The chaotic job market and the skill to manage it

How to prepare yourself for an unpredictable job market, plus Sarah's exciting new venture

We’ve all seen the scary statistics.

• Unemployment for recent college grads sits at ~5.7% — elevated, with an underemployment rate of 41.5%.

• More than 40% of employed recent grads are working jobs that don’t require a college degree — the highest share since 2020.

• The economy has added an average of only 68,000 jobs per month so far in 2026, compared to 186,000 in 2024.

• Job openings dropped to 6.5 million at the end of 2025 — the lowest since September 2020.

There are a lot of people of all ages navigating this increasingly unstable job market. We try very hard here at Pantsuit Politics to acknowledge tough situations without giving in to the gloom and doom. So, today, instead of trying to explain a job market no one understands, we brought on Kim Miller to talk about how to navigate it.

PLUS, I have a very, very exciting announcement at the end of the show! -Sarah

title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0” allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen></iframe>

Topics Discussed

• Why the job market feels so chaotic right now: AI, economic uncertainty, mass layoffs, and even retirees re-entering the workforce
• Negotiation as the skill nobody teaches you — and why it matters more than ever
• Building relationships instead of "networking," and graduating with at least one good mentor
• Getting work experience before you graduate, paid or unpaid
• How to handle a job offer: asking for 48 hours and negotiating beyond base salary
• Outside of Politics: Sarah opens Meander Bookshop in Paducah

Want more Pantsuit Politics? Subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode and get access to our premium shows and community.

Episode Resources

• Etre Empowerment Consulting with Kim Miller — use code PANTSUIT for 15% off any service

• Meander Bookshop

• Meander on Bookshop.org

• Meander Bookshop on Instagram

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:02] Beth: This is Beth Silvers.

[00:00:19] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Last week, we asked in our Substack chat, “What is everyone struggling with?” And we got a resounding answer: the job market. Parents of recent college graduates, tech sector workers, people changing careers, we heard it all. And as luck would have it, we had today’s guest already scheduled to come here and talk through all of this. Kim Miller taught both Beth and I at Transylvania University, but in recent decades, she has developed an expertise in job negotiations. She has two young adults herself navigating job searches and has helped countless people and students find jobs, and she’s here to talk to me today about all of that. Outside of politics, Beth’s going to come back because I have a very exciting announcement to share with all of you.

[00:01:07] Beth: I cannot be part of the Kim Miller conversation because I’m driving my daughter to camp, but I do want to say that Kim Miller taught me about African burial art in a class in college, and I think about that class at least once a month, and have for 20 years. So I think she will be a wonderful person to discuss this with you. Thank you, Kim. Before she starts, I want to tell you about another facet, another dimension of our America 250 celebrations here at Pantsuit Politics. As I was working on the murder mystery party that we’ve been telling you about, I kept thinking about younger kids. It’s a sore spot around here that not all of the kids get to be part of the murder mysteries. But it’s just a certain level of maturity required for that kind of party.

[00:01:48] Sarah: It’s Murder. Murder’s in the title.

[00:01:50] Beth: Correct. America 250 is for everybody, and so I started working on something that I ended up calling the Founders Trunk, and the idea is that there are six stories that are interesting parts of America’s founding for the entire family to explore through living room plays. So I’ve suggested that you grab some wooden spoons to be oars to cross the Delaware. Just simple things that you have around the house to tell these stories. I’ve also tried to put in kid-friendly language where these stories are hard stories, where they’re contradictory, where they don’t include everybody. I start from the very beginning by telling you that the people coming from Europe were not the only people sharing this land. So it’s not heavy-handed or overwrought in any way. I hope that it gives you lots of interesting things to talk about in your house, and have lots of fun. And by the end, everybody gets a certificate that says they’re a founder, because we are all making America a more perfect union together. So the Founders Trunk is available to all of our premium members, along with the Murder Mystery, along with Reimagining Citizenship. We hope you’ll come be part of it.

[00:02:58] Sarah: Yeah. Come join us on Substack. All right. Up next, Kim Miller. Kim Miller, welcome to Pantsuit Politics. Guys, I was so chill in the intro. I was like, “Kim taught Beth and I at Transylvania.” That is not a full and accurate representation of the relationship I have with Kim. She was probably one of the most influential professors I had. She led the women’s studies department at Transy at the time, and changed my life in so many ways, including but not limited to she had her son, Gabe, while I was a student and she set me down the path to natural birth and a version of motherhood that I have-- I’m getting a little verklempt-- tried to institute in my own life. So she’s very important to me and I’m so happy that she’s here. Welcome.

[00:03:57] Kim Miller: Thank you, Sarah. It’s an honor to be here. I have memories of teaching you, or your class when I was nine months pregnant with a massive belly that hit the chalkboard before I did. And in fact, you were the one who told me “Your belly is full of chalk.”

