a job market that’s genuinely tough right now
- The structural scaffolding Meg is building at Good Maven: B Corp, EOTs, and why she’s thinking about exit strategy before she’s anywhere near exit
- Why the next generation of recruiters needs real mentorship, not just AI shortcuts
Action items:
- Think about the last time you made a career decision under pressure. Who or what was creating that pressure?
- Where in your business are you moving humans through a pipeline rather than actually meeting them where they are?
- Is work at the center of your value system? Should it be? What would change if it weren’t?
Listen anywhere podcasts roost (except Spotify).
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mBfJ3tii6lk
Learn more about Good Maven: https://goodmaven.com/
Follow Meg Rye on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megrye/
Read the Good Maven Substack: https://goodmaven.substack.com/
Subscribe for easy access to transcripts, show notes, our secret insider thoughts on the interviews… and the occasional goof reel.
Read the raw transcript:
[00:00:10] Anna: Welcome to Flying the Coop, a podcast about rethinking how business works and who it should work for.
[00:00:17] Janel: We are Janel and Anna, small business owners learning in public as we turn our company, Strange Birds, into a worker owned co op. Today we are interviewing Meg Rye, founder of Good Maven, a people first design, recruitment and career coaching business that is reshaping what ethical hiring can look like in practice. Meg and I overlapped years ago at Meta, back when she was scaling global design teams across multiple countries and charming the bejesus out of everyone lucky enough to get to know her. But what’s been even more surreal here, Flannery will get you everywhere. What’s been really special for me is getting to know her after that chapter. Strange Birds has been on and off collaborating with Meg’s team as she’s brought Good Maven to to life over the last several years, driven by a vision that she’s been shaping over her more than 20 years in design recruitment.
[00:01:07] Anna: Running her own business has given Meg the freedom to be bolder about the kind of work she believes in. Things like treating recruitment as a practice of care and building hiring systems that genuinely widen access for underrepresented designers. What we particularly love about Meg’s work is that it lives at the intersection of systems and humanity. She gets people hired, which is a big deal in of itself. Plus she’s interrogating how hiring itself shapes careers, opportunities, wellbeing, and the future of work.
[00:01:37] Janel: Yes. So to kick us off and right on into it, Meg, like I said, you’ve been in recruitment for over two decades now across huge tech companies, fast scaling product teams, and now you’re a founder building something that’s entirely your own.
You have found success in so many different forms, no matter what yardstick you’re using. So then, what is your vision for Good Maven?
[00:01:56] Meg: Oh, thank you for having me. And thank you for asking.
So I would say part of my vision for Good Maven is how can we do things a little bit differently within the recruitment and hiring landscape.
I feel like recruiters so often burn out in their jobs, whether it’s in house agency, and they’re targeted with targets that may sometimes seem unrealistic.
And how might we look at that? In a completely different way. And I think what I’ve done as I started my own company about a year and a half ago when I left Facebook, Meta is really brought forward a lot of the work that I did earlier in my career in cultural not for profits in the States.
Where we are in our journey is Very early days. We’re about a year and a half in and we are on our way towards becoming B Sort B Corp certified, which is an interesting one because I don’t know that I think it’s a perfect model, but I think it is a good model and I think some of the things that are good about it is that they have ways to measure if you’re being successful in having the impact that you’re looking to make. And I think where we’re a little bit different than other recruitment companies who have taken the B Corp route is they usually do the environmental impact route, which quite honestly I feel like that’s a bit of a vanity metric. Most recruitment companies are a hundred percent remote or they have a very small footprint and they’re mostly working online. Now that may change a little bit with AI, but I just see the nature of hiring and working with human beings and changes in their lives. That the social impact route through B Corp is so much more meaningful and so much more of an opportunity for us to actually make change. So we are just in the beginning of our journey towards becoming certified towards B Corp and then my longer term goal potentially. We’re toying with the idea of an employee ownership trust in the future. So I guess I’m also really curious to learn more about your adventures as you’re working in the co op space because I feel like maybe EOT is a sub genre of Co op or like a brethren of Co op.
[00:04:12] Anna: EOT Employee Ownership Trust. If you could give the listeners a brief, if it’s not too much to ask, what is it? What does mean eot?
