Month: August 2026

Mentorship, Metabolized

If you have a mentor, hold them tight and thank them for everything they have done. You are one of the lucky ones.

I’ve spent too much of my career hoping to be one of the lucky ones.

I blame Joseph Campbell and his Hero’s Journey for planting the idea: someone who would guide me, offer me tools and knowledge, and encourage me during my journey. I’ve even accepted jobs that were not the right choice because I thought I would be working with someone who might eventually become that person.

I’ve now learned that the odds are not in my favor, and finding a mentor is probably not where I should be putting all my energy.

To begin with, a mentor needs to be someone who actually has something to teach you.

An impressive title or background doesn’t guarantee that. You never know why someone has a title or a large bank account. Maybe they got lucky. Maybe they were at the right place at the right time. Or maybe they won the womb lottery. Just because someone has the outward trappings of success doesn’t mean they have something of substance to share.

I once went to an interview. Last round, with the CFO. And I found myself falling for my same trappings. This woman seemed impressive: Ivy League education, amazing company logos on her LinkedIn profile.

Even though I would not be reporting directly to her, I started imagining a world where I might learn something from this accomplished professional, even from a distance.

What a disappointment.

She was rude and aggressive the entire interview. A 45-minute humiliation ritual. She questioned my qualifications and belittled my experience. If you can’t treat people decently, especially those who might be below you on the org chart, you have nothing to teach me.

Secondly, even if you meet someone with real accomplishments and knowledge to share, that person also needs to have spent time looking back on what they’ve done. What worked. How they got there. What lessons they carried forward. Most people haven’t.

Most people spend every day jumping from fire to fire without ever tracing back how they got from point A to point B.

I was at a webinar recently and one of the panelists said that wisdom is “metabolized life experience.” Highlight on the metabolized part.

You could have achieved greatness, but if you have not sat and mulled it over, you end up with advice that is little more than: work hard. Working hard is table stakes.

I need more wisdom, please.

And finally, even if you find someone with the knowledge and self-awareness, they also have to be willing and able to spend the time sharing it with you.

I once accepted a job primarily to work under a Controller who was everything I wanted to be. Sophisticated, smart, and capable.

During my time working with her, we had exactly two one-on-ones: one on the day I started, and one on the day I gave her my notice.

She was surprised by my departure and asked why I hadn’t reached out sooner. I reminded her of all the meetings I had put on her calendar over the past couple of months that she had rescheduled and eventually cancelled.

I know this sounds negative on mentorship. It’s not. The idea of a mentor is amazing. The reality is just rare.

What I’m optimistic about is self-mentorship.

If you can’t find someone to guide you, guide yourself. We live in a world with more access to knowledge than any generation before us. Any technical or soft skill you want to develop is a book, a podcast, a class, a video, or a micro-credential away. Career coaching, interview preparation, resume writing. The resources exist.

But self-mentorship is more than a reading list. It’s the habit of looking at your own career the way a mentor would. Asking yourself the hard questions. What am I learning here? What should I do differently? Where am I headed, and is it where I want to go? It’s doing the metabolizing that you wish someone else would help you with.

I decided I can be my own mentor. Not because I don’t want guidance, but because waiting for it cost me years.

The Hiring Process Was Broken Before You Found It

The hiring process is broken.

People can’t find jobs. Companies can’t find the talent they say they need. Jobs sites are full of open positions, yet no one is being hired.

Maybe it was always broken.

In What Color Is Your Parachute?, the author cites a Financial Times survey that found the hiring process was only 3% more effective at picking a good employee than random chance.

That stuck with me. Decades later, after going through hundreds of interviews and hiring dozens of people myself, I see what the problem is.

And it is everything.

Companies fail to figure out what they actually need before they start looking. They evaluate candidates against criteria that doesn’t exist, and then the role changes because it was never defined to begin with.

It all starts with the job description.

I’ve seen companies dust off an old job description even when they haven’t hired for the role in years and the role has changed materially in that time.