[00:04:14] Sarah: That’s funny. Okay, so I’m so happy you’re here today.

[00:04:21] Kim Miller: Thank you.

[00:04:22] Sarah: We had a lot of people in the chat when we just asked generally about what was on people’s minds a few weeks ago say at the job market. So let’s start real high level. Because the reporting is insane and people’s experiences are very intense, and I know that you spend a lot of time in conversation with particularly young people looking at the job market. So what is your perspective on the weirdness right now going on in the job market?

[00:04:47] Kim Miller: Yes. So I do spend a lot of time talking to young people and their parents about careers and jobs, and there is a heightened level of confusion and panic about that for young people, but also including you. I have a lot of relationships with beloved alumni. And over the past couple years I’ve had a lot more of them coming back and wanting advice on either career changing or they’ve lost their jobs and what do they do next. So there’s definitely an increase in anxiety and confusion about that. And I want to say that it’s a really complicated moment to be a young person or to be the parent or a guardian of a young person. And I think that for a lot of people we just feel like we don’t know what to do. And so I would love to talk about the big picture, but also I do think that there are, like, actionable steps that people can do, young people but also old people like myself and parents. And I think that the support that parents and guardians are giving to young people right now needs to be a little bit different than it was in the past.

[00:05:57] Sarah: That’s interesting. Yeah. So what do you think is the weirdness going on? You’ll read AI’s taking all the entry level jobs. And then you’ll read, “No, they’re just using AI as an excuse to shift things around.” Or you’ll read, “No, this is about return to work and the work from home shift from COVID is going back to the office and that’s affecting entry level positions.” I feel like every day there’s a different story.

[00:06:17] Kim Miller: Yeah. So to be sure, so stepping back, so the headlines are scary. The advice is confusing and seems at times to be very contradictory. That’s why I think it helps to like talk. One of the things that I’m going to be pressing on the whole time is just having conversations with humans, like talking to people about their experiences. If you know somebody who was successful in getting a job, have a conversation with them. So part of this is that the advice is confusing, and we have to be careful about who we’re listening to or what we’re listening to if it’s not a human voice. And the job market is for sure changing. Confusion about AI. and one thing I will say about AI is that we do not yet know how AI is going to impact jobs. So there’s no clear advice or answer on that, but lots of doom and gloom headlines. So I just pulled out some of the language of some recent media coverage about jobs because I think this speaks to why we are reacting the way that we are. Here’s some language: The bleak job market. The grimmest job market in years. Job market panic. The Atlantic had an article, The Entry Level Job Market Is Breaking Down. So first of all even if you’re not looking for a job, that just sounds scary, right? And then I want to say that I think that this picture of uncertainty is intersecting with other big areas of uncertainty that we are also not used to. So one of those areas is political uncertainty. I do not need to tell you or your listeners about that.

[00:07:53] Sarah: Yeah, we’re well-versed on that here.

[00:07:54] Kim Miller: So there’s that. And then there’s also been mass layoffs across other sectors that were previously considered to be stable. Federal workers, look at all of the thousands of federal employees. Even if you look at the national parks alone, those were a lot of entry level jobs. Like that is not being part of this conversation, all of these layoffs. So federal workers, mass layoffs across higher ed, which is unprecedented in this country, mass layoffs across media, Washington Post journalists, even Stephen Colbert lost his job.

[00:08:33] Sarah: Yeah, and the tech sector. They’re doing big layoffs. And so that puts more people into the job market. You read that a lot. Those entry level jobs are highly competitive. Even we had parents in the chat talking about their teenagers couldn’t find summer jobs because even these low income, entry level jobs are getting taken by maybe higher level people that have been a part of these layoffs.

[00:08:54] Kim Miller: Yes, and not just that, but this wasn’t on my little list, but people who are retired are needing to come back. So I will confess that I get the magazine of the AARP sent to my house. And I will tell you that the most recent issue of the AARP magazine was about hourly summer jobs that retired people can pursue in order to boost their [crosstalk] and they’re all the summer jobs that the young people would also be going after. So think about those pressures, and then you have economic instability, which is causing employers to be a little bit gun-shy. Definitely risk-averse. So places that especially like in industries that would have been hiring previously are maybe putting a pause in it, or waiting. That is definitely a factor. And then of course there’s AI, and of course AI is a factor, even if it’s in creating uncertainty.

[00:09:33] Sarah: I hear a lot about AI in the job search process itself.

[00:09:54] Kim Miller: Yes. So the AI is completely I want to say wrecking the job search process itself. It is having a huge impact on the process of job seeking. Now, I do want to say that economists do not think that the struggles that young graduates, like young college grads who are trying to find entry level work, they do not think that those struggles are currently being caused by AI, but are more likely to be caused by sort of economic uncertainty. It’s about sort of a knee-jerk reaction to just blame AI for all of this, but big picture, there are a lot of different vectors that are impacting.

