Tag: career advice

Green Flag

“Let me know if you are interested.”

That was the subject line. The email came from a recruiter I have been working with. I read the job description and burst out laughing.

We all know the universal red flags by now. The company that calls itself a “family,” the job that promises you’ll “work hard and play hard.” Those have been discussed to death.

The job description in question was for a Controller role. I received the email on Thursday. According to the recruiter’s email, the Controller had given notice the previous Friday, and her last day was going to be the following Tuesday.

Red flag number one.

The two weeks’ notice is standard. This person was just three days shy of that mark. This was the equivalent of holding your middle finger on your way out.

Someone who is happy with their current job but simply moving for better opportunities doesn’t do this.

Also, even though two weeks is considered standard, as you go up the ladder the expectation grows.

A President of an international division would probably be expected to give more than two weeks’ notice. Some transitions may last months. It is understood and an expected courtesy.

A Controller is not an executive, but it is the position in charge of the entire accounting function. In this case, the person was also guiding the company through an audit.

Someone in this position would be expected to give at least two weeks’ notice and maybe even offer to consult to help with the changeover.

Neither of these things happened.

The other, more important, red flag was that someone wrote it didn’t matter that there was not going to be any handover of responsibilities because the work was “easy.”

This one connects to a hard lesson I learned early on. No job is easy. Every job requires know-how and care. Especially if you want to achieve excellence.

What the hiring manager is really saying when calling a job “easy” is that the job is not respected or valued. Even if you outperform and deliver great results, those won’t count in your favor because, as an early employer told me, this is a job that “any monkey off the street can do.”

“Easy” is a toxic way to describe any job. Just run.

The red flags don’t stop at the job description.

A friend of mine was rushing to get a job ahead of a planned layoff. She finally got a verbal offer. As a professional, she did what she was supposed to do: negotiate the initial offer. The HR representative responded with a firm “no.”

The negotiation ended before it even started. The company pretty much told my friend: take it or leave it.

This was especially surprising after several rounds of interviews. The company used hours of my friend’s time.  And the time of dozens of people already working in the organization. Yet they were willing to risk all of that on the bet that my friend needed the job too badly to walk away.

My friend took the job. I understand why, but this doesn’t show great promise.

My advice to her? It is okay to continue to look while you settle into the new role.

The hiring process is the ultimate red flag to never ignore. It provides a window into how working with the company is going to be. I’ve yet to meet a company where a chaotic, disrespectful hiring process opens the door to a disciplined and generous company.

Still, red flags are not an automatic rejection. I once interviewed at a company where a colleague described working until nearly 11 PM on New Year’s Eve the previous year. I still took that job. I made the calculation, and the long hours were outweighed by other aspects of the job and the company.

But always pay attention to red flags. And learn from them. Which ones are a dealbreaker for you?

For me, this role had too many unforgivable flags, and I’m in a position to wait, so I chose to wait for a possible green flag.

Iced Coffee and Other Disqualifiers

Reason for rejection: iced coffee.

Recently, a recruiter posted on social media that young candidates were showing up to interviews with iced coffee and that it was disrespectful to their potential employers. That indicated a casual tone, like the whole interview was just one more errand to run that day.

I wouldn’t judge if a candidate showed up with an iced coffee. Unless they showed up late mumbling something about “traffic” while swirling their iced latte.

A friend recently sent me her schedule for an in-person interview. She was supposed to meet with six people over the span of four hours. At that point, you almost need iced coffee for sustenance during a marathon interview session.

Iced coffee aside, what bothers me about the whole conversation is that it is just one more obstacle that job seekers need to overcome while looking for work.

It is no longer enough to look polished and professional, have a strong resume, and know how to answer key interview questions. You also need to know individual biases and company-specific cultural expectations before walking through the door.

I once worked at a place where we hired two people for the same job, back-to-back. They both had the same name, and neither one worked out. One actually left the company in spectacular fashion, but that’s a story for another post.

So when it came time to fill the position for the third time, you better believe that resumes with that name were immediately disqualified.

My boss would simply say: “not again.”

Some of those candidates had very good resumes, yet they were rejected for having the wrong name at the wrong time.

I’ve seen candidates dismissed for being unemployed three months after a layoff. For being too excited about the company. For touching their hair too much during the interview.

