Welcome to Hiring For Good, a podcast presented by Acumen Executive Search exploring the transformative power of leadership—and what happens when the right person takes the job. In this episode, co-hosts Suzanne Hanifin (President, Acumen Executive Search) and Tanis Morris sit down with Mac Prichard, founder of Mac’s List—Oregon’s premier job board and a nationally recognized career resource.
About Mac Pitchard: Mac Prichard is the founder and publisher of Mac’s List, a regional job board that helps people find jobs that matter. Mac’s List was founded in 2001 and became a Certified B Corporation in 2017. Mac is also the author of Land Your Dream Job Anywhere and Land Your Dream Job in Portland and the host of the top Apple-ranked career advice podcast, Find Your Dream Job. From 2007 to 2023, Mac owned and operated Prichard Communications, a social change public relations agency that worked with philanthropies, nonprofits, and public agencies across the country.
Previously, Mac was a communications director in Oregon, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC. Mac has a master’s in public administration from Harvard University and a bachelor’s in political science from the University of Iowa.
Topics Discussed: – Owning Your Career Path: Mac shares how periods of unemployment taught him the importance of clarity, networking, and taking charge of your own professional journey.
– Hiring with Intention: The conversation explores how values, mission alignment, and clear expectations are essential for successful hiring and team-building.
-The Origin of Mac’s List: Mac reflects on how a simple act of service—sharing job postings—evolved into a mission-driven business connecting people to meaningful work.
Mac’s List Website : https://www.macslist.org/
Mac Pritchard’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/macprichard
Hiring For Good Website: https://www.hiringforgood.net/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hiring-for-good-podcast/id1725208602
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/288s2urueV7xjlsFoYW8QN
Acumen Executive Search Website: https://www.acumenexecutivesearch.com/
Tanis Morris: Director of Business Development at Acumen Executive Search Email: ta***@***********************ch.com
Suzanne Hanifin: President at Acumen Executive Search Email: su*****@***********************ch.com
Hiring for Good is presented by Acumen Executive Search. Acumen Executive Search is the leading certified woman-owned Executive Search and advisory Firm on the West Coast.
Acumen sources, attracts, and qualifies world-class executive and management talent for organizations to support them in achieving their organizational goals. Due to their focus and local network, which is both broad and deep, we are able to leverage best practices across a broad range of industries. We employ an equity lens throughout the recruitment process.
Hiring for Good Transcript
Well, hello. I am Suzanne Hanifin with Acumen Executive Search and once again I’m with my lovely, lovely co-host Tanis Morris, also from Acumen.
Good morning.
Good morning, Tanis. Well, we are thrilled to have Mac Pritchard join us today. For over 23 years, Mac has been helping people and organizations in the Pacific Northwest looking for jobs or finding the right person for their openings in their jobs through Mac’s List.
Mac’s List is a regional job board and the premier source of passionate, creative professionals to find meaningful and rewarding work. Whether that’s through job postings, career advice, online courses, Mac networking events, which Acumen has participated in, and through his weekly Find Your Dream Job podcast, which celebrates its 10th year this year. So, congratulations Mac.
We are hoping Mac will share his journey with us, how his personal lessons he has learned along the way. Mac’s List is a B Corp and are doing their part to making the hiring process more human. So welcome Mac.
Well, thank you for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure to be here. I am super excited because 23 years having Mac’s, which most people in Oregon and Washington, especially Southwest Washington, know of you. Tell us your journey and how you got to where you are today.
Well, I’m an accidental job board operator. That’s what Mac’s List is, a job board. It’s a niche site. And I came to this work, Suzanne and Tanis, after a career in communications working for nonprofits, government, and elected officials. So, when I got out of the University of Iowa a long time ago, I wanted to do three things. I wanted to get paid to write for a living. I wanted to work on political campaigns. And I wanted to do human rights advocacy on Latin American issues. And by my mid-20s, I’d done all three of those things.
And it turns out that if you’re going to run a successful job board, you’ve got to be good at building community. And so the skills I learned as a communications professional and as a political organizer were the perfect background for doing that.
Well, I’m sorry, but this is already so interesting. We’re going to have to just stop and go back for a second. Please say a little bit more about writing for a living and working on human rights campaigns in Latin America if you don’t mind. Would you mind just expanding on that? That’s very interesting.
