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#199 - Your Career Has No Comms Team

I joined Uber in February, 2013, just before we launched in Singapore.

One day during my first month, I parked myself at a cafe and pitched Uber back-to-back, for hours. I wasn't interviewing, I was just getting in front of people we knew were talented, to spread the word: "We're here, we're hiring."

The problem was, no one knew what the heck Uber was. None of them had ever taken a ride with an app before.

By mid-afternoon, I was four coffees deep. It had been six meetings of being told some version of, "Yeah, cool, that'll never work in Singapore". In my last one, I explained Uber to a McKinsey consultant, who nodded along as I went.

Then a sheepish grin slid across his face, and he said:

To be fair, we had no consumer brand in Asia. Nobody in Singapore, Taipei, Manila, or Seoul knew who we were. The whole concept of ride-sharing was foreign.

That meant recruiting was hand-to-hand combat: a non-stop stream of coffees and calls, needing to explain what Uber was before we could get to the role, the culture, or the opportunity.

As the person tasked with building teams in these cities, this was a problem. Needing to start from scratch every time was draining and inefficient.

Dilution

The issue wasn't just a lack of awareness in the market. It was us. Our six-person team in Singapore was pitching Uber -- all day, every day -- in six different ways.

For some of us, Uber was a replacement for taxis. For others, it was a limo service. A transportation company. A data platform. A mobile app. A luxury brand. A payments play.

I'd sit in the office and listen to our launcher pitch Uber to a candidate, then our GM give a press interview, then our community lead sell a promo to a nightclub. It was all over the place, and none sounded like my pitch.

So hiring suffered. The deeper we got, the more I realized the actual problem was our messaging. By pitching Uber six ways from Sunday, we were diluting our impact.

The Singapore talent market -- any talent market, really -- is much smaller than you think. Pumping inconsistent, misaligned messages into it was just sowing noise and confusion.

But the biggest problem of all was: our message could not travel.

The message has to travel

What we're actually trying to do when we communicate about ourselves -- our work, our company, our career -- is get to people we'll never meet. Whether online or offline, we want reach and leverage. We want opportunity to find us.

In last week's issue on the math of career luck, I featured Jason Roberts' formula for luck surface area. It says your luck is a function of doing interesting work and telling people about it:

But there was another line in the same issue I want to come back to:

That word, "clearly", was doing an awful lot of work. Because it's not enough to tell.
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​You have to tell clearly enough that someone else can tell for you.

Most of us neglect that clarity. Either because we think our work should speak for itself. Or because we think our brands and credentials will do the trick. Or because we underestimate the amount of noise we face.

But the quality and clarity of our message matters -- because the message is what travels.

And how far it travels is our leverage. So we have to optimize for how cleanly it lands, how easily it's understood, and how readily it can be repeated.

At Uber, we were "telling" 'til we were blue in the face. But our message was poor. Scattered, inconsistent, uninspiring, and unclear.

LinkedIn, networking, job boards, headhunters -- who cares what hiring channels you use if your message stinks? Channels don't fix that.

Our message couldn't travel within our talent market, so we had no hiring leverage. And sharpening my own pitch, or taking more coffees wasn't going to help.

Your career has no comms team

Careers, job searches, and startups all unfold the same way: unpredictably. You don't know which coffee will convert, which message gets forwarded into the right group chat, or which referral circles back months later. The opportunities you get are rarely the ones you set out to find. And they rarely come directly from a first-degree relationship.

So when you tell someone something about yourself, your work, or your company, what you want is simple:
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​You want the message to keep traveling after the conversation ends.

You want it to reach people you'll never meet. You want someone you know to be able to turn to someone they know and say: "Actually, I think I have somebody you should talk to."

Of course, companies hire people whose job is to make sure a message travels well. Brand teams. Comms leads. PR firms.

Your career does not have that.

Your career is a solo act. Nobody workshops your story for you. Nobody runs your comms strategy. The version of you that travels through other people is either the version you shaped on purpose, or the version that got shaped by default when someone couldn't figure you out.

We talk about networking, job searching, personal branding, storytelling, LinkedIn, resumes. And we should. But there are more basic questions:

Are you legible to people? Can they repeat you?

Because people want to help. They want to introduce you, refer you, and think of you when they come across something relevant.

But they need something to carry forward.

Whether you’re searching, sitting in a job you’re unsure about, or rebuilding, the need is the same. The conditions we’re operating in -- noise, unpredictability, less institutional leverage -- are the same. The message has to travel without you. Making sure it does is the work.

Compression is leverage.

That work has a name: compression.

Compression is the deliberate act of taking something complex -- a career, a company, a strategy, a job search -- and making it digestible enough for others and tight enough to travel.

That line from last week is itself an example of compression.

In other words, a phrase that locates you at a moment in time. A stake in the ground that's now tight enough to travel.

Once you see compression at work, you notice it everywhere:

In 2013 -- when Netflix was a far cry from the entertainment Goliath it became -- its head of content, Ted Sarandos, put the company's strategy into 13 words:

A 30-slide deck got compressed to a sentence that journalists fell over one another to repeat. One sentence that galvanized employees for years.

In April 2014, Niraj Pant, a high school junior, cold emailed Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel for an internship:

Niraj, aged 16, understood the assignment: he compressed his message to fit a busy CEO's noisy inbox. (And got the gig).

Lawyer, leader, student, job seeker, recruiter. Different contexts, different channels, same logic: what gets compressed travels. What doesn't stays with you, or drowns in the noise.

Compression is attractive

Often times, in a career context, clarity is talked about as utility. "Be clear, so they get it. Have an elevator pitch, so the ride is productive."

That's the simple version. The bigger one is that compression doesn't just create understanding. It also creates attraction.