[00:04:22] Meg: I’ll do my best. I’m still learning myself. But I think again when I was looking at how can we take the business and have this like double bottom line and also have a way that recruiters could work humanely. Employee ownership trusts are like examples would be John Lewis Partners or Riverford Organics where the employees actually own the business. So let’s say for example whatever the income is that comes in at the end of a year, the profits at the end of the year, that’s distributed among the employees and there can be different classes of shares and, and the employees are really empowered to be a part of the decision making process as to the future of the business and things like that.
So where, where EOT is right now in the UK world specifically is I feel like it’s mostly being used as a tax advantageous exit strategy for owners which hey, that’s great. But I think what we’re trying to do is how do we build the bridge between where we are today B Corp status and just creating a values based business and starting to educate employees earlier on in the process. What does it mean to run the business? Where is the money going? Where is it coming in? What decisions do we want to make together and transparently and building that bridge to the future. Yes, I would like to at some point in my career retire. And so there is a tax advantageous part of that because I think only 50% of an EOT is charged capital gains tax.
So I’m looking at how do we pull this all forward. And so EMI shares I think is one of the ways that I’m we’re considering how can we reward employees in a way that might benefit them not only today but like in the future.
[00:06:02] Anna: I’ve never heard of employee ownership Trust. This is a new one. I don’t know if that exists in the us. It probably does. There’s so many different ways to run a business over here. So from what I’m hearing, how this employee ownership trust would work is there’s still an owner. Right. You or maybe there’s a co owner and the employees have more power than in typical company structures. Correct. Where they have more decision making power. They have some literal skin in the game because they get access to profits from the business in a way that traditional models they wouldn’t have access to that unless the boss is a benevolent boss and is you get a Christmas bonus, whatever. Is that about right?
[00:06:46] Meg: Yeah. So I think in its entirety an employee ownership trust is fully employee owned. So there may not be a separate owner like like myself in this case. The way that it works right now is we’re a private company and I own the shares in the company.
So if we were to move to an employee ownership trust, think of it like a sliding scale. You can take any percentage of the company and make it employ employee owned and then the that percentage of the company, the profits are distributed to people within to employees within the company. And it can be adjusted based on the type of employee, whether they’re freelance or full time or things like that.
So some people have exited and given 50% of the company to the employees and kept 50%.
[00:07:35] Anna: I think when people hear all of These terms like ESOPs and EOTs, don’t you have to have a lot of employees? How big is the company now?
[00:07:42] Meg: So we have two full time employees that are recruiters and we have two freelance design coach partners.
We have a bunch of awesome freelance partners like yourself, strange birds and on, on the social media side.
And I also have a partner who is part owner in the business, so we’re still relatively small. And I think that’s. It’s interesting that you asked that question, Ana, because again, I think a lot of the work in the employee ownership trust space is like, how do we do this? Because it’s a big thing and we want to exit and make a lot of money from a tax advantageous perspective. And I’m saying, how do we turn that on its head and actually look at that from the beginning and say, how can we build the company in a way that gives employees a larger part of the profit? So we’re still at that beginning learning stage. And I feel like I’ve talked to a lot of experts across the UK who work with an employee ownership trust, and no one seems to have a model for how you can do it at these early stages.
So this kind of conversation with you all is great because I feel like we essentially are learning from each other how to maybe make the systems bend to our will.
[00:08:49] Janel: A bit like Ana is a big time geek with this kind of stuff and eats it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I am, I deal with this stuff because I must in order to be in the business in the way that I want to be in it. It’s. I think one of the reasons why we don’t see so many smaller early stage companies doing this is because it’s freaking hard to understand the Alphabet soup of acronyms, to understand all the laws around it. God knows how long it’s taken us to finally get to the point where we have papers to sign to officially reincorporate. I mean, it. Yeah, it’s an uphill battle to go against the grain, even though I think it’s.
No, that’s not true. I was about to say it’s fairly clear what is right and what is wrong. No, it’s anything but. But we, even though it’s very clear to, I think all three of us present that we want to do business in a way that aligns more with our values, it is oftentimes really difficult to figure out what that translates to in terms of exactly how do you set that up? Because it’s.
It’s what you were saying at the beginning, Meg, about setting up, like incentives for success, that that determines what shape you’re going to grow into.
And these early decisions that you make that can feel inconsequential really define, like, what direction you’re going to grow. And anyway, I don’t know. I Have a question here? I’m just commenting on how overwhelming I find it to deal with.
