Embracing Change: Get Hired’s Next Chapter

Change is a constant in both our professional and personal lives — yet knowing that doesn’t make navigating it any less daunting. This week’s special episode of Get Hired marks an important milestone as LinkedIn Editor Andrew Seaman reflects on the podcast’s journey and announces its next chapter. 

Joined by Leah Smart , LinkedIn Senior Editor and host of the Everyday Better podcast, Andrew unpacks why learning to embrace transitions is an essential career skill. Together, Andrew and Leah unpack how change — whether welcomed or unexpected — can be reframed as an opportunity for growth, and share strategies for finding forward momentum amid uncertainty.

From grounding contemplative practices to actionable advice for managing career shifts, this episode equips listeners with tools to navigate life’s inevitable transitions gracefully and find the silver linings hidden in our most challenging moments.

A transcript of their conversation is below. You can also listen to the episode above or on your favorite podcast platform by clicking here.

TRANSCRIPT: Embracing Change: Get Hired’s Next Chapter

Andrew Seaman: Hey everyone. It's Andrew. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different from normal, because I need to announce some changes to Get Hired. Get Hired, as you may know, is so much more than a podcast. It's a newsletter, a conversation, and a community. And this week, we're taking a big step to better meet your needs. We're putting more resources into meeting you where you're spending more of your time, LinkedIn. And that's going to mean winding down this podcast.

So I'm asking you to spend the next few minutes with me while I tell you a little bit about these changes. After this, you'll hear me in conversation with my colleague, Leah Smart, who is the host of the Everyday Better podcast. We'll be talking about change, of course. It's the only constant these days.

First, it's worth sharing that Get Hired predates this podcast. In fact, I launched the very first edition of Get Hired in 2019 as a newsletter. Since then, Get Hired has expanded to 14 countries around the world and evolved into this podcast and an occasional live show.

Together, we've navigated so many twists and turns from a global pandemic and a great resignation to today's job hugging and emergence of AI. Through it all, you've shared your stories, your struggles, and your successes with me, and that has really meant the world. Truly, nothing felt better to me than reading your messages, explaining that some little tip you took away from this show made all the difference in your job search or career.

While the world of work is always our main topic of conversation on the show, the common thread connecting everything, in my opinion, is change. Like many people, I didn't instinctively run toward change. When I joined LinkedIn in 2018, one of the most difficult lessons that I had to learn is that change is a feature in this company. It's not a bug or a flaw.

I came from the world of legacy media that longs for consistency and stability. But in tech, we're constantly evolving and looking toward the next chapter. The work continues, but how we do that work changes. And that's exactly what the future of Get Hired is about. So as we look to beef up our offerings for LinkedIn members, especially for premium subscribers, we decided it's time to wind down this podcast at the end of the year.

On the platform, you'll be able to find more conversations with people leading the world of hiring, plus courses, live conversations, and other exciting offerings that I'll be able to tell you more about in the coming months. You'll also still get career guidance and job search strategies through my weekly newsletter. To stay connected and join the Get Hired community, visit linkedin.com/gethired and hit that subscribe button.

I also want to make it clear that the podcast archives will remain available to you as a resource. Over the past few years, I've had hundreds of conversations about how to get hired, thrive at work, and build the career you deserve. We've heard from CEOs, chief people officers, Olympians, bestselling authors, and many more. So over the next few weeks on the show, the Get Hire team will be curating the most essential advice from those conversations and packaging it into four take everywhere episodes, designed to help you kickstart your job search with intention.

But before anything else, I want to say thank you. Thank you to every one of you who tuned in over the years. My hope was always that you didn't have to listen week after week, but you knew we were here when you needed us. I also need to say thank you to everyone who helped make this show possible. Florencia, Dave, Laura, Dan, Courtney, Jesse, Leah, Sarah, Michelle, Alexis, Rafa, Ava, Grace, Alexandra, Mujib, Assaf, Andre, Scott, Maya, Tim, Joe, and especially Emily, who has been working around the clock to make sure we ended this series on the right note.

Of course, I need to thank the guests who made time to sit down and chat with me over the years. I look forward to having many more. We'll just be airing them in a different place. Now, let's take a short break. When we come back, I'm joined by an expert and a friend who knows what to do when we face a big change.

Andrew: With me today is my colleague, Leah Smart, LinkedIn Senior Editor and host of Everyday Better, where she shares tools for creating positive change in your life. We sat down to discuss how to embrace change in our professional and personal lives. Thank you so much for joining me.

Leah Smart: Oh my God, I'm so happy and honored that I get to be-

Andrew: The last guest.

Leah: ... the last guest.

Andrew: Yes. On the podcast, at least.

Leah: Yes, on the podcast. But we started together, and here we are.