[00:10:35] Sarah: Yeah. There’s just a lot of moving parts here, and I think that’s what everybody’s experiencing. Everybody knows. Even the job report numbers, there’s like unemployment’s rising, but so are the job openings. It’s very confusing numbers and everybody knows something weird is going on. So this is where your skill set becomes very important. How did you get into advising on negotiation skills? How did you develop this skill that now you’ve turned into workshops and consulting and everything?

[00:11:07] Kim Miller: Yeah. So I like to say negotiation is the most important skill that nobody teaches you. And I was really lucky when I was in graduate school that somebody had a conversation with me about it. It’s not really something that is typically taught in a college classroom. Career services sometimes. Somebody in career services might advise a student or a young person to negotiate, but that’s very different from learning it as a skill, and it is something that can be learned as a skill. It’s critical to people’s economic futures. And also, when I talk or teach about it, I talk about it from a perspective of self-advocacy. Doing something where you are standing up for yourself in the workplace. You can think about negotiation as a conflict, but when I’m talking advising students or I even advise peers about how to negotiate. It’s really problem-solving. If you give me a job offer, you want to hire me, I want to say yes to the job, but we both have to come to a different kind of understanding in order to solve that problem, right? So it doesn’t have to be a source of conflict. It can be problem-solving. It can be a way of relationship building with your future employer. And that’s how it was presented to me when I was in grad school, and I just wound up being lucky to have a group of advisors and faculty who sat me down when I got my first offer, which was from Transy and who insisted that I negotiate. And I have to say one of the reasons why I do this, why I talk about this now, is because if you think about what are all of the things that you wish somebody had told you or taught you about, or told you to do, advice that they would give you when you were younger, this is a thing that I see people missing. So I’ll have alumni come back and say things like, “I wish I had known that I could have done that,” or peers who are other professors at other institutions who say, “I never did that, and if I had negotiated 30 years ago, I’d be able to retire on time.” And so I just think it’s something that falls through the cracks, but it’s a skill, and anybody can learn it and do it. And when I look in my classroom and see all of these promising, young faces and students who are ready to go out and find their purpose and their roles in the world, it’s a skill that I want to empower them with. I started doing it at Transy informally in classrooms, in office hours, and then it developed into really a consulting practice that I do.

[00:13:37] Sarah: I love that. Okay, so let’s go back, though, because I know people are like, yeah, negotiation, I need an offer before I can negotiate it. So when you’re advising young people right now in this super weird job market, or just anyone, what do you tell people about getting the offer to begin with, like navigating applying, navigating finding job listings, all of that part of the process?

[00:14:00] Kim Miller: So one of the things that is new that I’m saying to students and to parents now, and this includes parents of high school students because everything is being planned for earlier now. Parents of students who are younger are thinking about what’s going to happen to their kiddo when they graduate from college, as opposed to just, “Where should I send them and how will they get in?” But I do think that for college-age students and their parents, thinking about employability cannot be left until the last semester. And actually, that is different advice. In the past, I had this mindset of let’s teach them the skills, but also college is such a beautiful, important time for them to explore their social lives, to find out who they are, to figure out who they want to be in the world, maybe to do a semester somewhere else. And so I was holding back a little bit from really talking about thinking about employment, but I think we need to do that earlier now. So you should not wait until the last semester to start thinking about employability.

[00:15:04] Sarah: That’s probably good advice for anybody. If the job market is weird and you’re thinking about changing careers or you’ve gotten laid off, instead of just presenting yourself think about what part of my skillset, maybe not my exact job title says that I have employability in this particular moment or in this particular sector.

[00:15:24] Kim Miller: And so a lot of that is about how do we prepare for uncertainty, right? And so, again, we’re surrounded by uncertainty in all of these realms. We don’t know what the future holds politically. We don’t know what the future holds economically. We don’t know what the future holds in terms of AI and jobs. But there are still things that we can do now in this moment. And when I was a young professor, one of the best pieces of advice that a mentor gave me was, “Kim, you don’t know what the future possibility will be for you, but do whatever you can to make yourself ready for when it comes.” And I think that’s great advice for people of any age. If you’re want to change your career, but you’re not quite sure what direction you want to go in or what might be available for you, you can focus in the here and now on what kinds of skills you can develop, what kind of experience you can get, what kind of people you might need to form relationships with, to set yourself up so that when the interview comes, when the job ad appears, when the phone call comes to offer you the job, that you are ready at that moment.

[00:16:32] Sarah: I think all the time about Cal Newport’s piece he did right before he wrote his book. He was like, “Follow your passion is dumb advice. Build the skills.” Steve Jobs didn’t follow his passion. He built skills that were then applicable. And I tell my own kids that. I’m like, “How exactly was I supposed to follow my passion as a podcaster in 1999 when I started college when podcasting did not exist?” So I think seeing it as like a complex process where you’re building a particular set of skills over time. I think the paradox with the employability conversation is it’s this combination of you want to build skills for a job, but you don’t want to get locked in on the jobs so that you don’t present yourself as a person with skills. How do you balance that combination of, yeah, you want to be employable, you want to think about the careers and the jobs, but you also want to keep this sort of integrated big picture of yourself as a human inside this process?