None of these things reveal anything about whether a candidate can or can’t perform the work, yet these biases persist.

I was once looking through resumes with my boss. We were adding one more member to the team. I pointed at an interesting candidate, and she quickly set it aside by saying: “I would never hire someone with a two-page resume.”

I was surprised because I had a two-page resume, and she had hired me.

I told her and she didn’t believe me. I had to dig a copy of my old resume from my files to prove it to her.

Job seekers are told to prepare, yet how can you prepare for biases that are arbitrary, inconsistent, and only sometimes enforced? The rules of interviewing are not even rules anymore. They are preferences that change depending on who is sitting across the table or on the other side of the Zoom.

Somewhere behind the wrong name and the two-page resume, there might be the right person for the job. Everything else is just iced coffee.

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.

Embrace the Chaos

“Embrace the chaos.”

This was the advice my friend didn’t expect to receive.

She called me asking for help updating her resume and preparing for interviews. She told the story of many toxic workplaces. Vague and ever-changing strategies. Lack of resources. Poor communication. High achievers leaving with their institutional knowledge, and managers whose only competency seemed to be delegating work.

She was done with her job.

To her surprise, my advice was to embrace the chaos instead.

I told her to prepare a vision for how things should be done, with her in charge, and present it to the CFO. After all, what’s the worst thing that could happen? The CFO could simply say no. And in that case, I would help her update her resume and look for another job as planned.

Here’s the thing about chaos: in a well-run organization, every problem already has an owner. There is no gap to fill. In a chaotic one, problems are orphaned. Nobody is in charge of fixing them because nobody has been asked to.

So my friend spent a few weeks documenting what was broken and wrote up a practical plan for how she would fix it. Nothing elaborate. Just a clear assessment and a path forward.

What people forget is that if you hate your job and feel like you are drowning, you are probably not alone. Your colleagues are feeling the same way. So is your boss. So is your boss’s boss. Everyone is waiting for someone to arrive with a plan to fix things.

If you are willing to be that person, to own the mess and bring the plan, you can turn a bad situation into the biggest career opportunity you’ve had.

My friend followed my advice. She got a promotion and a salary increase that would have taken a typical accountant many years to reach.

I would never suggest joining a toxic workplace on purpose. A toxic workplace can burn you out and make you question your own worth. I know from experience. But if you are already working in chaos and can’t leave for whatever reason, don’t just survive it.

Use it.

When Everything is a Priority

In a sea of “tell me about yourself,” someone asked an interesting question at an interview the other day.

The hiring manager asked me how I prioritize when everything is a priority. In this era of doing more with less and fast-moving environments, it is a fair question, and it started a meaningful conversation about how we work. It’s a question most people answer with instinct. There’s a better way.

When prioritizing, I use three pillars: risk, visibility, and materiality.

Risk.

In accounting, there are areas of the financials that have a higher propensity to cause harm if things are missed or not kept under control. Revenue recognition and accruals at reporting period ends are common examples. These areas tend to be the focus of compliance efforts. A useful signal: if an area comes up time and time again during audits, it is probably high risk. The question to ask: what happens if I get this wrong? If the answer scares you, that’s where you start.

Visibility.

Leadership will always have one or two KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that they track closely while monitoring growth or the lack of it. Maybe it is a metric that once caused a major issue in a senior leader’s career, and they’ve learned to watch it closely ever since. You’ll know what these are quickly. They will be the first or second thing asked about during review meetings. It keeps you from getting caught off guard. When leadership asks, and they will, you need to have the answer. The people who advance prioritize based on what leadership is actually measuring.

Materiality.

Materiality is the accounting concept that only information significant enough to influence stakeholder decisions needs to be highlighted in financial reports. Most companies set a quantitative materiality threshold, a minimum dollar amount that triggers further review or action. If an issue falls below that threshold, it won’t necessarily be ignored, but it won’t be prioritized either. In accounting terms, “it is not material.” This is the pillar that gives you permission to say: this can wait. Most people never give themselves that permission.

These three pillars often overlap. When something is risky, visible, and material, that is where you focus first. No debate needed.

But here is what I find interesting: these are accounting concepts, but the logic behind them applies far beyond accounting.

