The Most Valuable Executive Job Search Training You'll Ever Watch

Executives, right now you're likely on one of two paths in your career. Path number one, you're feeling stuck. You live within the boundaries of what you think is possible. You apply to jobs you know aren't a great fit. You go into interviews not properly able to convey your value. You feel like you're on the back foot and you simply hope that things are gonna work out. When something does come to fruition, you might feel rushed to take it because you might not get another chance. And whether you realize it or not, This is a mindset of fear and scarcity. You play defense and you lose because of it. It's not a good look for leadership. Or you're on path number 2, a much better path. You go into the market knowing exactly what you're worth and able to challenge how to get even more. You're able to handpick which positions, companies, hiring managers work best for you. And once you land an interview, you can convey yourself so clearly that you get more than anyone could ever imagine. Throughout the entire process, the other side is worried about losing you, not the other way around. And all of this without coming across as greedy, feeling confrontational, or fearing the outcome of losing the deal. If you're on path number 1 right now, or even if you're somewhere in between, as I suspect many of you are, this is designed to help you avoid years of potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, in avoiding the non-obvious career mistakes that many of us have made. My name is Jacob Warwick, and I'm Silicon Valley's comp negotiator. I've shaped over $1.25 billion in lifted outcomes across greater than 5,000 engagements for senior leaders, Fortune 500 companies, the foundational AI labs, and some of the most consequential boardrooms in the world. And look, I've noticed something about my most successful clients that not everybody has. These are the ones where, for example, we get offered $350,000 a year, and then a few days later we end up signing it at $1.2 million a year in total comp. These are clients that are willing to invest intentionally in themselves and their careers, and that's exactly what this course is for you. Inside today's course, I'll reveal my PACE Job Search Accelerator, and here's how it works. Step number 1 is plan: how you can navigate today's challenging market and shift your mindset from a passive job seeker to a valuable and confident driver of your career. Step number 2: attract: how to streamline your LinkedIn profile and your resume and build a more powerful professional network that advocates for you when you're not in the room. Step number 3, close. How to master the 4 core interview questions and also run interviews like a collaborative strategy session rather than feeling like you're on the back foot in an interrogation. And finally, step 4, elevate. How to negotiate your compensation with confidence and clarity, as well as when to ask the right strategic questions to lift up those around you. Ultimately, today you're going to learn the job search, compensation strategy, negotiation leverage, and the patterns behind how top senior leaders get paid, positioned, and promoted. Let's get started. I'm excited you're here. I think it's important that we talk about some table stakes. Every executive must know their unique value, and we'll provide some workbooks to help you find that. Every executive is going to need to have a cleaned-up LinkedIn profile. Every executive is going to need to have a resume. Now, whether or not you use it is not really that important. We know that when asked of us, we need to provide that information. So it's important that you consider those things. But if I'm honest with you, especially with the LinkedIn and resume, a lot of executives get hung up on the details, trying to optimize, trying to do the perfect ATS to break through the door. And look, When I think back to my most successful clients, and even those that are less successful, I can't remember the last time somebody got a job by applying for a job online. I can't remember when somebody was asked line by line on their resume, tell me about this story, tell me about that. Like, that's just not how it works anymore. I haven't seen somebody say, hey, I found you on LinkedIn and this is why I wanted to hire you. You don't close the deal with the bait that you put out there. You're simply setting the perception. One thing that a lot of executives do is that they overshare on LinkedIn, specifically in their experience and summary sections. I'm here to tell you, you don't need to do that. That stuff can and will be used against you later. I would prefer you have less information, less KPIs, less performance, less all of that. Just get it done and get it out of the way. If you continually spin your wheels trying to tweak your LinkedIn, and use this platform that you haven't necessarily mastered yet, it's going to slow your job search down. And for someone like you, that's tens and tens of thousands of dollars of money that's falling out of your pockets. So I'd rather you concentrate on how to activate your network, and that's where you're going to get the most value out of the job search process. And then it's all about closing the deal with interview and negotiation mastery. Now, I'm going to share a lot of examples through the course, stories, and this idea isn't that you're going to emulate these stories. You're not going to become a negotiator exactly like me. I just want you to know what's possible. I just want to break the mindset so you're not living within boundaries of what you think can happen. And instead, you can say, I can't believe that happened. How can I do that for myself? If we achieve that outcome through this course, you're going to be significantly better off throughout the entirety of not just this job search, but all of your future ones. So in summary, don't mess around with your LinkedIn all day. Don't go spend thousands of dollars to go get it fixed. Don't try to master your LinkedIn. When you think about your career, think about where you have the strengths. Where are you strongest? Is it having a conversation or is it playing on LinkedIn? What we want to do is we want to bring people from channels you're unfamiliar with to channels where you can set the stage and you can control the conversation. So spend less time where you're not good, lean into your strengths, talk to more people one-on-one, showcase your value, and move into a negotiation process that's going to accelerate a career beyond what you even thought was possible. Let's get started. Session 1, Understanding the Market. Embarking on an executive job search is more than simply updating your resume. It's about understanding the unique challenges of finding leadership roles in today's complex market. So we start this course by uncovering the critical background knowledge you need to set yourself up for success. We'll cover the reality of today's job market, locating hidden opportunities, and common pitfalls that derail people hoping to make the transition to executive leadership. Kind of the 4 concepts I want to get through right now so that we can better plan for really what this, this transition process, or if you're planning a transition, what it could look like for you. So first, we need to understand the market and have a good stamp on what's going on, and maybe some areas where you've been gaslit on how good the