Andrew: Yes, of course. And I wanted to have you on because when we were thinking, "Okay, how are we going to end this?" I was like, "Well, why don't we talk to Leah about change?" Because I think change is the only constant. And I thought, "Let's talk about how people can deal with it." Because I think at this time, everyone's kind of dealing with change in some form. And they kind of always are, but it feels a little bit more pronounced, I think.

Leah: Feels different right now.

Andrew: Yeah. Everything's changing. AI, the workforce, the world.

Leah: The economy. I mean, the state of all the things.

Andrew: I went to Trader Joe's and spent $300.

Leah: That's a problem.

Andrew: Yeah, it was.

Leah: It's supposed to be 30.

Andrew: I know. Even my bank messaged me as I'm checking out, they're like, "Hey."

Leah: Are you sure?

Andrew: Yeah. They're like, "Did you just spend this at Trader Joe's?" I'm like, "Yeah, I am."

Leah: This is Trader Joanna's. Exactly what happened.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Well, obviously, I'm going through a transition with the show.

Leah: Yeah.

Andrew: How do you deal with change?

Leah: Yeah. There is an author who I really love. His name's Bruce Feiler and he was on my show probably four years ago.

Andrew: Life Is in the Transitions.

Leah: Life Is in the Transitions, and it was all about change. And first of all, one of the surprising things that I heard from Bruce is that we think if you think of change as a quadrant, if it was voluntary versus involuntary, and if it was something you wanted versus something you didn't want, we think of those quadrants being the separators of how we approach change.

And yet, what he found is there's the commonality of sort of these three stages of new beginnings, messy middles and long goodbyes. And most of us tend to have one that we're really good at and one we really suck at. So I will say, I'm pretty good at new beginnings. I'm really bad at messy middles. And I've really struggled with approaching change. I've really struggled with I'm a new mom. And so struggling with the idea that not only am I watching things change around me, I also feel like I'm different. And so I leaned on what I always lean on, which is contemplative practices.

So for me, everyone's different, but for me, that looks like taking space to just be with what's actually happening. I tend to want to rush into, "Okay, what's the next new beginning?" I always need something to look forward to. I'm like, "All right, what now? What now?" And I'll say right now, I don't have a what now, so the discomfort is high.

And a good friend of mine not long ago said to me, "I think you're just going to have to sit in this." And I was like, "Ugh." And that's how you know it's the right answer is I have to sit in it. And so you're finding me getting comfortable in the messy middle and just trying to keep my head afloat and stay grateful, which I think is incredibly important. I think you and I both do the five-minute journal. That is always a grounding force for me to think about three things I'm grateful for in the morning, what would make the day great, and something affirmative about myself. So I find that those practices give me some sort of grounding in moments of change.

Andrew: Yeah. And I think for me, it's interesting because I definitely do lean into meditation, but meditation is often not contemplative. You might have realizations or things like that, but it's more of training. So sometimes I sort of reflect and I think I don't actually sit with my thoughts that often. And it does encourage me sometimes to go for a walk without my phone or just to ... And I'm sure people think I'm a psychopath when I tell people that, but I'm like, "I live in New York City. I can find my way home."

Leah: You're like me, I'm like, "I love when my phone dies and I'm out in bed."

Andrew: Yeah. It's just like-

Leah: And my husband's like, "Are you alive?"

Andrew: I know. I'm like, "People survive for quite a long time without their phone."

Leah: I'll call you from a payphone if I can find one.

Andrew: But yeah, no, and it's interesting. And I think when I came to LinkedIn, because I come from legacy media, so it was always like you just do everything the same. You try to resist change as much as possible. So when I came to LinkedIn as a tech company, it was very interesting because change was so frequent. I think what happened to me was I was like, that's where I got to that messy middle. I'm like, "This doesn't feel right." I've always known consistency, where in this case it was like, "Oh, that project's not working, dump it and move on."

And I had to really acknowledge like, "Okay, change is actually part of this system." And I think there are always those messy moments, but I go back to something that when I was learning to drive, my grandfather was a bus driver for 45 years. And sometimes, people say I'm wrong about this, but how he told me to go around corners or take a curve is to slow down before and accelerate on. And I think of that as change, because I think when you're changing, there is that resistance at first, so you do kind of slow down a little bit. And then if you lean into it, you're like, "Okay, I got this a little bit more." So that's how I like to think of it, but you still get that anxiety, I think, no matter what's going to happen.

Leah: Well, and I love that analogy of the slowdown and then accelerate in. And I remember when I first started on this team, I've had a lot of change in my career, but it's all been at LinkedIn. So starting on this team, it was the first team that I saw so much change. It is a feature and an intention, I think, of our team and the way that we function that we are constantly changing.

