Job Hunting as A Mom of Young Kids
In spring 2019, when I was approached by a recruiter for my now-former employer, I wasn’t job hunting. I’d been at the museum where I worked for more than three years and I’d built up the trust and autonomy needed to have a somewhat flexible schedule. If memory serves, I also worked from home on Fridays thanks to having been partially remote the year prior, when our building was being renovated. (Remember, that was the height of luxury before the pandemic hit!) I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to find the same flexibility elsewhere, at least not without taking significant time to earn it.
My conversations with the recruiter and interviews with the then-ED and Artistic Director of the music education organization I ended up joining made it clear that I could, in fact, find it elsewhere. My new boss had a child about six weeks older than Robbie and another senior colleague had a kid two years older than that, and both were super open about prioritizing time with their families. I could not have hoped for a more understanding workplace and think I was, in turn, pretty successful at modeling a good work/life balance for my direct reports.
When I started looking for a new job this past fall, I knew that a family-friendly environment was a non-negotiable. Here’s what I kept my eyes open for as I networked and interviewed:
Parents - and, even better, parents of young children - in leadership roles
Good parental leave (though we’re not having more kids, this shows that an organization puts their money where their mouth is about being family-friendly)
PTO that differentiates between vacation time and sick leave (because you use up sick leave so quickly when you live with cute little petri dishes!)
Healthcare and other benefits that include children (like an FSA for dependent care)
A hybrid work schedule
The explicit confirmation that emailing on evenings and weekends isn’t standard (with some time-sensitive exceptions)
A commute that would allow me to participate in school/daycare drop-offs and pick-ups
If an open role/potential employer didn’t check these boxes, I wasn’t interested. (The one exception to this was a really exciting job in Baltimore that paid incredibly well. I was willing to be on-site two days a week, staying in Baltimore overnight between the two, but they required three so I emailed my “thanks but no thanks” before the final round of interviews.) Sometimes that meant not even applying to jobs that sounded great on paper; sometimes it meant withdrawing from the process after meeting with my potential new manager and colleagues. It also meant asking a lot of questions and, often, listening between the lines of answers.
All of this was possible because I wasn’t trying to flee a terrible work situation and so didn’t need to take the first job I was offered. I also recognize the weight that being at a director level carries, both in terms of the value of my professional experience to potential employers and my personal comfort in setting these boundaries and probing into an organization’s reality. I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to do so a few jobs ago.
The hope, of course, is that we get to a point where an employee doesn’t need seniority to be able to prioritize what they need to have a family and maintain a good work/life balance. No, hope isn’t the right word; those of us in positions of authority have a responsibility to make sure our junior colleagues are able to do this without fear of being held back in one way or another. In my new job, I absolutely will!
