Yes, back in high school or college you might “look for a job” to make some extra pocket money. It did not matter much if the job led anywhere or fit into your larger career goals. I bagged groceries, painted houses, and worked as an office boy during my school years. Not exactly preparation for a physics career, but those jobs did not need to be.
Things change after graduation, whatever degree level you decide to stop at. Many people still talk about “finding a job” after graduation (I know I did), but in hindsight I do not really think that is the right mindset. What you are really looking for is your next career building block. That may sound like a distinction without a difference, but the two outlooks have separate attitudes and approaches. Looking for a job is a discrete, isolated, and often discontinuous activity that frequently has implicit, dubious assumptions about the permanence of employment. Career building, by contrast, is continuous, diversified, and creates resilience. Careers are built out of a lot of large and small blocks collected over time: positions, relationships, publications, presentations, grants, press coverage, etc. Let’s consider an example of the two perspectives in action.
One of my mentees recently asked if I thought he should go on a job interview for a position that he did not think would ultimately work out for him. From the “looking for a job” perspective, going on the interview looks like a waste of his time. Worse, it can feel a bit like taking advantage of the interviewers and leading them on. Flip things around to the perspective of career building and things look a lot different. First, careers span a long time and professional communities are often a lot smaller than you think, so it is always wise to get to know as many people as you can. You never know where your job ten years from now might come from. Interviews are a great, albeit intense way to build relationships with people in your particular community. Second, it is easy to go wrong making to many assumptions. What makes you so sure that you are not interested in a particular job? Perhaps the organization has a poor reputation or no reputation at all. Do you want a (often flawed) reputation or hearsay making your decision for you? Why not go see things for yourself? Who knows what opportunities might open up if you just go and talk to people. You might like what you find or there could be alternative, unadvertised positions available. Failing that, a good interview performance that does not lead to a good fit might lead to referrals to other positions that are. Of course, there are always exceptions at the extreme end of the interview spectrum (perhaps a confirmed pacifist can pass when a defense contractor calls) that you might be better off skipping, but “yes” is the best default answer when someone offers an interview. If nothing else, you will get valuable interview experience, which is a great career building block. There are a host of people in my network that I have met during interviews, both when I was the subject and the hiring manager.
Here is another example that sticks in my memory. I was at a physics conference talking to a group of students about career issues a few years back. This was in the earliest days of the Prosperous Physicist and I wrapped up the conversation by offering this website for further information. One of the students informed me that she did not need any more career advice because she had just gotten a job at a big national lab. She had apparently looked for a job, found one, and that was the end of that. I tend not to argue with people who have made up their minds, and this was no exception. Besides maybe she is totally right. This is a probabilistic universe after all and the odd of her spending a happy career at the same national lab are not zero. They are not that great, however, and I fear she might one day need to “find a job” again and discover that all the best ones are taken by the folks who spent the years stacking their career building blocks.