Sure. So when I finished my undergraduate degree, I worked on a US Senate race in Iowa. Okay. And this is a long time ago. It was way back in 1980. We were working for the Democratic incumbent and we lost to Senator Chuck Grassley who’s still there decades later. But that experience—we did door-to-door political organizing—taught me a lot about talking with others and listening above all.
And I always loved to write, and I’d done an internship in college in Washington, DC, with a human rights organization that pitched stories about human rights issues in Latin America to national and international media. So that’s where I learned how to write a news release, how to talk to reporters, put together news conferences and reports, and edit a newsletter.
And that led to a position in Boston where we took members of Congress on fact-finding trips to Central America. Again, this was in the 1980s. And I was responsible for the logistics of the trip. We would move groups of 15 to 20 people through three countries over the course of a couple of weeks. And it was like doing advance for a political campaign.
Oh, sure. Was that like, were you in Guatemala? Wasn’t there all that unrest in Guatemala at that time?
There were civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Oh, Nicaragua is what I was thinking.
The United States was investing a lot in the region. So, the organization I worked for had done development work in Central America in the 1970s. And my boss thought if policymakers could see what he had seen and talk to the same people, they would come to different conclusions about US policy. So we would put together these trips that would involve meetings with the head of the state, the US embassy, but we could also set up appointments with leaders of the armed opposition in another country as well as with human rights groups.
Wow. And so again, you’re heading down this path. How did that bridge to Mac’s List? You know, it seems like a mile chasm.
It’s a great point, Suzanne. So I thought all of these jobs came easy. I got the campaign job by responding to a newspaper ad.
Oh, wow.
Right. And the position in Washington DC came from doing a college internship. I’d shown what I could do. The employer liked me, invited me to come back. And the position in Boston came from just reaching out to my network and asking about opportunities.
So in my mid-20s, when I left the job in Boston, I thought, “Oh, the next job will come easily.” And it did not. And I had a long period of unemployment. Eventually I found another job working for a big transportation project in Boston called the Big Dig. And I came to that position after talking with a career counselor at Northeastern University where my wife worked because I was unemployed for a year.
Wow.
And what was happening was I did not know what I wanted to do next. I could do fundraising. I could do communications. I could do politics. And I would get interviews but I would never get offers because employers could pick up on the fact that I was uncertain. And you both know that employers want to hire people who are excited about their mission, about their job, and want to invest in their organization. And I didn’t have that clarity.
So how did that lead to Mac’s List?
That experience as well as another period of unemployment in my 30s taught me the value of not only learning job search skills but being an effective networker and doing networking throughout my career. And good networkers, as you both know, don’t only ask for help—they serve others.
Yes.
And they give without expecting to get anything in return.
Yeah.
And so my way of doing that—later after I moved to Oregon and I found other ways to do it in my 30s and 40s—but I had a position in state government in Oregon in the late ’90s and I left it for a position in Portland. And I wanted to stay in touch with my network in state government in Oregon. And so my way of doing that was to share job postings. And I did it informally for almost a decade before I turned it into a business.
But nobody would object to getting a job post.
Absolutely. Everybody wants to know what’s out there.
Yeah.
And we all get them and we’ve all sent out that email that says, “Hey, you know, we’re hiring. Help me find my new boss,” or whatever the message might be.
I probably got more than most, and over time people started sending me postings and I didn’t know them at all. And so I found myself, after creating a public relations agency in the early 2000s, paying a member of my staff to send out these postings and that’s when I turned Mac’s List into a business.
Okay. I’m fascinated. So you’ve already, in our very brief conversation thus far, spoken about multiple formative experiences, which is our next question. So you’ve discussed your early ambition and how some of those experiences really set you up to understand the value of communications. You’ve talked about being unemployed. You talked about serving others just to be a good human and how that kind of opened up doorways. You can expand upon those experiences as really formative in helping shape how you think about leadership, or if there are others you wish to share with us, we’d love to hear.
Well, two thoughts come to mind. One is I think we all need to be leaders in our own careers. And too often—and I made this mistake early in my career as well—we think that we’re not clear about what the next job might be, and we start applying for positions. We need to be leaders of our own careers by figuring out what it is we want to do next and throughout our career.
And as you both know, we’re likely going to change careers five or six times in the course of the 40-plus years many of us will be in the workplace. So you’ve got to recognize that and embrace it. And as the leader of your own career, learn the skills you’re going to need and do the planning and figure out the answers to the questions that are going to be in the minds of the employers that we talk to. And if we do that, we’re going to not only have an easier and shorter job search, we’re going to have much more rewarding and satisfying careers.