[00:10:15] Anna: I think I can take your statement and segue into design hiring pretty smoothly. You want me to try?
[00:10:21] Janel: Do it.
[00:10:22] Meg: Do it.
[00:10:23] Anna: So I think what I like about this conversation, because I do eat this nerdy stuff for breakfast, all this Alphabet stuff, soup. Oh, there’s all these different ways. It’s like you get a Lego set and you could follow the instructions, or you could build your own thing with the same pieces, right? And then you can teach other people how to build that same thing. That’s really cool. And it comes from a place of valuing the work that’s being done. And you work in recruiting and hiring, which is all about work, right? So it’s work, meaningful work, compensation. A lot of all of these things intertwine. So what is the relationship, in your opinion, between meaningful work and compensation? Would love a hiring expert’s opinion on this.
[00:11:15] Meg: It’s a very broad topic. And my answer to a lot of things within hiring is it depends. And it’s very specific to each individual person.
And that in itself is a bit of a, I feel, an anti capitalistic approach because if you want to take the time to really understand every human being you’re working with, what makes meaning for them, what compensation is necessary for them, and then map that to companies that can either provide that or not provide that, and being the broker between those two things, it takes more time. And time is money and time takes time from one thing means that you’re not going to accomplish the other thing more quickly. So I think creating an environment where recruiters have the time to be able to have those thoughtful conversations with candidates and really understand a little bit more about what each individual’s motivations are. So I always say when I come to a recruitment conversation with a human, with a candidate, with a designer, is, look, I may have reached out because I have an opportunity in mind, but if this is the first time we’re talking, I come to this conversation with an open mind. Maybe this job is the right thing. Maybe it matches what makes meaning for you in your life. Maybe it matches the compensation you’re looking for and maybe it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, I don’t see my job as to talk them into wanting that job. I see my job as to just listen, to take notes, and to really understand when the right thing does come along. I don’t know if that answers the question specifically enough, but that’s the way I’m oriented towards those Two topics I
[00:12:47] Janel: have a follow up thinking about the job market where it is today. Anna and I are not on the market in the sense neither of us is looking for full time position. We’re whole hog on strange birds. But a lot of my friends, a lot of the conversations I’ve been having with people out there in the ether is that times are tough to find, find meaning. So I guess from both like a company that needs to hire people perspective and from people looking for jobs, how can people approach the like, how can people balance, I guess the need to find that meaning with the need to pay the mortgage?
[00:13:20] Meg: You’re asking all the big important questions.
[00:13:23] Anna: It’s our favorite kind of question.
[00:13:27] Meg: So how can people balance the question of meaning with the question of yeah, paying the mortgage and the practical bits.
[00:13:35] Janel: Yeah, like I’m reminded of, I talk a lot about work with one of my best buds who is also a freelancer, but does it in a very different way than me, does it from a place of scarcity and just I need to take anything that comes along. And their industry is pretty rough. It’s clothing design and it like the thought of optimizing for what is meaningful to her is almost unthinkable. And here I am like sitting high and mighty and being like, oh, we’re building businesses as a container for like us as beautiful complex humans. I’m asking for your perspective as somebody who is like deeply enmeshed in the job market which like I think universally is regarded as like pretty rough right now. And what can we do to make it better?
[00:14:16] Anna: I don’t know.
[00:14:17] Meg: No, I hear that, I hear that. So I guess I’m thinking of like how to go from abstraction to specific examples. And one of the things that I’m doing right now as part of my learning journey is I’m taking classes in multicultural orientation. So how do I approach every conversation with an individual? With humility and knowing that there may be certain things that I can understand through the conversation and there may be certain things that I’m going to get wrong and just making that they know that I am open and have humility in being able to learn. There’s so many different levels that this can impact people. There’s systems, right. And like how do we recognize the systems within which this person is living? So someone who’s at risk of redundancy in the US is in a very different, maybe in a very different position than someone who is at risk of redundancy in Europe or the uk. So there, some of the factors there may Be more employee. I don’t know if safety is the right word, but more protections for employees in Europe and the UK in the US at will, employment any day can be your last day. And that also means your health insurance is out. So, like their ability to pay a mortgage. And what that means is going to be very different. How much money you have at the bank is going to be another facet. So I think, again, this is one of those things where it’s okay, we can look at the systems and acknowledge the systems, and then meeting the person where they are and saying, okay, what can we control?