[00:17:36] Kim Miller: I think that part of it is that, again, we don’t know what the future or the future of work will look like, but we do know that we can help young people prepare for change, right? We can help them prepare; we can help them develop resilience. We can help them prepare for a nuanced professional life. So pulling on what you said earlier I don’t think it serves young people at this moment to prepare them for a specific role or to prepare them for a specific job. Students need to be prepared for work, but not necessarily to be prepared for one. I think the future of work will need people who are good at solving problems, are good at collaborating. Sometimes we call these soft skills. I don’t like that they’re called soft skills because I actually think they’re really hard. And I think that at the moment that we’re in now, post-COVID, still close enough to COVID, with all of our work mediated by devices, the professor-student relationship has changed in many ways since you and I were in the classroom together. It’s mediated heavily through software. When you and I were together at Transy, students didn’t come to classes with their laptops and iPhones. You would’ve walked in and sat down and started talking to people. Now you walk in, and this is what [ crosstalk]. So I think we really need to push back, not necessarily on technology, but we need to help young people develop the kinds of, again, they’re called soft skills, but this is what employers are saying that they need and that they want. And it seems to be the direction to go in if we want to help young people be able to have the ability to pivot between jobs and careers in the future. So we want them to be able to evolve, to be adaptable, and a lot of that comes through the kinds of experiences and skills that you get, especially if you’re in a small college setting, talking to people.

[00:19:27] Sarah: With the dreaded word networking, which I think everybody kind of side-eyes. But that makes sense to me that people are struggling because if your experience is I think you nailed it with the mediated through software, and then you want the job search to just be mediated through software. Yeah. I’ll apply through Indeed, or I’ll apply through the internet. You watch these news items where somebody’s applied 100 times, and I’m like I’ve never gotten a job from cold applying like that. It’s always through relationships. Yeah. I tell people all the time a couple of the jobs I got in DC early, and this is a notoriously hard job market, the job I got at Hillary Clinton’s campaign was through other student who had a great network. And then the first job I got for Congress because one of my fellow classmates at Transy was an intern. You don’t necessarily have to know the boss. Just knowing anyone, even your peers within the organization, just somebody to get can be like, “This person’s not crazy,” goes a long way.

[00:20:23] Kim Miller: Yeah. I’m so glad you said peers because I think that and a lot of people don’t like the networking word. And so you use the word that I use which is relationships, right? When I present it this way, that’s what it is. It’s really about building relationships with people because your peer is going to reach out to you to tell you about a job opportunity, not because they’re in your like network, but because they care about you, or because they know what you’re looking for and then they hear about this opportunity and they think, “Oh, I know Sarah told me she’s looking for something like that.” And so part of the purpose of relationship building is also so people know what to look for you. And so that people care about you. I would say the two most important things that I would advise young people to cultivate when they’re in college or after or before, aside from learning how to negotiate, is cultivate your relationship building and find that among your peers, but also among your faculty and staff, and to have the goal of graduating from college with at least one really good mentor.

[00:21:33] Sarah: Yeah. That’s good.

[00:21:34] Kim Miller: Now that might seem obvious, especially because you went to a place where faculty really engage a lot with students and it’s part of the culture, right? But I recently saw this statistic that nearly half of graduating students now say that they do not have a faculty or staff mentor and they want one. And so students or young people might think, “Oh, a faculty member will reach out to me” but really it’s the young person who often needs to take the initiative. Show up for office hours. If you have a coach, that kind of develops a little bit naturally. Identify someone on campus who is a grown-up who will know you.

[00:22:12] Sarah: Yeah. And again, this is applicable even if you’re not a student.

[00:22:15] Kim Miller: Totally.

[00:22:15] Sarah: Find someone in the situation. This is why I always tell my boys as they read this stuff and they get freaked out, especially Griffin as he’s about to apply to college. I’m like, “Look, I can’t tell you what the job market’s going to be like when you graduate, but I can tell you if you move back to Paducah, I can get you a job.” That’s all I can promise. Absolutely. I know enough people. The town knows you. Your network here is good and strong, and we will figure it out. But I have a lot of empathy for people who are going into a big city and don’t know anybody or is trying to enter an industry without a lot of connections. I think that has to be exceedingly difficult.

