When we seek a job, we are looking for someone to hire us. But maybe that’s backward. Perhaps we should view it as hiring our next job.

“When you decide to work somewhere, you are hiring your employer, consciously or not. You are choosing how and where to spend your precious time and what compensation you’ll accept for it. You are choosing the work you’ll do and with whom you’ll do it,” Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein, Harvard Graduate School of Education teacher Michael B. Horn and innovation consultant Bob Moesta write in Job Moves.

You will have to make trade-offs, of course, between the various things you are seeking and what the organizations you are hovering around are offering. There is no magical, perfect job, they stress. But the system they have pioneered is based on the notion that you are steering the ship that is your job search, not letting the waves of happenstance and other people’s needs determine your final location.