Recently, I interviewed at a company where it felt like they were workshopping the role as the interviews went along. I was sitting with the controller on a Zoom and asked how she envisioned this position interacting with the rest of the team. She responded that maybe they didn’t need this role after all. Maybe they were looking at things wrong. Maybe they needed to split the work along duties instead of business units.

While she was talking to herself, I was questioning why I was even in this meeting. They didn’t even know what they were interviewing for.

A week later, I got a polite email from HR closing the loop. Two days after that, I got a message from LinkedIn saying that I was a great fit for a new role at the same company.

The role wasn’t even that different. Same department, same level, a few key differences. Instead of going back to the candidates they already interviewed and asking if they would be interested in a slightly different role, they cleared the slate and started a new search.

I’m surprised that a company that seems so far behind has the time to have their employees interview candidates over and over as they figure out what they need.

A friend was telling me about a failed hire by one of his clients. The client was looking to fill a Senior Accountant role, a highly independent position. She hired a young guy who had graduated two years prior. He had gone to a great school and passed the CPA exams.

He turned out to be a terrible hire, and the company let him go before his 90-day trial period ended.

My friend was wondering what went wrong. I told him the answer was there all along. His client needed an individual contributor who could function with drive and independence. Instead, she hired a junior accountant with two years of experience in a large, highly automated company that was probably still figuring things out.

The problem was not the candidate. It was the candidate-role relationship.

Then there is the fact that the role you hire someone for often changes, sometimes shortly after the candidate starts. A candidate who could have been great at the original role might struggle with the new expectations.

I once started a job where I was told the company was “a mess” and that the team needed a lot of help. I debated whether to walk away, but I was offered a lot of autonomy and independence on how to deal with the issues. I decided to accept.

Five months passed between my first interview and my first day. That alone said a lot about the “mess.”

On my second day, the controller set up a meeting with me. I thought it was a simple welcome to the team. It wasn’t.

She told me that since we had last spoken, months prior, she had gotten approval for another hire at my level. She had just started the search but didn’t want to assign me a specific role until “all the pieces were on the board.” She asked for my patience and told me to observe and help around until my colleague was hired.

I declined politely. I told her that if there wasn’t a clear role for me, I was happy to leave. I had left a position where I was leading a team to take a role where I was going to lead a larger team, not to sit around and help like a junior staff member. If they couldn’t provide what was promised, I would leave and look for a better opportunity.

The controller quickly changed her tune and gave me a team and a somewhat defined role.

What would have happened if I had agreed to just wait?

Colleagues would have started wondering what I did. Questions about my competence would have surfaced. And I would have probably been quietly escorted out of the company while the controller wondered why this hire didn’t work out.

Roles are not well defined. Every member of the hiring committee is looking for something different. After the candidate is hired, the role morphs into something unrecognizable. And then we wonder what went wrong.

Slow, invisible systemic failures that are ultimately blamed on the hire who doesn’t stay, and that hurt the team left behind, understaffed, and starting the same failed process all over again.

Behind every resume is a person. Someone who prepared for the job interview, showed up, and trusted that the company knew what it was looking for. It would be nice if the process remembered that.

It’s Not You

Don’t worry, even with a CPA employers don’t want to hire you.

That was my reply to a LinkedIn post from an accountant struggling to find a job because employers were “obsessed” with the CPA certification. I have my CPA, so trust me, I know.

Everyone forgets one thing: market dynamics will always win against personal effort. People are not finding jobs because companies are not hiring. It is not you. It is the market.

People talk about how we are living through unprecedented times. As someone who was unemployed for almost two years during the Great Recession, I can tell you, these times are very precedented.

When I was first laid off during the Great Recession, so many people mobilized around me. Colleagues, classmates, friends, professors, academic staff. I was pursuing my MBA at the time. It was like a village sprung up around me.

Everyone was cheering me on and offering to help however they could. People would send me job postings, introduce me to contacts, and check in regularly.

