Why are we still asking employees to navigate their careers like it's 2015?

Photo by omid armin on Unsplash

Last December, I did what half the internet did. 

I opened Spotify Wrapped. Within seconds, it told me my top artist, my most-played song, my total minutes listened, and a slightly embarrassing "listener personality" I did not ask for. It knew I had replayed the same three songs on loop during a stressful week in October. I hadn't noticed that pattern in myself. Spotify had.

I didn't search for any of this. I didn't fill out a form or browse a catalogue. It just arrived, wrapped in a bow, built quietly from months of choices I'd made without thinking twice. For a few minutes, I felt strangely seen by an algorithm.

Stepping into my regular Monday at work, I log into our internal learning portal. Thousands of courses. No idea where to start. Just a search bar and a vague sense that something in there is probably useful to me.

Same story with the internal job board. Same story with the mentoring programme nobody told me about until a colleague mentioned it in passing, eighteen months too late.

The gap between those two experiences is the whole point of this newsletter.

"You can't be what you can't see." – Marian Wright Edelman

Discoverability, not desire

Imagine opening Netflix. Instead of seeing personalised recommendations, you are presented with a catalogue of every film and television show ever made. Just thousands of titles and a search bar. You'd probably close the app. 

Yet this is exactly how many organisations expect employees to navigate their careers. We publish learning portals with thousands of courses and launch internal job boards with hundreds of vacancies. We create mentoring programmes, leadership development initiatives, employee resource groups, and innovation challenges. Then we wait for employees to find them. 

I don't think employees lack ambition. I think they lack a way of finding out what's already available to them. 

Spotify never asked if I wanted my Wrapped. It didn't wait for me to go searching for insight into my own listening habits. It just noticed, connected the dots, and handed the story back to me.

Most workplaces still expect employees to do all that noticing themselves. Find the course. Find the mentor. Find the internal role. Find the community that might actually help them grow. The information usually exists somewhere in a system. The nudge that says "this is for you" almost never does.

Consumer brands solved this years ago.

The best consumer experiences anticipate what customers might need next.

Netflix recommends what to watch. Spotify curates playlists based on your listening habits. LinkedIn recommends people you should connect with. The common thread reduces effort. They know that too much choice creates friction. So they remove friction through relevance. 

We've become very good at helping candidates discover organisations. But too often, employees are left to navigate an increasingly complex organisation on their own. 

• Should I apply for that internal role?

• Which learning programme is right for me?

• Who could mentor me?

• What skills should I build next?

Imagine if internal experiences worked more like the platforms we use every day. 

• "You've led three cross-functional projects. Here are two leadership programmes employees with similar experience found valuable."

• "People who moved from engineering into product typically built these skills first."

• "Based on your interests, you might enjoy joining this employee community meetup."

A few things I keep coming back to

If I can envision what a "Career growth wrapped" could look like inside an organisation, a few principles should be non-negotiable.

• Be transparent. Employees should know why something is being recommended to them, not just that it is.

• Nudge, not dictate. A suggestion is not a mandate.

• Surface things people didn't know to search for. That mentor. That stretch project. That community.

• Widen options, not narrow them. If the algorithm only ever recommends "more of the same," it just automates the ruts people are already stuck in.

Employees are not listeners on a music app. There's more at stake, more history, more trust required. But the underlying idea still holds. People don't only want more information. They want relevance.

The future of employer branding

Perhaps the next evolution of employer branding is making it easier for employees to discover opportunities, build meaningful careers and connect with the experiences that matter most. A personalised employer brand and experience will not only help people choose your organisation but also guide them throughout their careers. 

I still am half amused about my Wrapped list and wonder what it would take for an employee to open something at work and feel seen with that same small jolt of "Oh, this actually gets me."

Beyond the Brief

If consumer brands have spent the last decade removing friction from customer journeys and if a music app can tell me my own story back to me without me lifting a finger, maybe it's worth asking a harder question inside our organisations:

What friction are we still asking employees to accept simply because "that's how work has always been"?