GradSimple lndustry Insiders: Gus Baxter

Disclaimer: The views expressed by our interviewees are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of GradSimple. We only edit these responses for clarity. All opinions remain those of the interviewee.

• Role: Assistant Director, Center for Career Development & Executive Coach

In five minutes or less, can you walk us through your background? What led you to work in career development?

All the way back in 2012, I graduated with my degree in biological anthropology, specializing in osteology, the study of the skeletal system. I loved it, and I had my life planned out. I thought, okay, by 30 years old, I’m going to be Dr. Gus Baxter of biological anthropology. I’m going to be working at a medical examiner’s office and maybe writing books on the side and living that lifestyle. I had a short stint in a contract role at the New York City medical examiner’s office where I got to use my skills to excavate bone fragments about the size of a quarter or smaller, and it was incredible.

From there, my life took a very liberal arts twist. I was applying for graduate school and having trouble getting in, so I took knitting lessons to try to de-stress. In that process, the owner of the store said to me, “Hey, it’s been so much fun having you hang out here. We have a two-day-a-week position if you want to make a little money on the side.” I said, “Okay, well, I’m applying to grad school, and I’ll be done in the summer. I’m going to be leaving.” And she said, “Listen, as long as you’re here, you’ll have a job. Don’t worry about it.”

Well, I never got into grad school, and I ended up becoming the manager of that store. I fell in love with the community aspect, the events, hosting different designers, and helping with classes. From there, I transitioned to what was then the largest craft publishing company. They produced videos, classes, books, and magazines called Interweave Press, and I became the assistant editor on their knitting magazines. It was incredible. So now I’d gone from anthropology to small-business management to magazine work as an assistant editor.

That was short-lived. The company was struggling because, you know, nobody buys magazines anymore. So that lasted for about a year, and then I found my way into social work. I was just looking for a job to keep things rolling when a friend of mine, who worked at a local middle school, said, “I have a paraprofessional role for you. There’s a student you’d work one-on-one with.” I sort of begrudgingly said yes. The idea of going back to middle school voluntarily as an adult sounded terrible. Middle school was terrible for everybody. But I ended up working really closely with his case manager, who was a clinical social worker, and she really opened my eyes to what social work is. 

Through that experience, I really dug into it and thought, I think this is what I want to do. So I applied to social work school and was going to be starting at NYU in 2019. During that time, though, I realized social work is an invaluable resource, but it’s just not for me. I’m not going to do it justice the way I’m seeing other people and their passion do it justice. That was a tough thing to come to terms with. In that space, I had been working with a certified executive coach, and I realized there was a lot of overlap. I was really enjoying it, and I thought, what if I explored this professionally? That experience opened me up to the possibility of coaching, and in 2022 I started my own journey toward certification and licensure in coaching.

From there, I opened my own practice and had some incredible opportunities supporting people through the pandemic as they explored what they wanted to do after experiencing how different life could be. Some had been furloughed, some had been laid off, and people were saying, “I don’t know that I want to go back and do what I did before. What do I do now? I learned all these skills during the pandemic. What do I do with those?” We had so much fun dreaming up new realities.

Then, in 2023, I reached out to where I work now, Drew University, and it happened that they had an opening for a career counsellor. I said, “Well, yes, I’d love to come and talk about that.” A few months later, I was hired as an Assistant Director in their Career Center.

How do you think job searching has changed since you started your career?

When I first started, you could still get a lot of traction from simply applying to places. Submitting applications and writing a good cover letter was really important, and you could get a lot back from that.

Now, it’s rough. It really depends on…I don’t like to say “who you know” because it’s not about that. And even “who you’re connected with” isn’t quite the right way to put it. It’s about who you’ve worked with. Who have you connected with? Who have you built trust with? There’s so much uncertainty right now, and companies are very reticent to make bold hiring decisions. They want to make decisions that are rooted in trust and relationships more than simply looking at pieces of paper.

So yes, résumés are still paramount. You still 100% need a well-crafted résumé. Cover letters? Cover letters are required when they’re required. Even then, and this is a terrible statistic, only about 40% of companies actually read them. Which sucks, because cover letters aren’t easy to write. You put so much time into them, and then you realize there’s maybe a 40% chance that another human being actually reads it.

Now that everything has AI attached to it, I’m sure a lot of them are getting scanned automatically first. So you still need a good, strong base application, but it’s the networking piece that really gets you through. That’s been the biggest shift for me. It used to be that a strong application alone could get you meaningful feedback. Now, it really has to be the complete package plus networking.