After a year of unemployment, I could sense the shift.

People would ask how the job hunt was going, and when I said it wasn’t, silence would follow. I had zero interviews in year one of unemployment and three in year two.

Finally, a “friend” said the quiet part out loud: I had been unemployed for so long, I had to be the problem.

I tried to dismiss her comment, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to question myself. Was she right? What was wrong with me?

I tried to quiet that voice by pouring myself into volunteering. Maybe if people saw that I could work for free, they could eventually pay me to work.

In a culture where we base so much of our value on work, if you are not working, you are not valued. And there is so much that is out of a job hunter’s hands.

After two years, I found a job. And then found another. I was working seven days a week. I would have worked more if the week had moredays.

I didn’t change. I didn’t get an additional certification that made me more employable. I didn’t all of a sudden develop work ethic. I found a job when companies started hiring again.

A friend shared recently how she is struggling to find a job because employers keep discounting her years of experience as an entrepreneur. She built a business from scratch and wore far more hats than she ever did in her corporate jobs. Yet none of those skills are being recognized.

I joked with her that she had tasted freedom, and maybe hiring managers were afraid she had become unmanageable. Maybe only half-joked.

Hours later, I stumbled over an article written by a professional in her 50s. She was struggling to find a job too. She had cut decades of experience from her resume and removed her graduation dates, yet employers still labeled her as “too overqualified” and “too expensive.”

What do all these concerns have in common? They put the blame of unemployment on the unemployed.

A single individual cannot fight market dynamicsalone. A single individual cannot fight inflation, trade wars, wars-wars, interest rate hikes, and corporate hiring freezes alone.

So if you are hitting a wall while looking for work right now, remember what I learned the hard way. I didn’t become a better candidate. I didn’t unlock some secret. The market shifted, and the phone started ringing again.

Unfortunately, this’s not a motivational story. That’s just how it works.

Be kind to yourself. This is not your fault.

A Record of Your Accomplishments

I opened it and my heart dropped.

A former report reached out asking for help revamping his resume.I had worked with this guy. He is hardworking, smart, and dependable. Yet nothing on his resume showed that. His resume introduced someone who had “participated” and “supported” instead of “led” and “managed.”

I did a revision that more closely resembled the good work I saw him do. He found a great new opportunity shortly after.

I thought it was a one-off when just a few weeks later I got another call. This time from a former colleague. Her company had been acquired, and she was going to be out of a job by the end of the year. She had been looking but had not landed a single interview in months. I told her to send me the resume.

Same story.

I called her back immediately. I had been part of the team that hired her almost a decade ago. I asked her: how is it possible that your resume was better then, than it is now?

The resume is a tough document. In a world where so much of our identity is tied to our work, the resume becomes the record of our accomplishments. People want it to be faithful to their job descriptions, but they end up with a document that undersells their actual impact.

I offered to rewrite my colleague’s resume. I started with one question: what is your value proposition? What is the one thing you can do better than anyone else?

She was surprised by the question. She had not thought about it.

If you don’t know what you’re bringing to the table, you end up with a list of tasks that go from one to the next with no cohesive thread. A resume without a value proposition is an inventory not a story.

The core premise was not forthcoming, so I asked more questions. What projects did you oversee, and how did you contribute to their success? What are you proudest of from this experience? Did you make any changes that improved the processes, the company, or the team?

This is value creation. Most people have it. You just need to uncover it.

As important as what to include is what to exclude. Faulkner called it killing your darlings: removing the parts of the story that you love but that don’t serve the narrative.

My colleague had repetitive bullet points describing junior tasks that didn’t feed the pictureof an accounting professional with the power to automate manual systems and improve processes. She had done that work. It was real. But it was pulling the story in the wrong direction.

As we continued working, my colleague raised a concern that a lot of accountants share: how do you include numbers on a resume?