Oh, absolutely. You know, it’s so funny that you say that because that’s our number one first piece of advice. Figure out what you want to do, because right now with applying—and especially at the level of placements we do—it’s a lot of work to apply. It’s a lot of work to write that cover letter and to make sure all that information is there. And if it’s something you’re not excited about, wouldn’t you much rather spend your time doing something else that you want?
Right? And I love that whole intentionality of your career of saying, “Here’s where I want to go. What are the steps I need to get there?” And I think that’s really—people don’t think strategically about themselves.
The other thing I think is interesting is, you know, we speak to very highly accomplished individuals who’ve reached a certain point in their career where they’re typically going for a very high-level role.
When someone like that is going through a career change or maybe has, you know, for the first time in many years, is actually actively having to look for a job—I think what’s interesting is they’re so accomplished that they’ll read what’s available and think like, “I could do that, I could do that, I could do that,” instead of starting with: what kind of team do I want to work with, what kind of value, where do I find the most joy in my work, and how can I align with the right kind of company?
That for me is a red flag when someone says, “I could do that job.” And I say this with kindness and respect: yes, you probably could, but what’s the job you really want to do? Because when you figure that out, you’ll probably—you will—start getting offers. Because people who say, “I could do that job,” and again, I did this early in my career as well, you invest way too much time in applying for positions that you could do rather than the ones that you want to do.
Right. Yes.
And people who run agencies like yours—I mean, you both are experts at looking at someone’s application—and you can tell if they’re just exploring. And you can tell when someone is certain about what they want to do next.
So, to your earlier question about formative experiences, there are really two that have shaped me as a leader. One was those two periods of unemployment—cashing the last unemployment check once. And that takes 30 weeks, Tanis. So that’s a long time. And I came within one check of doing it a second time. And that was after I got a fancy degree from Harvard In public administration, which I thought would make me eminently employable—and it does—but if you’re not clear about what you want, it doesn’t matter what your credentials are.
And I think the second formative leadership experience was starting my own companies, because in my early career and mid-career I didn’t think I was an entrepreneur. And I think we’re all entrepreneurs of our own careers and our lives when we take charge of them.
One of the experiences I had when I was starting my public relations company, which I ran successfully for years—I thought, I have to find an office, I have to hire staff, I have to set up systems. I’d done all this working on political campaigns in my 20s and 30s. And it felt like working for a candidate was perfect preparation for starting a small business, because in the end, there are a lot of parallels.
It starts with a conversation around a kitchen table. You’ve got to raise money. If you’re a candidate, you ask friends and family, and you do the same if you’re starting your business. You’ve got to make a case for why people should vote for you if you’re running for office—or buy your services if you’re selling. And in the end, in a political campaign, there’s election day: you know whether or not you made the sale.
Then, in politics, you’ve got to shut that whole campaign down and start all over again if you continue to do that work. I went through that process four or five times. So it was the perfect preparation for starting a business.
But I would also say, when you take charge of your own career, you’re being an entrepreneur too. You mentioned earlier, Tanis, that you work with senior people who often haven’t looked for a position for some time—and that’s not uncommon. Job search can be an infrequent event, and it often is uncomfortable to go out and look for work. So it’s not surprising that many people, when they get that position, say, “Oh, I’m glad that’s behind me. I don’t have to think about that now.” But you will have to.
And whether it’s three or five years in the future—or 15 or 20—you should invest the time to learn those skills and keep them up to date, and do the planning that is going to allow you to be a leader not only in your own career but be an entrepreneur as well. Because no job lasts forever, right? And it shouldn’t. Because we all learn and evolve and we want to do different things. So you have to get ready for that day.
Yeah. And I think the other side of that coin is not only knowing what you want to do, but what values you hold close—and then to align those values with the organization. Or, if you’re starting a business, to make sure those values are embedded into those processes. So, being an entrepreneur or being an employer—what values are important to you and how have you operationalized those?
Well, we talked about service to others. That’s been a central value for me throughout my career, whether I’m working for others or running my own companies. Wanting to make a difference in the community where I live and work, and on issues I care about, has also been important. And I think we’re clear about the values that matter to us at Mac’s List. You can find them on our website, but most importantly I think we do practice those values.
