Nathaniel's Site

My Work

I'm a strategist and entrepreneur working to ensure that the future arrives safely for society and our planet.

ReWork Co-Founder & CEO September 2011 - Present ReWork helps talented professionals find meaningful work by connecting them to hiring managers at companies making substantive social, environmental, and cultural progress. ReWork was born out of the 2011 Unreasonable Institute and won the 2012 TEDxMileHigh Prize.

My Story I graduated from college in 2008, determined to build a career that would allow me to contribute to solving our world's greatest challenges - things like climate change and ecosystem collapse, preventable disease and chronic malnutrition,and underemployment and crushing poverty. I was looking for a job that gave me a true balance of professional development, tangible impact, and sufficiently-sized paychecks. It turned out that that balance was incredibly hard to find. So hard, in fact, that in the year after I graduated my search for meaningful work led me to have 11 different jobs. I did all sorts of things that year. I installed rain barrels, helped renovate houses, and installed insulation to increase home energy efficiency. I led backcountry trail crews in US National Parks and ecotourism trips to Latin America. I wrote grants and built business plans and did strategic planning for nonprofits. I even worked on customer discovery for a Fortune 100 company. I learned an incredible amount that year and had a lot of fun along the way. But it was also a very stressful time, full of uncertainty and anxiety about my career. I noticed that I wasn't alone in my feelings, that many people my age (and older, for that matter) were also asking these questions. But one by one, I saw them settling for work that didn't inspire them. Some got lucky, but many more felt disillusioned. It was just too difficult to figure out all the moving pieces. By the time I had a sense of what I wanted and was really good at, and what hiring managers wanted and looked for in candidates, an odd thing had happened. I had started to care the most about this career support stuff. I just couldn't stand it that there were so many smart, caring people who wanted to find meaningful work, yet it was so tough. I felt like I had to do something. So I co-founded ReWork to build a solution. Since we started the company in 2011, the ReWork team has talked to thousands of professionals and hundreds of hiring managers at organizations working in the impact economy. The insights, strategies, and tactics that ReWork encourages - and that I write and speak about - have come from the distillation of my experiences, the many conversations ReWork has had, and months of research into how successful hiring actually happens.

Speaking

Talks and workshops for a range of audiences: entrepreneurs, executives and hiring managers, bright-eyed college students, and career strategy enthusiasts.

Affinity Lab Building a Career Worth Having 24 April 2013 - Washington D.C. A talk outlining the shortcomings of traditional career strategies, and an introduction to mental models and approaches that are effective in finding meaningful work. Center for Social Innovation Hire Like a Pro 18 April 2013 - New York City A roundtable discussion of what a best-practice hiring process looks like, including key elements and considerations for scoping roles, sourcing passive candidates, screening effectively, designing trial projects, interviewing and selection, and onboarding. Harvard Business School Building a Career Worth Having 10 April 2013 - Cambridge A talk outlining the shortcomings of traditional career strategies, and an introduction to mental models and approaches that are effective in finding meaningful work. Bold Academy Finding Meaningful Work: Strategies and Tactics February 2013 - San Francisco A workshop covering the anatomy of meaningful work, new models for understanding career landscapes and strategy, and detailed tactics for reliably building an inspiring (and financially rewarding) career. SOCAP How To Hire Top Talent October 2012 - San Francisco A workshop outlining a best-practice hiring process, including how to source, evaluate, and hire the very best candidates. Denver Startup Week Bootstrapping a Startup September 2012 - Denver A joint talk covering key learnings of how to build a business by earning revenue from day one, including recommendations for tools and hacks to make it easier. TEDxMilehigh Shift Work 2 June 2012 - Denver A joint talk with co-founder Evan Walden on the rise of the purpose-driven workforce, and the reasons why companies should pay close attention.

writing

Insights on career strategy and talent acquisition.

Harvard Business Review What Job Candidates Really Want: Meaningful Work 18 April 2013 A brief examination of systemic failures of (and costs associated with) hiring practices, and the role that purpose might play in addressing them. The Wall Street Journal MBA Grads Should Know What They Want 4 April 2013 A guest post to WSJ's The Accelerators blog, outlining considerations for hiring MBAs into startups. 99U by Behance A series of posts on career strategy and workplace dynamics. 2013 Turn Your Wandering Career Path into a Secret Weapon Why Baby Boomers and Millennials Make Great Teams The Daily Muse A series of posts on career strategy and workplace dynamics. 2012-2013 3 Signs You Should Definitely Quit Your Job You Don't Have to Settle! How To Find Work That Inspires You 7 Keys to Hiring Your Startup's First Employee

If you want to work together, or you want to stay up-to-date on my projects, say hello!

Twitter Keep up with my projects, announcements, and items of interest. Email Reach me directly if you'd like to have me speak for your organization or audience. LinkedIn Connect for network-building, collaboration, and talking shop.

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln

Background

My studies have revolved around complex systems, including global ecological systems, human economic systems, and the consequences of their interactions.

Singularity University Executive Program Alum December 2012 A Singularity we examined the development and evolution of networks and computing systems, renewable energy sources and storage technologies, nanotechnology and molecular assembly, robotics and artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and 3D printing and distributed manufacturing. Unreasonable Institute Boulder, Colorado Summer 2011 I spent six weeks living in a house with 24 other ambitious entrepeneurs and over 60 mentors - specialists in branding, startup finance, team building, scaling, investment, and more - learning how to build and scale a mission-driven startup. Blekinge Tekniska Hogskola Masters of Science - Strategic Leadership toward Sustainability 2010 - 2011 I went to Karlskrona, Sweden to study strategic sustainable development under Karl-Henrik Robert in his MSLS program. The program revolves around what companies can do to shield themselves from risk and improve their competitive standing by addressing social and environmental challenges in a proactive way. Thesis: Embedding socio-economic sustainability into impact investor due diligence. University of Vermont Bachelor of Arts - Global Human Impact Studies 2004 - 2008 I studied the myriad of systemic issues that we have become aware of in the last decades – from climate change to peak fossil fuels, ecological collapse and biodiversity loss to topsoil erosion and deforestation, preventable disease to poverty. Thesis: Ecological wastewater treatment in Stonetown, Zanzibar: A feasibility analysis. Semester at Sea Pacific Rim Voyage Summer 2006 I sailed on Semester at Sea’s voyage along the pacific rim, visting Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan. School for International Training Zanzibar - Coastal Ecology Spring 2006 While abroad I lived with a local family in Stonetown, learned Swahili, and studied marine and coastal ecosystems – including whaleshark migration patterns and population dynamics of large mammals in Saadani National Park.