I do think your point about meditation I think is a good one. And I'd say for people who are interested in meditation or I say for people who are like, "I can't stand the idea of it." You probably would benefit from it a lot actually. I typically find what I resist is probably a gift at some point. Meditation for me is really about setting the table for how I approach the things that happen in life. So it's not really time for me to think. It's actually time for me to stop my brain. My brain is always going.

And I think when you take a big deep breath and you sit, your responses to what happen in difficult moments or moments of change shift and they become responses instead of reactions. And so that for me is the value of meditating is like sitting with this, "All right, I'm just sitting." And even meditation's uncomfortable, right? That's why a lot of people don't like it is they're like, "Well, I can't slow down my thoughts and I don't like just sitting there." And I'm like, "Yeah, I get it. That was me too, eight years ago, but if you can sit." And it doesn't change. It's not like all of a sudden you become an expert meditator and then you're perfect. I mean, I could sit down today and go, "I can't do this." But if I can just do it and allow it to happen, then it just makes these little tiny shifts in how I show up.

Andrew: Yeah. I think everyone has that transcendental meditation idea where you'll levitate off the ground and you're-

Leah: Yeah, you're basically asleep.

Andrew: Yeah, you'll feel reborn and you're like, "No, you're sitting there." And especially if you do Buddhist style meditation where you're sitting cross-legged, which I cannot do, or you're kneeling or something like that, you're like, "Wow, this is, first of all, physically uncomfortable, mentally uncomfortable." But then also, you start to realize that the present moment is what's real and it's what you can control. So it's like even when things start to get crazy and change is being thrust upon you, you end up sort of saying, "Oh, okay, but in this moment, this is what I could do."

Leah: That's it. Yeah. And I'll also say there's the ability to look at the long term, but typically that doesn't come until you've gone through the process, you've taken the curve, if you will. And so you can look in the rear-view mirror and see the curve and see where you've come out and go, "Okay, I kind of get why that had to happen." Even if it sucked, like, "This led to this, led to this, led to this." I can always connect the dots, but it's only looking back. And so I have faith and that's difficult sometimes to have, but I have faith that even in the midst of change, that at some point I will look back and go, "Oh, I get it." So then if I can be where my feet are now and know that in the future I'll look back and go, "I get it," then can I find ease and comfort in the moment I'm in?

Andrew: Yeah. It goes back to the idea like there's a zen monk who's deceased now, but Thích Nhất Hạnh who used to say, "No mud, no lotus." So it's like you do have to get used to that muddy part, but then out of that, something good can grow. So ending this podcast, it was really interesting, because you get into a routine, you do this every week and it's fun. And then when we were discussing, "Okay, we want to evolve Get Hired into something a little bit larger." We were talking about like, "What if we did two weeks out of the month or something like that?" And I'm like, "I don't know. I just don't think that's a good thing." So it was like when we were sort of breached the subject of like, "What if we just don't do it anymore?" It was like, "Yeah." It was a weird like, "Yeah, that is good."

Leah: It's almost cathartic. The idea that you're holding so tightly to something and you've been doing it for almost four years and it's like, "Okay, what if we just stop?" Most people would think, "Oh my God, this is going to be terrible, but maybe you close this thing down to create space for the lotus."

Andrew: Yeah, it's nice. And I think the people who listen to this show, what's unfortunate is I think a lot of them are thrust into change.

Leah: Involuntarily, you want this.

Andrew: Yeah. Either you're let go from your job, something more catastrophic happens. And I think part of it is you don't want to dwell on bad things happening, but also I think you need to expect that bad things will happen. And it's not always going to be easy and it's not necessarily like ... You can't say it's always for the best, but you can anticipate it and say, "Okay, I can mentally prepare for that."

Leah: First of all, with Get Hired, it's really nice to hear how you said it's evolving. Because a lot of times, I think change, at least for me, I can be pretty catastrophic in my thinking. I'm like, "It's over." Whatever it is. "My career is over, my this is over." And if you go down that rabbit hole, you will go down. That is down the negative spiral. And I do think there is a really important middle ground of addressing what you're experiencing and what you are feeling. And then also allowing space for feelings to change.

It's like they say emotion is energy and motion and it is. It doesn't have to stay stuck for long. But the meeting we were just in, the person who was speaking talked about a big change that had happened and that it took them like a month to get through and process, and so there are things that will just take time. And my old acupuncturist used to say, "In 30 days, you will feel different." And I loved that. I lived by that for so long with different things in my life and work that were happening, and it's true.

And so I really think that the idea of an evolution and that of feeling different is important and that you've been here before is really strong evidence that you can get through whatever the this is. And I think for anyone who's feeling like they're in the midst of change, part of the work, especially with career change, especially because it can be involuntary, is you probably will have a period where you aren't actively interviewing yet. You don't have your new offer on the table yet. So the question is like, what do you do? And you and I have recently talked about this. Do you click apply a hundred times on every single job? And we were just listening to one of our leaders talk about the fact that it's actually harder for companies because they're getting so many applies that it's almost not as valuable as it was.