That’s why we are a certified benefit corporation—part of that global movement of business as a force for social good. And when you’re clear about the values you practice as an employer, you not only attract great people, but you attract the clients you want to serve as well. And whatever your values might be, you just need to communicate them—because some people will be attracted to them and others won’t be interested. And that’s okay. It’s a big world.
I think way too often, whether it’s in business or in careers, people get paralyzed by the unlimited choices that are available to us. I mean, there are indeed tens of thousands of jobs on Indeed and LinkedIn. We have only hundreds on Mac’s List, but there are a lot of choices. But you really need to focus on what matters to you—both in terms of your values and your own personal and professional goals.
Well, I think that’s such a lovely sentiment to kind of infuse your work life with. I like the idea that you spoke about being kind of the captain of your own vessel, whether you’re working for others or working for yourself.
The next question that we ask our guests is about how you successfully build teams. And I’m really interested in your response to this because I suspect it’s going to be multi-faceted. Not only have you built your own teams as a business leader, but you have supported so many people in joining teams. And you’ve supported organizations in hiring. So you’re truly an expert on this front, and I would love to know: best practices for building teams—what are the kind of benchmarks that are going to set both company and candidate up for success?
To further expand upon that, you can speak to that as your own hiring manager and also just what you’ve witnessed and observed. But then I’d also be interested in hearing maybe a firsthand story about a hiring that either was phenomenal or maybe took a turn for the worse—and then hearing your thoughts on that.
Well, I think that as an employer you need to be clear about your mission and your values. And you need to use plain language—put it on the website—but most importantly, you need to practice it.
And then—I expect I’m speaking to the choir here when it comes to recruitment—but don’t dust off the job posting and just put it out there. Be crystal clear about what it is you want the person who takes this position to do. There’s a set of problems that are keeping you up at night. You need to describe them and be clear about the outcome you want. And do that not only in the posting but in the interviews.
All too often, because people haven’t been trained in hiring and recruitment, they ask general questions. They have general job postings. And those kinds of recruitments—because you’re not clear about the problem you want solved and the person you need—often go south.
So I think that’s key. If you do that, you will attract the people who are excited about your mission and your values and have the skills and the background you need for the position you’re trying to fill.
You asked about a hiring that went wrong. One of the first hires I made when I started my PR company—I was very attracted to this candidate who had an interesting background, good credentials… and terrible references, Tanis.
Oh no.
And I thought, “Oh, I can fix it.”
Yeah.
And so I learned from that experience: if somebody has references that aren’t walking on water—walk away. And it is shocking to me how often I talk to employers who don’t check references. In part, there’s a misunderstanding out there that you can’t do that. And yes, you can, and you should talk to everybody’s past employers. And look—find out if there are other people you can talk to, too. It makes a huge difference.
When I think about hires that went right—at Pritchard Communications, the public relations company I ran successfully for 15 years—I had three managing directors. Each was so good.
One who really stands out for me is Jenna Rudy, who started as an intern when she was a senior at the University of Oregon, studying communications. She spent a summer with us. Then we brought her back after she’d worked somewhere else in an entry-level position. Over the course of five years—ours was a small company, only six or seven employees—but she ended up running it.
And when she left, our billings were about a million dollars a year. She went to run corporate communications for Telmuk, and their billings that year were $800 million—or revenue, rather.
So she was one of those people that you meet early in their career and you say, “Oh, I knew them when.” We’ve all got people like that in our careers—that we know we’re going to be lucky enough to work with them.
Why did that hiring work out so well? I think because she got a chance to see us and experience us—and we got a chance to work with her. Sometimes people who come back are called boomerang employees or retreads, but that’s a very positive sign, I think, when you have people return to your company. Because they know the culture, they know the people—and you know them. And I think that’s going to be an especially effective relationship.
Oh, I agree. And it’s interesting because sometimes people need to leave, learn more skill sets, different skill sets, and see things from a different perspective—and then when they come back, you benefit so much from that. And you’re like, wow. And again, just their growth that you can apply to your organization.
So when you look back, Mac—again, 23 years with Mac’s List, 15 years with your own communication organization—what advice would you have given your 20-year-old self? And what advice would you give a 20-year-old today?
Don’t wait to be picked.
When I was sending out applications in my 20s and 30s, I was hoping that I would be chosen by the person reviewing the application. And—you should apply, don’t misunderstand me—but first, before you send out that application, you should do the work we talked about earlier, Suzanne: getting clear about the job you want, the employers where you want to work.