[00:22:48] Kim Miller: Yeah. And especially because, again, even our work is so mediated with people doing remote jobs. So that’s one thing. And then the second thing is tied to relationship building or networking, and this is for young people. Get work experience before you graduate. So and I was just reading this study that was done with thousands of employers who were talking about early career work, but specifically like recent college grads, and they said that the number one factor that they are looking for in applicants is some kind of work experience while in college. And now I want to say that this can also sound scary, right? Because college is many things. Students are very busy. They have very fast-paced and fragmented lives. They’re doing their academic work, they’re meeting new friends, maybe they’re on a team, maybe they don’t have time for a job. So I want to say the job does not have to be paid. You can do volunteer work. You can do it one day a week. You don’t have to go overboard and make your life miserable by working while you’re doing all of these other commitments and responsibilities. But getting experience that somebody can write about in like a letter of recommendation. College campuses are amazing places to get work experience. I’ve had former students who worked in the office of the president. And if you think about all of the skills that you get, even like exposure to confidential information, discretion, so this kind of experience. I have students who have great careers in development and fundraising now, and they had a work study job in the advancement office when they were in college. So I think maybe young people don’t really realize how much this counts. Your future employer is not thinking about that as “Oh, that little campus job.” They are thinking about it as work experience that you have now on your resume. And so the work experience that you’re getting leads to relationships. So again, shifting back to maybe older people who are looking for a new job or who got laid off from their job, you can also get experience as a grownup by volunteering for an organization, by serving on a board.

[00:25:09] Sarah: Yeah, that’s true. People forget that it doesn’t matter as long as you’re showing up and being a committed volunteer or just a person who’s not flaking goes a long way these days, I think.

[00:25:22] Kim Miller: It really does. And you’re part of a new network and you’re part of a new community. I was talking to a client recently and made the comment that you have your own network. You’re like a spider with like your own web. And then as soon as you talk to one other person, you become part of their web. And it really it is truly the best thing that you can do. I work with a lot of young people who are getting jobs. I am seeing many young people who are new college grads who are getting jobs, and I think it’s important for us to tell those stories. I’ll know people who are struggling with their jobs or who have been laid off from their jobs or who are miserable with their jobs, but let’s share the success stories as well. Yeah. And all of the success stories that I could share with you, they all have those two things. They all got experience while they were in college, and if they couldn’t find a job after college, they volunteered or they did an unpaid internship, and they got that experience so that it could lead to a job, and they built relationships. And you have to cultivate those relationships.

[00:26:28] Sarah: Like you can’t just show up at an unpaid internship and think I’m going to get a job via Hannah Horvath on the first episode of Girls.

[00:26:34] Kim Miller: Exactly. And that’s also something to learn. Like, how do you cultivate a relationship? When you graduate from college it might feel weird to write to your professor a year later to share information with them. We love that. We love it when you reach out to us and let us know that you valued your time in our class and you would like a little bit of help. Part of our job is to help you long after you have graduated and left our classroom. And so I think that’s also a message that doesn’t get heard, or people think like why would I email my professor? But maintain that relationship because when I know what my alumni are looking for, I can help them.

[00:27:14] Sarah: And I think that’s true, like you said, with the spider and the web. People want to help.

[00:27:18] Kim Miller: Yeah. People want to help and it’s a hard time.

[00:27:35] Sarah: Okay, so let’s say you’ve made it through the process and now you have an offer. What are your top three negotiation either mistakes people make or things you want people to focus on when it comes to negotiating that job offer itself?

[00:27:52] Kim Miller: Okay. The first thing I want to say is I want to underscore again, like, how important negotiation is in this cultural, economic moment because imagine you are, like, a 20-- So this is a real person, a real young man who I was just working with. A 24-year-old who had been unemployed for a year, has a great college degree, got a job right out of college, but it was a one-year role, and then was, like, a dry spell. Applied for jobs every day. Applying. So imagine you’re this person. Then he gets a job. You go through interviews, and also the interviewing process for entry-level people now seems to be tougher. More layers, more people. I think that Zoom plays a role in this because it’s easier for employers to knock off a few Zoom interviews. So, anyway, so he goes through four rounds of interviews and then he gets the job. And if you can imagine, in that moment what do you want to do?

[00:28:55] Sarah: You just want to go, “Yes.”

[00:28:56] Kim Miller: You just want to say, “Yes.” You want to be done with this. You’re so relieved, and you’re so happy. You want to tell your friends. And so the number one piece of advice I would say when you get that call is to say, “Thank you so much.” Be honest and be your true self. “I am so excited about this. I am so happy that you have called. I’m so happy to receive the offer. I would love 48 hours to consider the offer. Is it okay if I call you back in two days?”

[00:29:30] Sarah: That would be so hard if you’ve been applying for a year.

[00:29:35] Kim Miller: It is so hard, and this is true in all times. I have coached so many people who got a great offer, and they’re so happy, and they’re so relieved. You just got to stick it out for two more days, all right? You have to wait for two more days because for a couple reasons, Sarah. One is that the majority of employers in this country are expecting people to negotiate.

[00:29:58] Sarah: Even in a tough job market.