What’s important to you? What, what are your requirements and how can we try to balance these things? And sometimes meaning can be found intrinsically, extrinsically. So maybe digging into meaning and understanding a little bit more about what makes meaning for them. And are there ways that we can find that outside of work? Are there ways that we can find that inside of work? And if so, how might we.
Where can we negotiate the compensation? What is the breaking point there? So, again, I think back to my it depends kind of conversation is like, how to help people balance those two things and then prioritize the things that are going to get them what they need and want as quickly as possible.
Part of the work that we also do at Good Maven is for every coaching package purchased or person hired, we donate an hour of coaching to people in the UK with refugee status. And oftentimes these are folks who are extremely competent. They may have PhDs or master’s degrees, they’re bilingual, trilingual, multilingual, so employable. But because of the relatively conservative nature of the job market and the difficulty finding a job right now, they just need a door opened for them, right? And so for them, what makes meaning is maybe having a job in society so they can start building a new life and making relationships and being supported in a way. And someone else who I might be working with wants to relocate from San Francisco to London. And for them it’s going to be maybe a very different experience, right? You have access to relocation, to visa sponsorship. And so what makes meaning for them might be more around domain expertise or something that may seem superficial to someone in a different stage of life. So I guess that’s why that’s where the specificity comes in.
[00:17:30] Anna: I love this because as I’m listening, I’ve worked with other recruiters in the past with Strange Birds and just have generally engaged with a few of them. And I think typically people hear recruiters and they think like brokers Right. Brokers jobs. What you are saying is much more recruiters as guardians or guides of helping people, like protecting the interests of the person and making sure that they’re getting what they need, whatever that is, and then also on the other end, making sure the company that maybe is hiring them is also getting what it needs.
[00:18:09] Meg: What came to my mind when you said that, Ana, is that here’s where I think coaching can actually come into the recruiting world is like, how do we treat people like adults, right? So my job is not to coerce someone into an opportunity that’s not the right thing for them. And similarly, my job is not to coerce a hiring manager to hire someone that’s not right for them. However, I can take my expertise as a coach myself. I understand the psychological underpinnings of how to support people to make decisions in their best interest. So how might I ask questions to help people get to a decision of what’s right for them and honors their values and, and honestly, just the like dollars and cents or pounds and pence of what they need to accomplish in their life. And then similarly, from the business perspective, how can I hear what it is that they really need and want? How can I push back with a, with a good attitude if I think something could potentially be adjusted or may not be realistic to achieve it in the market that they’re in? And then I, I guess I look at the broker part is, okay, keeping all the adults in their in choice.
How do we make the best introductions to do that? And I think we’re recruiting in that way.
It can take a little bit more time with each individual that you’re spending with, but the outcomes are usually much more durable because everyone’s bought in. It’s their choice. They haven’t been. Been convinced of something that they don’t actually want to do. And yeah, I think though also you have to account for that time, right? So you have to. The way that we’ve been doing it is we’re just really skilled at what we do. Like we’ve been. Everybody on our team has been doing it for 7, 10, 15, 20 years. So I think something that I’m grappling with is like, how do we bring up the next generation of design recruiters and help them find places or create places where they can work in a way that they’re not similarly having to take blood from a stone?
[00:20:05] Janel: It’s a great freaking question. I think most of us who are somewhat senior in our fields and think about AI at all are grappling with something similar because AI allows a lot of low level shortcuts. But it’s by doing the lower level building block stuff that you learn how to do the more complex things on top of it. And it’s something on my mind a lot recently. How do we bring up the next generation so that they understand the value of doing like this complex systemic work that it really it takes humans to do? That’s something that I freaking love about Good maven is how much of a hub you are for other people and how you, it feels a little bit from my perspective that the connections that you make are like very fueled on the stories that you understand about the business need and about humans that you’re recommending. And I, I, I remember in the recent project that we did together getting some design inspiration from a competitor site that was very AI based and it was like yeah sure they’re slick, but that’s not actually the niche that you’re in. You are like intrinsically human doing this very like high caliber complex storytelling human through and through work that I think is essential when if you really want to transform something like recruiting into. I forget how you put it on it like Guardians of Guardians of Care. Guardians of Guardians was a cool word, but I think to be truly ethical it takes that level of complexity and how do we bring people into it? How do we build the systems that put guardrails around people who are learning or I, yeah, I don’t have any easy answers to that, but it’s something that I think about as well.