Andrew: Yeah, you're just giving up. Yeah.

Leah: Yeah. And so you're like, "Okay, so if that doesn't work, what else can you do?" And I know I can sound a little like woo-woo and hokey, but I swear it's not. It's what's the internal work you can do for yourself to make yourself either clearer, more aware or more hopeful. I want to say, again, I'm not going to say positive. I think it's like aware of what's happening, but hopeful that something can change.

Andrew: The other thing I think we should end on too is that change is not failure. So sometimes it's the result of something that didn't go well, but I think too many times people say like, "Okay, there's this change and it's because I failed." And I think that happens a lot after layoffs. Someone will say like, "I was the tough salesperson. Why did I get laid off?" It doesn't mean you failed, it's just their business priorities change or something like that.

Leah: Well, and I think you've highlighted what is probably really valuable is change can be evolution. You have more agency maybe inside of the messy middle of change than you perhaps think you have. I can certainly be someone who is the victim and who's like, "Oh my God, this is happening to me." And then after, I noticed after a couple days I wake up and I'm like, "I'm going for a run. I'm doing yoga."

And then all of a sudden, I'm like, "This isn't happening to me. I'm doing something about it." And it's like, how do you take the space to acknowledge what's going on and maybe just sulk for a second and then go, "All right, what can I do?" And I think also in the place we are, in the place that it seems the economy is in and where jobs are and all the uncertainty and the questions, I do think it's impossible not to ignore what you're seeing out in the world.

And so it is this internal work. It's a mix of that plus the external understanding of what you see and then also allowing yourself to be creative. What's the thing that you can do to feel like you are creating some sort of forward motion, even if it's not exactly what you imagined it was going to be?

Andrew: Yeah.

Leah: There's still something out there to do.

Andrew: Yeah, totally. And nothing can go on forever anyway.

Leah: And that's the toughie, man. Like we all think in the moment. It's like, "Oh, this is going to be how it is." And it's like, "No, it's the one thing you started with this, the one thing that is constant, and it sounds cliche, but it is change." And it really is probably more about what's the evidence you have of how you handle it.

Andrew: Yeah.

Leah: Yeah.

Andrew: And on that note, I think we should call it a day.

Leah: All right. Well, I have two questions for you.

Andrew: Okay.

Leah: What have you loved most about doing Get Hired as a podcast?

Andrew: Hearing from listeners. I'm sure you get the same thing. It's like you see the listens, you see the data, and then you're like, "Is anyone really listening to this?" And then you'll get comments here or there. You'll be like, "Oh, this episode was great." And then you'll get this amazing message and you're like, "Oh, wow." Even if I did three episodes and no one listened to it, I'm like, "It was all worth it because that person did." So I think that is usually the thing that really made it worthwhile.

Leah: Yeah. And is there a message that you, although it is evolving, the podcast is ending, is there a message that you'd want to share with the people who've been listening or who are finding you right now?

Andrew: I think it's mostly goes back to the idea of be kind to yourself. And it's like the idea that we can't always control everything. We always want to, but also you can, in most cases, control yourself. So it's like, if things are happening around you, what can you do? And what will put you on the path to something better? So that's like even when we talk about setting goals in your job search, it's like don't set a goal that you're going to get five interviews next week because you can't control that. But what you can control is like you're going to take an online course or something like that. So I would say focus on yourself. It sounds selfish, but it's so important. Put your own air mask on before you help someone else.

Leah: You can put on your child's.

Andrew: Yes. Yeah.

Leah: Without yours, your child will not make it.

Andrew: Yes, exactly.

Leah: There you go.

Andrew: Thank you so much, Leah.

Leah: Thank you.

Andrew: That was my colleague, Leah Smart, LinkedIn Senior Editor and host of Everyday Better. Remember, no matter where you are in your job search, Get Hired is here for you every step of the way. Make sure you come back next week when I'll be sharing some of my favorite advice on cultivating a resilient mindset for your job search. And if you want to follow along with what's next for me and Get Hired, make sure to head to linkedin.com/gethired. That's where our community continues and where I'll keep sharing the strategies and insights you need to navigate your career. I'll see you there.

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Emily Reeves. Assaf Gidron engineered our show. Tim Boland mixed our show. We get additional support from Alexandra Kuznietsova and Mujib Mehrdad. Sarah Storm is our senior producer. Dave Pond is Head of Production and Creative Operations. Maya Pope-Chappel is Director of Content and Audience Development. Courtney Coupe is Head of Original Programming. Dan Roth is LinkedIn's Editor-in-Chief and Vice President of Content Development. And I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.