[00:30:01] Kim Miller: Even in a tough job market. So they’re expecting you to negotiate, and the majority of people who are receiving offers do not. So that is a lot of money left on the table, right? And so the one thing I would say is envision yourself in the moment when you finally get the good news and you want to have your appropriate emotional response, and then you want to get to business. If you have not figured out how to negotiate before this moment, this is not your moment. This is something that you want to do earlier.

[00:30:35] Sarah: You need to have called Kim already.

[00:30:36] Kim Miller: You need to work with a negotiation coach. It can be me, it can be anybody, but you have to talk to somebody about the negotiation and be ready for it. And it’s also just like you rehearse before you do a job interview, you want to rehearse for the negotiation. Now, I do not recommend you rehearse with AI. I think AI can be a useful tool in maybe giving you some ideas about things you can negotiate for. I can also do that. One of the things that I think especially young people who haven’t had a salary job yet don’t realize is that there are things beyond salary that you can negotiate for. And also, that’s part of knowing who you are and knowing what your values are. So when I came to Wheaton, where I teach now, from Transylvania where I met you, I had a infant and I had a toddler, and I had a spouse with a career, and I knew that I needed to negotiate on behalf of my family before salary. So that was something that I was really grateful that I had figured that out before I was in the moment of negotiating. So I negotiated for things like housing so that I could be close to my job and support my kids and that sort of thing. Figuring out in advance what you want to negotiate and understanding that you can negotiate more than just base salary; although, the general advice is that base salary is the most important thing to negotiate because that will increase. So if you’re starting your career earning $60,000 and you get a 5% raise at the end of the year, that’s going to look very different if you’re starting with 65,000. That’s important information for a young person to know. I also talk to them about how to understand total compensation. You would be shocked by how many people don’t even know how to read the paperwork about their benefits package, their health insurance. I know employers that are hiring young people now and they’re not even having conversations about retirement like 401ks even though they offer them. Sarah, there’s so much knowledge that is assumed or presumed to be just out there, but again, it falls through the cracks. It is not taught unless you’re maybe hearing it from a parent, or a neighbor or a coach or your minister, somebody else who works with young people who’s sharing it.

[00:32:58] Sarah: And I just think that’s a stressful situation to be in as a parent. I have a listener who we’re working with for college admissions because I just think the processes have gotten so intense to have an expert. And also with your kids, it just becomes very emotional. And often they don’t want to hear your advice. They want to assert their own independence and their own decision-making, and so I think always having someone else there for them to talk to who they feel like is an expert but not mom or dad, I think is just huge. I think it’s been very helpful. I absolutely will be calling you up when Griffin gets closer to this situation. Because I just think it’s really an investment that pays off and giving your children-- and especially, even yourself. Like I said, I don’t think this always has to be young people out of college. I think if you took the first job that was offered to you out of college, and now you’re switching careers, you need a refresher. It’s like everything is different. Having a coach to say “Wait, this is now the process. This is what they’re expecting. Like all of that, it’s just always so overwhelming. And I think to the AI of it all, the more we can find the actual human being who can look at us and treat us like a human being, especially if the job process is getting more and more kind of opaque behind software and technology, the better.

[00:34:14] Kim Miller: Yes. And that’s another great example of why as much as we can lean on our human relationships we need to do that because I agree with what you said earlier, something that you said earlier about adults who are sending out all of these cold applications and hearing nothing. People are being ghosted by recruiters or ghosted by HR offices or ghosted by employers. It might not be possible to lean on a human all the time, but as much as you can cultivate that, I think that is probably one of the strongest things that we can do. And also, parents can talk to each other, right? In ways that maybe they hadn’t done before, about jobs for youth and maybe jobs for themselves, but also about higher ed. The higher ed landscape is shifting rapidly. I mean, never before have we had a federal government that has wanted to destroy us. I also have a lot of clients who are parents of kids the age of your kids who don’t know does it make a difference where I send my child? What kind of college is giving support for careers? What kinds of colleges are eliminating departments right now? Those are the headlines that I wake up to every morning. But it really makes it a very difficult territory for parents to navigate.

[00:35:30] Sarah: Yeah. That’s why we wanted you to come here because we believe in relationships here at Pantsuit Politics. As we always say, all we have is each other. So I know you have a little special offer for our listeners. But tell people the stuff that you do offer if they want to reach out to you after this episode.

[00:35:45] Kim Miller: Thanks. So I have a consulting practice that I have named Etre Empowerment Consulting, and I’ll send you the link for your show notes. But for listeners who might not know, the word Etre is the French verb which means to be. To be. And so part of what I love about being a professor and about being a mom is watching young people figure out who-- No w I’m going to get a little verklempt- - who they want to be in the world. What is their purpose in the world? And those are the conversations that I have through my consulting work. And so on campus we have office hours. I have office hours that I have opened up to anyone, who can come in to. It can be talking about jobs or colleges or just problem-solving for anything. And then specifically for negotiation, I run a negotiation clinic which a lot of people have purchased as gifts for graduation presents. I’ve had parents of high school students interested in it, again, because if you send your kids to college and they know how to negotiate or advocate for themselves, they’re doing that. They’re seeing situations as they become an adult where they can use their voice and speak up for themselves. Again I’m approaching it as problem-solving. Not as “Let’s teach your kid how to have conflict with their boss.” Let’s teach some self-advocacy and problem-solving techniques. And so I have a clinic, and it’s 75 minutes, and it’s on Zoom, so people from all over the world can sign up for it. And I would love to give your listeners 15% discount for anything. Any services, any time, no expiration. The code’s PANTSUIT.

