A client spent months reading job descriptions asking for five years of experience in a function he wanted to move into, and thinking he did not have it. He had close to 18 years of it, under a different title, in his own business, and no line of his record said so.

This episode is about the space between those two things, and the order you have to fix them in.

Everything starts in the same place: https://www.lauriejwetzel.com/start

00:00 The client who had 18 years and could not see it 

01:11 Why you cannot read your own record 

01:52 The line at the bottom of your resume 

02:38 The mechanism, and why you come up short 

03:34 Base first, surfaces second 

04:32 What this is not 

05:00 A different client, financial services into tech 

05:27 Two sticky notes 

06:01 The close

Next Level Leadership Group | Laurie J. Wetzel | lauriejwetzel.com

Everything starts in the same place. Go to lauriejwetzel.com/start

Next Level Leadership Group | Laurie J. Wetzel | lauriejwetzel.com

Some people are too useful to promote. Not because they are underperforming, but because work flows toward competence, and the safest pair of hands keeps receiving the same kind of problem.

This episode is about what that does to you in the rooms where your next move gets decided, and why the first move to change it is smaller and less satisfying than the one most people reach for.

Go to lauriejwetzel.com/start

Chapters
 0:00 The person you put on the hard account
 0:31 Work flows toward competence
 1:13 The word that attaches to you is execution
 2:02 Evidence, not confidence
 3:02 Why the strategic work is the second move
 3:44 When the ceiling is actually structural

Everything starts in the same place. Go to lauriejwetzel.com/start

Next Level Leadership Group | Laurie J. Wetzel | lauriejwetzel.com

A client once told me that nobody at her company would ever go back and look at what she had actually done. She said it the way you would say it is going to rain. She was right, and most career advice is built on pretending she is not.

The story you have been told is that good work gets noticed, that if you deliver consistently at a high level the system eventually catches up to you. It is not a matter of time. It is a matter of whether there is a record, and whether that record is somewhere the people who decide will actually encounter it.

I spent 25 years in senior leadership at Adobe, Slack, and Salesforce, sitting in the rooms where nine names get worked through in 40 minutes. The people who got moved were not the loudest ones. They were the ones somebody in the room could describe in a sentence.

In this episode:

Why the people who decide are working from an impression rather than a record, and why that impression is often two years old.

The annual review loop where you are told you work above your level and that you need more experience, from the same person in the same meeting.

Why the ticket list is designed never to run out, and why the more capable you are the longer it gets.

Why the record of your work is yours to keep, and what happens if you do not keep it.

Next week: why being excellent at the work is often the exact thing that keeps you in it.

Everything starts in the same place. Go to lauriejwetzel.com/start

Next Level Leadership Group | Laurie J. Wetzel | lauriejwetzel.com

"I have never read a cover letter. Not once."

Mike Materasso has spent more than 15 years deciding who gets hired at Amazon, Slack, Brex, and Alpine Investors. He is not being dismissive. He is describing arithmetic: 8,000 applicants filter down to about 700, and he has roughly 20 seconds per resume to decide whether to read further.

Which is the thing worth sitting with. It is not whether you are good. It is whether what you are can be read quickly, by someone who is not going to work hard to understand you.

In this conversation, Mike explains why most senior roles are never posted at all, what he is actually listening for in the first ten minutes of a call, why a short stint on your resume gets read the way it does, and what he tells candidates to do instead of applying.

He also tells the story of an account executive hitting between 200 and 400 percent of quota, every quarter, for three years, who could not explain what he was doing differently. His method was real, repeatable, and had never once been put into words. Which is fine for the company and a problem for him.

Mike's own line for what to do about it: don't find your next role, make yourself findable for that next role.

I open the episode with my own version of this. Four months of interviews at Slack in 2018 with no read at all, calling my husband after every one certain I had not got it, and a reason for the delay I could not see from the outside.

Mike runs AQ Recruiting. His LinkedIn and the firm are linked below.

LinkedIn

Website

Read the Room is about one gap: the work you do, and how it gets read. Every episode brings on someone who has seen that gap up close, from one side or the other.

The Read is a free email sequence, seven emails over ten days, that shows you which of the four places your read breaks down and what to do about it.

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Everything starts in the same place. Go to lauriejwetzel.com/start

Next Level Leadership Group | Laurie J. Wetzel | lauriejwetzel.com