2024 is turning into one heck of a year for candidates interviewing for quantitative positions:
You see a job and decide to apply for it.
You get ghosted - no rejection or follow-up to the interview.
Or maybe you land the interview, but the employer drags out the process, only to make offers and then rescind them - or they never really had the role to begin with.
While we can't control what the world does, we can control how we respond.
Glass half full: Use each experience to refine your understanding of whether the role is a good fit for you to better assess future opportunities.
Let me explain.
The Ikigai Method: What it Does (and Doesn't Do)
Ikigai translates as "Reason to Live" in Japanese, and is method that helps people discover their purpose, passions and aspirations.
The approach centers on finding the balance among
What you LOVE
What you are GOOD AT
What the world NEEDS
What you can be PAID FOR
One usually begins be reflecting on the four quadrants, experimenting with different activities, seeking feedback, and aligning your actions with your insights.
Below, we've created one representative of our clients at Quant Coaching.
What it Does: Helps align your actions with your understanding of yourself.
What it Doesn't: Understand trade-offs and align with your livelihood to realize your values.
The Quant Approach I : Understanding Trade-offs
Your Standard Ikigai represents the core categories of fulfillment and lays out how they overlap to represent our different facets in life.
In many client meetings though, I ask:
How much do you love learning new technologies relative to analyzing data trends?
The simplest way to address this is to add a score to each item on scale from 1 - 10: the higher the number, the more strongly you feel about how much it matters to you.
We've summarized all this in Your Quant Ikigai in the above Venn Diagram. In addition to what matters to you, we score each item in "What You Love" as:
Problem-Solving Challenges: 10
Learning New Technologies: 8
Building Innovative Products: 5
Analyzing Data Trends: 7
Collaborating on Projects: 3
This simple addition to the Ikigai has a number of profound realizations: it allows us to compute each Ikigai category's (average) score and rank them.
In our example,
LOVE (6.6) = PAID FOR (6.6) < GOOD AT (6.8) < NEEDS (8)
Put another way: doing what you LOVE matters just as much as what you get PAID to do, but less than doing what you're GOOD AT or what the world NEEDS.
We can go further, and compute the (average) score for each overlapping meta-category and rank them.
PASSION (6.7) = PROFESSION (6.7) < MISSION (7.3) = VOCATION (7.3)
Put another way: your PASSION matters just as much as your PROFESSION, but less than your MISSION or your VOCATION.
This is already super useful to many clients as it helps clarify their motivations during the job search and their trade-offs.
The Quant Approach II: Goodness-of-Fit
So far so good - Your Quant Ikigai not only lays out what's important to you, but allows you to understand their trade-offs.
Now comes the next obstacle: how can you realize this meaning with your employer so it's mutually beneficial? This is often referred to as Goodness-of-Fit, and it's amazing how much this gets thrown around during the hiring process (and how much it's used to justify pretty much anything).
At Quant Coaching: we quantify what Goodness-of-Fit means.
This is Your Realized Quant Ikigai.
It's the same as the Your Quant Ikigai earlier, but is adapted to measure alignment between both you and your potential employer, It has 2 distinguishing features:
Each Ikigai Category has an (equal) weighting of 25%,
For each of your items and scores, you now have a percentage of time you'll be able to do it at your employer. You can obtain these estimates in the critical 5-10 minutes at the end of each interview where you can ask the interviewer questions.
We now employ weighted averages instead of simple averages to obtain:
LOVE = PAID FOR < GOOD AT < NEEDS
--> PAID FOR < LOVE < NEEDS < GOOD AT
PASSION = PROFESSION < MISSION = VOCATION
--> VOCATION < PROFESSION < MISSION < PASSION
How do we interpret these results?
This job will prioritize your PASSION over your MISSION, and PROFESSION over VOCATION by prioritizing what you're GOOD AT over what the world NEEDS. Are you ok with that?
The Quant Approach III: Adverse Selection & Red Flags
How many times have you heard of a friend accept that job offer only to find out that the manager is a nightmare? Or maybe their offer got rescinded, but they're a glutton for punishment, applied to the company again, got an offer, only to be laid off later?
This is adverse selection, where sellers have information that buyers don't have.
Often you can try and avoid this be asking around your professional network (talk to people that have left the company / group !), but no matter how hard you try, there will always be an element of it.
So how can we adjust our Realized Quant Ikigai to reflect if this is a job we really want to take?
We accommodate this by a separate category we call Red Flags. In our example:
Each red flag you encounter has a score across employers, and are scored to reflect how much they matter to you. Maybe you're indifferent to how long the hiring process is taking, or maybe you're not. In the 2024 quant market, this matters a lot to candidates, so it's a 10.
Each red flag has a weight that reflects how much of a problem this is with this potential employer. In our example, this particular employer has dragged out the hiring process and hasn't kept the candidate in the loop timely, so has been given 50/50 weights.
Red flags carry a weight of 10%, so that every red flag you feel takes away 10% from the Goodness-of-Fit. A 0% means you'd take an offer regardless of any red flags. A 100% means any red flags you notice detract from the appeal of the job point-for-point.
Putting this altogether: we get an adversely-selected goodness-of-fit score of 6.675 vs the original goodness-of-fit score of 7.675. For a single employer, this doesn't mean much, but it's very useful for comparing different employers...
The Quant Approach IV: Comparing Different Roles
Once we have Realized Value for an Employer, we can now use it to compare against another employer.
In the beginning I mentioned how crucial it is to view the glass half full in 2024. You might have been through dozens of interviews already, but using this approach, you can fill out Realized Value Ikigai for each one and rank different employers to see if they were a good fit for you. Ideally, when you do accept a role, you should be accepting one with the highest Realized Value from a pool of data you can draw on.
I've concluded this section with a representative Realized Value Ikigai from our clients at Quant Coaching from offers they ended up accepting. Notice the comparison of it versus the one formed from their prior experiences, and how it really helps clarify why they accepted the role they did.
Conclusion
By quantifying your preferences and comparing them with an employer's requirements, you can more objectively determine which roles are a good fit for you. This method allows you to take control of your job search process, refine your understanding of what you truly want, and make informed decisions.
Remember, while you can't control the job market, you can control how you approach it.
Use each experience to learn more about yourself and to refine your search for your ideal role.
Create your Realized Value Ikigai to discover what really matters to you.
Use our experience helping dozens of candidates over hundreds of interview loops to estimate your goodness-of-fit and reduce reduce adverse selection.
Want more?
Learn how Roth IRAs and Mega Backdoor Roth IRAs could generate millions tax-free in your post-tax retirement strategies !
Estimate how much you could have in retirement using Pre-Tax Strategies that could reduce your taxes now and nab you millions at retirement.
Subscribe to our Substack page to read and keep up-to-date on upcoming strategies.
Comments