[00:37:19] Sarah: And look, when you were saying that I was just thinking for everyone. Yes, it is an incredibly chaotic time, but chaos is an opportunity. Now, is it expensive and stressful and hard? Absolutely. But I think in those moments where you feel like everything is changing, it can be an opportunity to change yourself, and I think having as much support as possible and leaning on the people around you and talking about that’s what I was happy to see happen in the chat, people sharing, “Yes, that’s what I’ve experienced. Yes, we’re seeing that too.” I think all of that is just key, and I was just so happy that this worked out for you to come and share your expertise and your skills with our audience, and just thank you so much.

[00:38:01] Kim Miller: Thanks for inviting me. Thank you so much.

[00:38:18] Sarah: Beth, I’ve been keeping a secret. Not from you but from-

[00:38:21] Beth: Which means I’ve been keeping a secret, too, and that’s hard .

[00:38:23] Sarah: That’s true. Okay.

[00:38:24] Beth: Actually, it’s not hard. I’m a good secret keeper.

[00:38:26] Sarah: You are. You are a good secret keeper. Okay, here is the secret. Guys, I have opened a bookshop in Paducah, Kentucky inside our local coffee shop, Piper’s Tea and Coffee. It is called Meander Bookshop. Let me tell you how it started. Let me tell you this first. I want to do Pantsuit Politics until I die, Beth. Maybe longer than you. I think you’d like to retire. I’m happy to do it right up until the end. I don’t want to do it from my house forever. You understand what I’m saying?

[00:39:00] Beth: I probably better than anyone understand what you’re saying. I do.

[00:39:05] Sarah: So this is where this all started. I would like to get on a path to maybe having a little storefront with a podcast studio eventually so that I don’t have to hang out in this closet for the second half of my life. You know what I’m saying?

[00:39:21] Beth: I do.

[00:39:22] Sarah: So I’d been thinking about this because we have this incredible executive producer, Lisa, who owns The Bookshelf on Church, and she started as a little bookshelf in a coffee shop, which I thought was phenomenal.

[00:39:35] Beth: So smart.

[00:39:35] Sarah: And so Piper’s, which is this longtime business, I’m very close friends with the owners, they moved into a bigger space, and I thought, man, this place could use a bookshelf. Just a little bookshelf. It’s such a fun idea. Wouldn’t take up all this time. What if I did a bookshelf? So I met with Amber, the co-owner of Piper’s, and I said, “I have this idea.” And she’s “Oh my God, we’ve been wanting to do this.” Alas. They were like, “How about instead of a bookshelf, you take this whole little space right here and just make a little micro bookshop?” And for some God-forsaken reason, Paducah does not have an independent bookstore. We got a Books-A-Million, but not an independent bookstore. And so it just felt like this opportunity that I’d been thinking about really came together in a very lovely way. And so I soft opened over the weekend. I do not have enough books yet, but I’m getting there. And I opened on Friday, and have been selling books from Meander Bookshop inside Piper’s ever since.

[00:40:55] Beth: It’s so exciting. Tell us why Meander? Where’d the name come from?

[00:40:59] Sarah: Because meander is a river term. It’s what a river does. It can meander along the shore. I like the idea of meandering through pages. I also feel like it scoops up a little of my travel that I do, my travel itineraries which have lived under my literary Substack. So Meander Bookshop. And you’re going to love this one, the logo is designed by none other than Pam Huber, who designed our very first Pantsuit Politics logo. She designed my very first parenting blog, Salt and Nectar, one of my favorite logos of all time. So I reached back out to Pam and I was like, “Pam, you’re on deck. It’s time to work your magic as you always do when I start something new.” And so I love the logo. I’ve got it up on the window. I’ve got a little table out front with all the fun summer reads. And the shelves are really stocked with... There’s fiction and nonfiction and memoir are my favorite genre. But it’s either something I’ve read and loved or something someone I know and trust has read and loved. So I reached out to you and said, “What books would you always have on the shelf?” Fun fact, half of those books you picked out have already sold.

[00:42:03] Beth: I’m smart that way.

[00:42:04] Sarah: You are.

[00:42:05] Beth: I was so happy to see a book of poetry in your first customer’s hands. I was like, “Yes, these are my people.”

