The Washington Monument
You’re about to graduate, you’re looking for a job in DC, and you’re having a tough time. You’re applying for job after job and getting few responses. What’s going on here?
While you face a lot of barriers to finding an entry-level job in DC, a primary one is what I call the “Who Sent You?” ethic.
Although it took place in Chicago, a story by former federal judge and law professor Abner Mikva perfectly demonstrates this ethic. As a young man, Mikva was trying to get a job working for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. When asked by a campaign manager "Who sent you?," Mikva replied, "Nobody sent me." The manager supposedly then put his cigar back in his mouth and said: "We don't want nobody that nobody sent."
What underlies this “Who sent you?” ethic?
Competition: For entry-level jobs, DC is the ultimate buyer’s market. If you’re a hiring manager in DC, you have a virtually unlimited pool of bright, eager, and well-qualified applicants who could do the job. In a previous post, I discussed the intense competition for jobs in DC. If you’re looking to be a Foreign Service officer in the State Department, for example, you’ve got a 1 to 2% chance in any particular year.
A recent search of Idealist.org, for another example, listed 711 jobs in DC, out of 4,555 jobs posted – about 15.6% of the total. Unfortunately, at the time, there were 789,941 registered Idealist.org members. If you assume that same 15.6% of the registered users are looking for work in DC – that leaves 123,230 people in DC – or 173 people per job listing. And that’s just one online job site – employers will typically post jobs to multiple sites, each of which has its own set of users. This is of course rough and inexact math – but the larger point is that a job posted online that looks good to you looks good to lots and lots and lots of other people just like you.
When you have an unlimited pool of applicants, ideally, you want to hire someone you know and trust. Lacking that, you want to hire someone who has worked for someone you know and trust.
Chemistry: Putting aside federal agencies, many DC workplaces are small, and office chemistry matters. The last thing a hiring manager wants is to bring in a disruptive employee, or someone who can’t pull their weight. I’ve often heard screening interviews called “head checks” – as in, ensuring that the candidate doesn’t have “two heads.” A candidate who is “sent” by someone brings with him or her a comfort level that a candidate off the street cannot.
Who you know: Most importantly, what you probably don’t realize about DC is that it’s actually quite a small town. It’s an extremely valuable asset in DC to know lots of “inside” information – i.e. gossip. People are paid handsomely for the unpublished information they glean about the legislative and rulemaking functions of the federal government. How do they find this information? By knowing people, of course.
You've certainly heard the old adage -- "It's not what you know, but who you know, that counts."
It’s not hard to see that in a city where it seems that everyone knows everyone, a hiring manager would want to hire someone they know – or at least – who comes recommended from a trusted source.
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