Salespeople have performance dashboards. They can say things like: increased revenue by $10M in my first year. Cost centers, accountants and other support roles usually have a hard time pointing to initiatives that made the company money. Success means getting the job done on time and as expected. Nothing flashy.

But you can add numbers in other ways. I asked my colleague to think about the number of accounts, countries, vendors, invoices, and entities she managed. These provide a sense of scope. Hours or days saved each month through process improvements, increases in accuracy, reductions in errors. These tell a story of continuing improvement.

After working on her story, I rewrote my colleague’s resume. She used it to apply for a few roles and started getting calls back almost immediately.

We spend so much time optimizing our resumes for the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) that we forget a human will eventually read it. Your resume still needs to tell a story that is compelling, specific, and that truly represents what you bring. The algorithm gets you through the door. The story is what makes someone want to meet you.

I think that sometimes a poor resume is connected to a poor sense of self. So when writing that record of your professional accomplishments, be kind to yourself. You are more qualified than you think. Your work matters. Let’s tell the story of why.

On Budget, On Time, Almost Never

Most projects don’t fail at the end. They fail at the beginning. The people involved just don’t know it yet.

How bad is it? From a database of 16,000 projects, only 0.5% were completed on budget, on time, and on benefit.

These numbers come from a book called How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. I just read it, and it should be required reading for anyone starting any project. The authors focus on big infrastructure projects, yet the lessons apply to projects of any size.

The book reminded me of all the failed projects I’ve witnessed in my career and how they were doomed from the beginning.

It starts with a question most teams never ask: why are we doing this project? Is it mission critical, or are we just following a trend? AI strategy projects come to mind. Everyone wants one. No one is asking the hard question of why.

Then comes planning. How much will the project cost and how long will it take? Usually the answer is a number pulled out of thin air without so much as a benchmark. People tend to assume that their project is unique, that it will somehow take less time, cost less money, and produce better results than similar projects undertaken in the past.

Who has not heard that story before?

And once the project starts moving, there is rarely a system in place to alert anyone that it’s running off course from the beginning.

I took a job with a company that was implementing a new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system due to go live a few months after my first day. This project was one of the reasons I took the job. It pointed to a company that was serious about process improvement and growth.

Two months after I joined, the project was cancelled.

It was not a total surprise. After onboarding, I hit the ground running participating in the testing phase and quickly noticed that the project was not where it should be. I was not the only one with that thought, so leadership hired a consulting firm to audit the progress.

The project was already a year behind schedule and a million dollars over budget. The consulting firm confirmed that there was no way it could go live in a few months. Their estimate: one additional year and one more million to complete. That would have put the project at three years and three million dollars, as long as everything went right from that point on.

The project was dead.

I was full of questions, so I reached out to the most senior person in the department.

Question: Who from the accounting department was part of the implementation team?

Answer: Why would the accounting team be part of that?

The problems started to become clear. No one from the accounting team had participated in any aspect of the project. The very expensive consultants were supposed to deliver a turnkey solution.

Question: Was there anyone from the company who functioned as the bridge between the company and the consulting firm?

Answer: The IT Director.

Question: And was the IT Director removed from his day-to-day duties and allowed to focus on the project?

Answer: Of course not.

This project was never going to happen.

No one had asked whether the original budget and timeline were even realistic. In my experience, any transformation project that doesn’t plan for at least three years is setting itself up for failure. No internal team had been assigned to the project. The very expensive consultants were trusted to deliver a solution for a business they didn’t understand. And the one person designated as the bridge between the company and the consultants was doing it as a side project on top of their actual job.

The real cost wasn’t just the money or the time. For people like me, who took the job because the project signaled ambition and seriousness, the company went from forward-looking to stuck in the past overnight. The project didn’t just fail. It told everyone paying attention what kind of company this actually was.

A million things can go wrong during a project. But it is usually just a few things early on, the questions nobody ask, the resources nobody commits, the warnings nobody builds a system to catch, that decide whether it fails or succeeds.