[00:42:09] Sarah: Yeah. And you picked up The Body: An Owner’s Manual, that sold. So I like the idea of every book is there because a person recommended it, not an algorithm.

[00:42:17] Beth: Yeah, that’s so nice. And, of course, I have a Google Doc going of unsolicited ideas for how to use the space. I love a project. And a physical space is exciting.

[00:42:25] Sarah: It’s very exciting.

[00:42:26] Beth: Physical space is a totally different energy than what we get to do here, and so I can’t wait to come see it.

[00:42:33] Sarah: Yeah, you’re going to have to come see it this summer. I’m not going to be able to wait very long for you to come. 

[00:42:37] Beth: I know. I’m trying to figure out when I can get down there, because I really do want to be there early so I can kind of see how it develops over time.

[00:42:48] Sarah: Yeah, it evolves. Definitely stop by if you’re in Paducah. I will be in there. The best part about this is that I don’t have to be in there all the time. If I’m not there, you can just grab a book and pay for it with your coffee. That’s the best part of this whole entire business plan. I don’t have to do staffing. If you’re not going to get to Paducah anytime soon, I have a bookshop.org Meander Bookshop link I’ll put in the show notes, along with a link to the Instagram and the website and all the fun things that you get to set up in this day and age, like the Facebook. And I’m going to post a lot of my recommendations and books that will always be on the shelf at Meander, like When Bad Things Happen to Good People. That’s a book that will always be on the shelf there, and novels. And it’s so fun to finally go through this list of books that have meant so much to me and be like, “Okay, that’s the one. I’m ordering that one. That’s going to be on the shelf always.” Jane Austen’s going to have her own very special shelf featuring the books that influenced her and the books she’s influenced. So it is fun. It’s fun to have a new creative outlet and to think about this. Obviously, I’m a massive reader. It’s something I do all the time. It’s something I think about all the time, so I’m really excited. I’m a child of a librarian. It’s probably my Path always.

[00:44:05] Beth: That’s what I’ve thought this whole time. You’ve been preparing for this your whole life. This just pulls together all the strings of things that you enjoy and are passionate about. I’ve heard you talk about Pipers like you own it for years. So this place that you love in the hometown that you love, with books something you love, it’s all things Sarah coming together in one place. It’s exciting.

[00:44:26] Sarah: I’m getting a little teary. But yeah, I am really excited. And it came together very fast. So if you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, how could I not know about this?” It’s because it came together in the last-- I’m not even playing-- month and a half. It came together very quickly once I talked to Amber, and they’re like, “Yes, please, come use this space.” And Lisa has been incredible helping me and helping me navigate this whole entire universe that is brand-new to me. It’s very exciting. And people are very excited to come in and see it’s there and see that there are books that a person has read and can recommend to you. It’s going to be a really great place for me to channel all my mentionitis, Beth. You know I get it real, real bad. I’ve already sold two copies of John and Paul: A Love Story. Got to Order some more because you know how obsessed with that book I was.

[00:45:08] Beth: I know you are.

[00:45:09] Sarah: I got Beth reading it. Totally obsessed with it. So it’s a really good way to finally be like, “Yes, I can get all these people to read these books I’m obsessed with.” I’ve got to figure out how to get them back in to tell me if they like the book. That’s the thing. I’m giving them the book, but I’m like, “But you got to text me or Instagram me because I want to know when you get to this part what you thought, and when you get to this part what you thought.”

[00:45:29] Beth: Okay. As you’re not at all business partner in this venture.

[00:45:33] Sarah: You’re my creative director. My volunteer creative director.

[00:45:36] Beth: I am. I do not want everyone texting you about it, but I am going to put in my Google Doc some ideas about how people could give you their feedback and be part of the whole scene.

[00:45:43] Sarah: I’m, like, so obsessed, because you know I love these books so much. I passed over a copy of Inheritance this morning, and I was like, “You’re going to get to a part, it’s going to involve Jared Kushner’s grandmother. I’m going to need you to tell me when you hit that part because it’s a part of that book I still think about all the time.” She’s like “Okay.” I’m just so into it I want to sit down beside them when they get to the part, I’ll be like, “ wasn’t I right about that part?”

[00:46:08] Beth: Let me watch you read and guess when you’re on page 62.

[00:46:10] Sarah: Yes, a little bit. A little bit. So it’s very exciting. I can’t wait for this community to find out and hopefully come to Paducah and stop by and buy a book. And I know that this community’s going to be crazy supportive and have all kinds of ideas just from the comments. I got to work my way through the comments from Friday on the Time Confetti, because it became a book recommendation list, and I’m like crap, now I got to get all these books for the bookshop,” because I definitely trust everyone in our audience and what they’re reading. So I can’t wait to hear from everybody. The links for, like I said, the website and the bookshop and the Instagram will be in the show notes. Thank you for joining us. Thank you to Kim Miller for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. We will be back in your ears on Friday, and until then, keep it nuanced y’all.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.