[00:21:41] Meg: So it’s interesting talking about learning and AI and how the next generation will come up and I was just reading the other day about some studies in the States where children for the first generation are not learning as much as the generations before them because of it’s so much technology and how important it is to have that one on one human interaction and that helps us absorb information so much more. So I think look what we’re talking in a meta way about hiring and things like that. So imagine when you’re actually giving someone who has a headcount on a spreadsheet that they have to hire the opportunity to really talk through what will it be like to hire this person? How will they be supported? How will you be supported as the leader to onboard them? And we, we offer coaching for the hiring managers as well as the actual employees. And similarly for candidates or folks who coaches, we’re helping them learn in a much more one on one way. So we feel strongly that is still the best way to Learn and is one of the best ways to process the things that are important about making such a big decision as to change your job.
[00:22:50] Anna: So I love the example that you gave earlier of the. You donate an hour per. I think. Did you say an hour per coaching to a refugee organization? Correct.
[00:23:01] Meg: Yes. So for every coaching package that we sell and person that we hire, we donate an hour of coaching. I personally coach for a charity called Breaking Barriers, and they work with folks who have refugee status in the uk. So they are allowed to work in the uk, but they’re usually very underemployed.
[00:23:20] Anna: So I wanted to bring that back up because something that we really like about Good Maven is you very clearly talk and address the problem of underrepresented talent. Specifically in design spaces. They tend to be pretty white, they tend to be pretty cis, they’d be pretty heterosexual. So how.
What does it take to design hiring systems that actually widen the funnel? So the classic of there’s just not enough qualified candidates out there, which is just a load of bullshit. There’s candidates. You probably just aren’t looking in the right places. So what is Good Maven’s approach to making sure that the design world starts looking and working a bit differently?
[00:24:13] Janel: Yeah, I’m really interested in building off of what you were talking about.
How do we bring new people into the fold? Because it can’t just be me with my 20 plus years of experience experience. Like, we have to design systems that help preserve these values that we know to be super important. And maybe we don’t design the perfect system, but, like, how do we move towards that?
[00:24:30] Meg: Okay, so caveat my answer with, I myself am a white CIS woman, relatively highly educated, and I have access to lots of opportunities and networks that I might not have had access to if I was not in the identity that I have that I hold.
So that said, I’m still learning and I think that there’s a lot of things along the way that I’ve picked up, some things that I’ve messed up and some things that I hold true and use with all of our clients. So if I think of some of the practical bits. So when it comes to hiring, again, that time factor is so important. How do we take time to look beyond our own superficial pools of connections to really intentionally partner with folks of other backgrounds? So for myself, that might be people from Muslim backgrounds, people who are Orthodox, Jewish people who are lgbtqia, and. And then also, how can I bring along the community with sharing this information in our blogs, for example? So it’s not as simple as saying we would like to hire people from LGBTQIA backgrounds because in some places it’s not safe or someone might not feel comfortable outing themselves. And so how do we create information in a transparent way that people can choose? Right. So I think back to that. Back to the saying that everyone’s an adult and we meet people where they are and understand what it is they need and how can we help them get to where they’re going. How this might specifically manifest when we’re working with clients is we do research anytime before we take on a new client, and we will look to understand what does the information out there tell us about how they treat LGBTQIA plus black desis people from underrepresented backgrounds. And then I will ask those questions of a hiring manager. Right. So you could ask questions around what the makeup is of your team, how do you support people who come in of a different background and make sure that they’re able to work well within the team, Things like that. And then I guess from the candidate side, similarly, we’ll ask questions or receive information about people’s identities as they share it with us and do our very best to just answer honestly what these environments will be like, because again, it’s up to them to decide, not us, to be like the values police and decide what is the best fit for someone. I feel like I’m going off on a tangent.
[00:27:03] Janel: Not at all. Like, one of my favorite things about you specifically and about Good Maven is that there are no easy answers. Really appreciate that you don’t try to give one I something.
[00:27:15] Meg: You’re asking big questions. You’re asking big questions. Yeah.
