Understanding Job Seeker's Anxiety

Understanding Job Seeker’s Anxiety

Suitable for Career Coaches, Guides and Counsellors


A recent training we had with a team of career guides made us realise that even the most professional of guides may occasionally fall into the blindspots of their own. How can we assess where we are at in understanding job seeker’s anxiety so that we can be more effective in our influence?

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Cultivate empathy by embedding yourself in someone else’s reality. Put a pause on solely using your past experience of success as a yardstick in evaluating their context, at least not yet. Here’s how you can assess if you have been exercising empathy in your engagement with job seekers- whether it is in the context of a job interview or a career fair.

Ask yourself, if you could identify with what they value in their next job? Why and where do these beliefs stem from? What emotions drive their actions/inaction? Were you able to capture those? If yes, ask yourself if these are your stories of them or an honest inquiry through your conversation with them?

Without empathetic listening, the stories that we subconsciously hold over time will soon surface as judgements. Some of them may sound like these, “...they have unrealistic expectations” and “...they always feel like the government has to take care of them / will find a job for them”. Sounds familiar? What are some other stories we hold of jobseekers today and have they served you in supporting their quest?

If empathetic listening has served you well, good for you! The next phase would be to see what you could unpack with the newfound data/stories you have gathered. Don’t just leave it as is, there can be so much to mine from it.

Assuming these data are empathetically-gathered, you would be able to form a sense of appreciation for how some parts of their stuckness may be linked to what we call dysfunctional beliefs. Some of them may sound like these

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The more you can identify and spot these, the more you can work together with them to rewrite internal ‘scripts’. 

A process also known as reframing. Just like how data analysts appreciate a clean set of data for processing, here we are also seeking for new possibilities from the recognition of dysfunctional beliefs. 

Here we are not ignoring systemic and structural changes that are needed, but choosing to focus on what’s immediate and actionable first so that we can work generatively towards bigger changes.

Once dysfunctional beliefs are identified, scripts are rewritten with the purpose of attaining their new found goals. There is no perfect job nor decision, and the key is to define job seekers’ top priorities at any point in time. 

Catch yourself should you be enforcing your goals or what is thought to be the best way onto them. Remember our lived experiences or scripts bestowed upon us may not work in their context. A reminder back to empathetic awareness.

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Riding along the point on good data sets, the marker of a meaningful conversation should facilitate their discovery of what they value at work or in life, the emotions they hope to experience against the options they have. Thus, enabling them to make better decisions moving forth. 

A healthy relationship between career guides and job seekers cannot be developed overnight but some accountability to be aware can do no harm and in fact boost our effectiveness in our roles as guides and leaders in the various workplace contexts we are in today. 


#BeBoldAtWork is a Design Your Workplace series that seeks to covers practical tips, stories and tools that would serve employees and employers to better design how you choose to think, feel and show up in workplaces so as to improve the performances of not only your organisations but also the lives of the people you work with.

If you like for us to enter your workplaces to provide talks and engagements on workplace wellbeing & career resilience ,drop us a note at hello@boldatwork.sg !