What’s your take on how AI is changing the way students search for jobs, or present themselves to employers?

Searching for jobs is crazy. And I’ll be the first to admit, as a professional, I feel like I’m barely keeping up with the times. Everything is changing so fast. I met with a senior who had just graduated, and I asked, “How are you doing your job search? What are your search terms?” And he said, “Oh, I don’t search for jobs that way.”

He had built an app in Claude to scrape LinkedIn, Indeed, and another job site for positions matching specific keywords and job descriptions. Claude scraped those sites for him and then sent him an email every day with the results. I was like, “Oh, cool…what?” First of all, that’s brilliant. You just saved yourself however many hours a week because the computer does the searching and you just sift through what arrives in your inbox. That’s incredible.

And of course, I immediately have a million quality control questions. What might you be missing? How specific is it? There’s so much you can do with your degree, so how narrow or broad should those searches be? But I think that’s really becoming commonplace. You’re swapping traditional job search hours for AI and other support tools. I don’t know how I feel about it. I don’t want to deny it because the reality is that it’s here and it’s happening, but it’s all so new. If that student had come back and said, “Hey, I built this. Could you check it out? Do you think it’s good?” I’ll be honest, I don’t know that I know enough to give adequate advice on something like that.

And then there’s the application process itself. Applicant tracking systems have actually been around since the ’90s, so the idea of software pulling information from your résumé isn’t new. But they’re now being used almost everywhere. Every company has an applicant tracking system. They kick out something like 90% of applications, and the majority of those rejections are based on formatting, not content. You could be the best candidate in the pool, but if your résumé isn’t ATS-friendly, the system won’t read it properly. It won’t understand it, and you’ll get filtered out before your application ever reaches a human resources office.

I think that’s one of the biggest shifts on the employer side. Companies are relying heavily on ATS systems, which means the average applicant now has to learn how the system works, what an ATS-friendly résumé looks like, and how formatting affects whether they make it through. It’s all changing very, very fast.

What would you say are the most common misconceptions that students have going into the real world?

Certainly that everything is a straight line. We’d love it to be. I would love it to be. But then I think back and realize I was absolutely convinced I was going to be Dr. Gus Baxter, biological anthropologist, forensic anthropologist. And now, I mean, I’m 36, so I’m six years beyond that vision, and I don’t know that I’d be enjoying it now. I had to let life take me where it was going to go.

So, certainly, being open to that takes so much courage and so much resilience. I don’t want people to hear me talk about it now and think, “Oh, well, it must be so easy.” No. It’s terrifying. It’s absolutely horrible. It’s terrible. Trusting that the right thing is going to come along at the right time is incredibly difficult.

I’ve actually been talking with a lot of my colleagues about how to better explain this. Serendipity is a good word, but we also call it “planned happenstance,” where life is going to happen, and you never know where opportunity is going to come from. Yes, you should always be putting yourself out there, applying for jobs, and doing all those things. But for all you know, something is going to come completely out of left field that you didn’t even know was available. It’s because you keep putting yourself out there, keep talking to people, keep going to events, keep networking and having conversations, that you’re creating new pathways for those opportunities to come in, as opposed to just sitting by yourself applying to this job and applying to that job. You’re creating the space for these serendipitous moments to happen.

That’s hard to explain because it’s hard to quantify. It’s not something you can really measure or say, “If you do A, B, and C, this opportunity will appear.” It’s something much more ephemeral than that. But basically, keep putting yourself out there no matter what. There will be plenty of times when it feels like a waste or like it’s not doing anything. It is. You just don’t see the results right away, but it is making a big difference.

The last piece I’ll say is that your first job out of college is important, but it’s actually pretty low on the scale of importance. So many seniors I work with are hell-bent on getting the perfect job out of school. It’s a tricky conversation because I want to fuel that passion, and if you’re ready for it, I want to help push you toward those great opportunities.

However, and I mean this in the best way, you have no idea what you want.

You have no idea what you’re looking for. You have a very limited perspective on what’s out there and what’s possible. So I challenge them to ask, “What is the best job for me right now?” Because a year from now, you might look back and think, “Hey, this was great when I was 22 and had just graduated. Now things have changed. Maybe I’m looking to move out. Maybe my priorities are different. This job doesn’t work for me anymore.”

That’s not a critique of you as a professional. That’s you looking at your career holistically rather than as something that stands by itself. Your career has to fit in with everything else in your life. So there really is no be-all, end-all job. It’s just about finding the best fit for where you are right now.

Connect with Gus

• LinkedIn: @GusBaxter
• Get executive coaching from Gus