I feel like we could talk about each of these questions for a couple hours. So.
[00:27:22] Janel: Yes.
[00:27:22] Meg: Yeah. And also I’d like to share, like, specific examples because otherwise we can end up talking a lot in, like, the. This values space of just. We all want to do the right thing, but what does it look like in practicality?
Do you have an example, an example of hiring people from underrepresented backgrounds, specifically,
[00:27:41] Janel: maybe some of the decisions that had to be made? Yeah, sure.
[00:27:45] Meg: So I think myself and the recruitment team, it is very natural for us on a daily basis to be talking about the diversity of our pipelines. Right. And that diversity could be our people from various educational backgrounds. We don’t want to just, for example, hire Americans into big tech companies in Europe. Right. We want to also hire people who are from the countries that we’re hiring into.
And we might look at the. The makeup of our pipelines. And this is actually something that we’re doing right now. We’re working with Zoe, our, our freelance partner to make sure that we have self identifying options within our recruitment systems so the people that we’re recruiting can say to us can self identify and say I’m neurodiverse or I’m black, I’m queer. And how we can make sure that we’re doing a good job supporting people and getting people into the hiring process, but in the interim, it’s like, how do we just talk as a team on a constant basis and say have we partnered with Muslim makers on this particular requisition or have we looked in Queer Designers Club or something like that? So you can do very practical things on a daily basis. Then I think the key thing that we’re looking to do next is like how do you have the metrics to actually measure if what you’re doing is having an impact?
[00:29:03] Anna: I’m so glad that you said yes to coming onto our humble little show. You are giving a perspective that we haven’t had yet. Not just teaching us a new acronym of eot, but also thinking about.
This podcast is thinking about work and you are thinking about a very particular column of work, which is the job, finding the job, staying in the job, making sure people are happy in the job and everything that happens around it.
I guess if, if you have any closing thoughts that you would love to share, let’s say to someone who’s listening that is feeling despondent about the current climate. Maybe they’re looking for a job or they have a job and it’s sucking the soul out of them, but they needed to pay the mortgage or they are trying to hire someone and it just feels so hard to do there. A little ra. You got this speech that you want to give.
[00:30:09] Meg: I think you’re speaking for most people, right? I think this is the most common question that I have in that I have with my clients right now. Is it just me or is it that tough out there? And so I think part of my job is just to validate and say, yes, it is tough.
And then to say, okay, and what do we want to do about it? So what we can do about it is we can only control the things that we can control. We can’t make the market completely different, but we can respond to it and say, I’m going to show up with a differentiated narrative about myself that makes it really clear and easy for people to understand what they’re getting getting when they hire me, that I’M going to have really clearly articulated materials to be able to, you know, smash the interview, that sort of thing.
And I think that’s the practical bits, right? And then you have the psychological piece, right. So how do we take care of ourselves when we’re in a period of time that there’s a lot of trauma happening just outside of maybe our own doors every day?
And then how do we cope with that when we have to deal with the practicalities of finding work and things like that?
And sometimes that may mean, and this may sound like not what you’d expect to hear from a recruiter, but sometimes that may mean like the job is not going to be the thing that’s going to give you the joy. There’s an idealized scenario where maybe we can find the job that is the perfect job and also pays us really well. And sometimes maybe the perfect job is something that lets us come home and be with our kids at 5pm or where we don’t have a toxic manager and we can actually, I don’t know, go for a run on our workplace on our lunch hour or where we’re just paid well enough.
So I guess I would just encourage people to maybe think about centering work less in, in their value system and look at it more as a lever to get what you really want out of your life. But I guess if everybody did that, I work myself out of a job, that’s okay, then I’d get a different job.
[00:32:14] Anna: If you can. Mic drop man. That was a mic drop. Way to close this interview out. God, thank you so much for being on and up. Your wisdom and words of encouragement and practical advice at the very end and
[00:32:30] Janel: throughout as we close. Is there anything that you’d like to direct our listeners to too? If they want to find out more about Good Maven or maybe read some
[00:32:37] Meg: more from you, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I’m Meg Rye. I look to do a lot of posting around how to treat designers as humans, not capital and how to build fairer hiring systems for both companies and candidates. And you can also check out our website@goodmaven.com I love it.
[00:32:55] Anna: Cool.
[00:32:55] Janel: Thank you. This is amazing.
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