You should have a list of target employers. Yes, you could work at thousands of places. But there are probably only 20 or 30 that have the values and offer the opportunities you’re most excited about—if you’ve done the work to answer that question: What do you want to do next?
And when you know the job you want, and you know where you want to go—when you’re shopping employers, not chasing jobs—then you can do the networking and the relationship building that will allow you to connect with people inside those organizations. So you can get the referrals that we all know—you two especially know—are so important when hiring decisions are being made.
Because in the end, hiring managers want to reduce risk. Nobody likes a hire that goes bad. It doesn’t work out for the candidate, it doesn’t work out for the team, and it doesn’t work out for the employer. So referrals are a way so many hiring managers look to reduce that risk.
So you’ve got to understand—not only do you have to not wait, you also have to understand how hiring works. And when you do, you can make the system work for you and then you don’t have to wait to be picked. You can choose where you want to go.
And it’s interesting. I’m going to bring this up because this is one of the pieces of advice I give a lot of younger people: not just to network—because we could all go and network—but network with the people who are in the job you want. And I think that’s the key, because then when you’re talking to them, you can say, “I want your job. How do I get there? What do I need to do?” Because that’s what I want.
Yeah. And that’s how I—in my early 30s, I wanted to get a graduate degree. I was living in Boston. I was there for nine years. And I was very interested in the Master’s in Public Administration program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And to prepare my application, I spent about six months going out and talking to people who had been through that program. And I talked to some people at the faculty and I figured out—asked them, you know, how did you do that? How did you get in? What did you want to get from that experience? How does the school make those decisions?
And that helped me put together a very competitive application that led to my admission. And I’m not bragging here. My academic record as an undergraduate was not distinguished. But by talking to people who did what I wanted to do, I learned what mattered to the decision makers and was able to position myself as a successful candidate. And you can apply that to so many things in life, including your career.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that’s exceptional advice and a great story. So our final question that we ask every guest—and we love ending with this because it is somewhat interpretive—is: what does hiring for good mean to you?
I think hiring for good means creating a team that does work that’s not only good for the organization but for your customers as well. And you can do that by being clear about your mission and your values and what makes you different, and how the services you offer are going to solve problems for your customers.
Absolutely. And you know, nothing is in a vacuum, and people need to remember that hiring is a two-way street. Whether you’re coming from it from the candidate’s perspective or the employer perspective, that fit and alignment has to be there.
I’m so glad you brought that up, Suzanne, because too often—and again, I was in this position early in my career—you’re waiting to be picked. You think you’ve got to please the employer. Think about what matters to you. Because you have choices. Each of us has unique skills and backgrounds and we have a lot to offer. But our challenge is we’ve got to be crystal clear about what we want and where we want to go in order to have the kind of conversations and do the kind of networking that you were describing a moment ago.
You’ve got to be strategic. Just showing up somewhere to talk to random people, you’re going to get frustrated. And I think that’s why so many people struggle with networking—because they haven’t done the work ahead of time to figure out who they should be talking to and about what.
Absolutely. And I’m going to ask one last question as we finish up. And I know hiring for good is about leadership and lessons learned and advice, but I’m curious: what’s the next iteration of Mac’s List and your business? Because you’re out there all the time in the community and you’re growing. What does it look like next for you?
Well, it’s a privilege to be able to do this work and help people find work they love, because you both know—you’re in the business—that having a job that you love is a life-changing event. And so we are looking for more ways to grow and strengthen our community.
This year we relaunched our event series. We’re doing four events in Portland in partnership with local universities, and those each typically attract about 100 people. Our weekly career advice podcast, Find Your Dream Job, reaches thousands of people across the US and outside the US as well. Ninety percent of our downloads are outside of Oregon and Washington, because the advice that we get from the career experts who come on the show works anywhere. I mean, we’re talking about, as you both know, universal ideas.
So helping to make a difference in the lives of the people who are part of the Mac’s List community is very rewarding, and we want to do more of that.
That’s so beautiful. Thank you very much. It’s really been a privilege to have you as our guest today, and I see your qualities of servant leadership and generosity really coming through in the answers you’ve given.
Thank you.
Thank you, Suzanne.
Thanks for joining us today at Hiring for Good. If you were inspired by our conversation, don’t forget to like, follow, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to learn more about our executive search services, check us out at www.hiringforgood.net or our company website, Acumen Executive Search.
Thanks so much, and don’t forget to join us next time for another in-depth conversation about transformational leadership. Until then, have fun.