When choosing what to prioritize in any context, ask yourself: What is the risk of not doing this? Do the people who matter, your team, your boss, your family, consider this important? And will this decision meaningfully change the outcome, or is it noise?

Those three questions can cut through most of the paralysis that comes with competing priorities. Not everything that feels urgent is risky. Not everything that is visible is material. And not everything that is material is visible. Knowing the difference is where good prioritization starts. And in a sea where everything feels urgent, that might be the only thing that keeps you afloat.

Impossible Questions

I knew better, but I did it anyway. I clicked on a clickbait article about hiring red flags.

Some of the advice was basic. Never hire someone who badmouths their former employer. Never hire someone who asks no questions. Never hire someone who doesn’t show curiosity about the company or the role. Fair enough.

But there was one that didn’t sit well with me. The author argued that you should never hire someone who can’t answer the question: “Tell me about your biggest failure.”

The argument was that someone who couldn’t answer this question didn’t have enough self-awareness to be a good performer.

I disagree.

Not because this is untrue, but because this is what I call an impossible question.

If you answer truthfully, you are highlighting your shortcomings to the hiring manager. And you don’t know what that manager considers a disqualifier. You try something relatively safe, only to find out you’re sitting across from someone who sees that particular issue as unforgivable.

If on the other hand you try to be strategic and answer with a non-answer, or a strength disguised as a weakness, you look disingenuous. Your application moves to the rejection pile.

Heads you lose, tails you also lose.

People know what their biggest failures are. They probably lie awake at night reliving every moment. They just won’t tell you. It’s not a lack of self-awareness. It’s self-preservation.

“What is your biggest weakness” is another question in this category. It gets asked less and less these days because people have realized it doesn’t tell you anything about a candidate’s ability; other than their storytelling and spin abilities.

By asking impossible questions, interviewers aren’t being clever or fishing for red flags. They are setting people up for failure.

And the interview process doesn’t need more help at being terrible. It’s already broken and getting worse by the minute, with algorithms removing qualified candidates automatically and recruiters who can’t be bothered to close the loop after taking up someone’s time for weeks.

As interviewers, we can do better. Ask what the candidate has built. Ask how they think through problems. Ask what they would do in the first 90 days. Those questions tell you something real.

Or better yet, ask them to ask you questions. See how they think and what they care about. That will tell you more in five minutes than any rehearsed failure story ever will.

The Questions That Were Never Asked

I could tell something was wrong the moment my friend picked up the phone. She had just spent a “ton of money” paying someone to rewrite her LinkedIn profile and they had done a terrible job. A bad, no good, horrible job whose only use would be as kindling for a fire (I’m paraphrasing here).

I was surprised since she had used a professional. Let me take a look, I said. Maybe I could help.

The package included a resume, executive bio, and a LinkedIn profile with instructions about how to populate the site. I read it all and thought… it was perfectly okay. It was professional and well written, easy to read, full of the buzzy keywords. I started to wonder what the real problem was.

I decided it was an issue of misaligned goals. I asked my friend some questions to find out.

Questions like: What is the main purpose of this profile? What do you want people to take away when looking at it? What kind of tone do you want to convey? Who is your main audience? Besides company names and titles, what do you want to communicate about your career?

She was surprised by the questions because her LinkedIn profile writer never asked them. But more importantly, she herself had not thought about them. She asked for a couple of days to sit with it.

Once she came back with answers, I had the clarity I needed to do a rewrite. I sent it to her a few days later, and she loved it. This was finally what she wanted. What she wanted all along.

She thanked me for all my hard work. What she didn’t know was how little work I had done. I pretty much changed the point of view and did some surgical rewrites, but overall, the foundation was the same package she had paid for.

This made me think about how many projects and pieces of work get tossed every day because we don’t ask simple questions about the end goal at the beginning. About how we discard good work just because it doesn’t match the fuzzy picture we have in our minds.

The professional who helped my friend never asked about the ultimate goal. She assumed it was the same as everyone’s: maximize recruiter engagement. And she delivered exactly that. A well-put-together yet generic result.

My friend failed to see the potential in what she already had. A few strategic questions and a few precise rewrites were all it took to get to the desired outcome.

Good work gets thrown away every day. Not because it’s wrong, but because nobody asks what “right” is supposed to look like.