The act of compression is a signal in itself: "This person has done the work. They've thought about who they are, what they do, and where they're headed. They've made hard choices. They've planted a stake."

We see -- and are attracted to -- this level of awareness, thought, and confidence.

It also acts as a filter. The right people lean in. The wrong people opt out. Both are good for you. Without compression, everyone sort of hangs around; interested, but unsure how to help or engage you.

Now apply it to a person: when someone can describe their work in a tight, clear arc, without hedging or wandering, you don't just understand them. Consciously or otherwise, you feel something. You're pulled in. You trust more. You want to know more. You're more able to help. You're more likely to repeat.

Years ago, at the very end of an interview, I asked an internal candidate for a big job at Netflix: "Is there anything else you want to leave us with?"
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She thought for a few seconds, shrugged her shoulders, and said:

I tried not to, folks, but I'm pretty sure my mouth dropped to the floor. 😮

I stood up, opened the door for the next interviewer to step in, and I kid you not, I sprinted over to the hiring manager -- so I could repeat her line. Years later, I'm still repeating it. (She got the job).

Thanks for coaxing it out of me

Knowing this, you'd think I'd have my own work compressed like a diamond. I did it for Uber, I've done it since for founders and leaders. I'm sitting here, writing a newsletter about it.

You'd think.

But late on a Friday two weeks ago, a friend DM'd me on WhatsApp. He's someone in the TalentStories community who's referred people to me before for career coaching. But he wanted to make sure he was getting the latest version right:

It was a simple question, and I should have been able to answer right away.

Instead, I had to pause and think. By Monday, when I finally had a reply, the answer I typed was clearer than anything I'd put on a website, or LinkedIn, or said out loud.

I told him what I didn't do: I'm not a life coach, or a formally certified coach. There are plenty of those, and they're not me. Then I told him what I did, as two clean buckets:
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Bucket one is active job search, tapping into my recruiter and hiring manager expertise: networking, reach outs, story, LinkedIn profile, interviewing, negotiation.

Bucket two is proactively building career resilience. Whether or not you're searching: clarifying narrative, networking, building personal brand, becoming more AI-savvy. This is my lived, real-time expertise; what I'm doing to build a more enduring and secure career.

I hit send and stared at the message for 10 seconds. Then I typed another one:

That P.S. is the essay today.

Three months ago, I couldn't have written that summary. A month ago, it was "there", in my head, but I hadn't.

I needed my friend's prompt. I needed the ask.

Why we don't compress

If you don't compress, it costs you. When you do, the ROI compounds in your favor. So why don't we do it more often?

Several things usually get in the way. The first is proximity: we’re too close to our own story to see it. It's like being stuck inside the proverbial jar: it's hard to read the label on the outside.

Second is pain: compression requires a stake in the ground. I do this, not that. I’m headed here, not there. Stakes sting. They close off optionality.

Third is flexibility: early in a chapter, you really do need to keep things loose. Exploration needs room. But the risk is extending that logic into a stage where you actually have clarity. At some point, the chapter needs to be named.

The real test

There's a way to test whether you've compressed enough:

Forget whether the listener understands. That's the lower bar. The higher one is: when the conversation is over, can the listener repeat the message to someone else, well enough for that next person to act on it? The test applies whether the message is about you, your company, your work, or your idea.

Most networking advice stops at the first bar, if that. Be curious, be reciprocal, bring something to the table. 100% true. 100% necessary. And 100% insufficient.

Because the actual mechanism by which luck surface area widens is the third party; its second degrees, and their second degrees.

In other words, the power of a relationship isn't just what the person you know can do for you. They're one person; they can only do so much. But they're tied to many others. The magic is what they can do for you after your conversation -- by carrying you to those people.

For that to work though, they need fodder. They need repeatable, ready-to-transmit ammunition. A compressed version of you they can carry into their office, their community, or their group chat.

When someone wants to help us, we have to give them something to carry forward.

The bar isn't whether they get it. The bar is whether they can repeat it.

We don't do pastries

So, back to Uber in Singapore in 2013.

The fix wasn't fancy. It wasn't a campaign, or a brand exercise. It was three of us in a room, and eventually our COO by email, taking 15 hours to compress, distill and wordsmith our way to something that everyone on the team could repeat.

I still have the bullets, 13 years later. Here's what we crafted:

🎯 Uber is a technology company. We make a mobile app that gives users an on-demand, private car service to take them safely and smoothly to where they need to go, in over 15 cities around the world — at the push of a button.

🎯 Uber applies mobile technology, data-driven decision making, and world-class operations teams to solve a massive, offline problem: urban transportation.

🎯 Our revenues have grown more than 10-fold in the past year, and they've continued to explode as we've launched Uber in 7 cities over the past 2 months.

🎯 These are early days. Come join us, and help build a new fabric for urban logistics that's redefining how people experience and get around a city.

We finally had the message we needed for hiring.

We shared it with everyone in the region, and with recruiting in other regions: "This is our message. As employees you're our best hiring channels. You need to talk about us this way."

Within weeks, conversations started shifting. More candidates had heard of us. More opened with "You're a tech company, right?". They'd heard the message; increasingly, from someone other than us.

The signal had begun to travel through the talent market on its own, while we slept. Inbound interest kicked in. Hiring went into a new gear.

That's what compression did for us.

But the bullets weren't the work. The bullets were the output.
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The work was the 15 hours of arguments in a small conference room, and the 10 more spent refining. The work was converting a messy, complex company into clarity: something legible that other people could understand, remember, and repeat.

So, yeah, I'm not going to not ask. 🙃

What are your bullets? What do you want someone else to carry into a room for you?

Thanks for reading and exploring with me -- and have a great end of the week! 🙏

Aki