market is or how bad it's been. Want to get clear understanding with some data there. Want to focus on how to reframe your mindset, how to think about how you should be looking for your next role. We want to build your strategy and provide some reframing so you can think about new ways to approach your job search. And then ultimately, we want to give you some tips on how you can best tell your story and start thinking about how you start showing impact versus talking about the past. So first, we're going to start with the market. Now, here's a sobering fact for a lot of us. The average executive role currently has about 267 applications. And so anybody here who is playing around looking on LinkedIn, looking at Indeed, whoever's kind of looking at traditional job boards, You're not alone in looking for that. In fact, a lot of folks are applying for those jobs and you're creating a ton of competition. Actually, I had a client the other day who was one of 3 finalists for an interview, and she said, Jacob, I kind of feel good about myself because 1,400 people applied for this job. 1,400 people. And, and this is just something to be mindful of as you've gotten to a more senior position in your career. There's a lot of folks vying for the best jobs in the country. All right, so here's something that's happening with the market that sometimes we're not being told about. And we've been hearing, you know, we have the best economy we've had in decades. Like the, the stock market looks like it's great. The media is sharing how awesome things are. So despite what we're hearing in the media, the market reality is a little bit different for those, especially those of us in tech. Executives accounted for double their usual layoffs compared to the 5-year average. So as companies are looking to trim back expenses, they often axe the tall poppies first. Anyone's familiar with the tall poppy syndrome? You negotiate a great compensation for yourself. The board looks at where the money is going and they say, hmm, do we really need Brian on the team? I'm not so sure about that. Look how much money he's making, right? Let's, let's quantify that impact. So executives are getting cut at a much higher rate than usual. When you're applying for jobs, only 2 to 5% of your applications are actually resulting in an interview. And for those of us who want to be picky and choose a company that's actually going to be worth our time, it could be pretty frustrating to apply for 20 to hear back from 1, right? And in some cases, you apply for 50 and hear back from 1. So something is not clicking when it comes to getting through the application process and earning interviews. We've also had a strong increase in CEO changes, meaning private equity companies and VCs are looking at shaking things up and transforming their companies. Whereas the previous mindset of growth at any cost, spend all this money because interest rates are free, right? That's changing to, oh wow, our companies need to make money. So there's some more common sense principles in here and we're doing some, some typical market contraction from there. The average executive search duration is about 10 months. That can be pretty frustrating, especially for anyone that's out of work, because 10 months could be $300,000, $500,000. For some of my clients, that's over a million in earnings that they're missing out. So that's something that can be very frustrating, and we often hear it's better to find a job when you already have one, likely because your confidence is still up and your mortgage is being paid. 79% of placements are never even posted publicly. So where the hell are they? How do we find those? And we want to focus on how we get to that 80% there. Search terms are taking— search times are taking longer than usual. And then we're seeing just that small success rate through traditional applications. So something needs to change here. I also want to share a couple stories about how top executives are getting paid. So When we look at traditional benchmarks and hiring data and things that you can pick out from publicly stated sources, whether you're in a community like CMO Huddle's Chief Pavilion or you're looking at PAVE compensation data or recruiting data or some of these average data, we're typically seeing salary increase only about 4.5% year over year. Normal equity ranges for, for executives is anywhere between 50 basis points and 100 basis points in traditional bonus structures tend to be about 15 to 25%. So for many folks, your comp structure will look something in the realm of $250,000, half a percent of equity, 15 to 30% bonus or something in that range, and skewing anywhere up to about $350,000 in salary, base salary. Now, contrary to this, what we're seeing from top results, some of our top candidates are breaking these packages down. And so we're seeing 25 to 40% above the market when we go through the entire PACE process and we really focus on how to structure and build leverage throughout the process. We'll see equity packages typically 2 to 5 times what's posted. I had a client the other day get 5% equity in a $100 million company. I think those are things that you don't see very often, but they do happen and they're getting advanced milestone packages, which we'll talk about later in the series. So I want to share just a couple of stories where I had a client late last year, and this was, let's say, November, December last year. I remember because the negotiation was about on Christmas and we started with— it was this chief revenue officer position. So kind of your top sales go-to-market position. And all the benchmark data said that this individual should be paid $300,000 base salary and $300,000 variable salary. And as we know, in sales, like, your compensation is largely based on performance and variable, and you don't necessarily know if you're going to hit that or not. Well, this client had 3 kind of companies vying for their services, all within the same portfolio company. It's private equity. Portfolio company that we were navigating. We ended up signing the contract at a $350,000 base and $350,000 variable. So a good $100,000 uplift there. But we also created milestone packages and equity boosts and cash bonuses that if all were hit would equal $3.5 million a year. So we were already above the benchmark, but we created these new performance milestones That could bring the compensation over 3 times higher than what benchmarks stated. We were also able to secure 6 months of on-target earnings severance in the first 6 months of the variable compensation guaranteed. So those are some big bonuses that you don't often find in benchmark information. And then I'll give another story that's more recent. We had 3 clients 2 at the senior director level and 1 at the vice president level who were in an interview process where the recruiter said, look, the top end of our range is $600,000 to $650,000 all in. All 3 of those clients finished their deal at over $1 million a year in compensation. So we were able to increase the role almost double from what was stated on the range. And we want to talk a little bit about how that is. It's, it's relevant to note that one of those companies was $200 million. So not terribly big, but not also not an early-stage startup. And the other 2, one was a Fortune 500 company and the other was a midsize in the, in the couple billion dollar range. So kind of across the board, but not your earliest-stage companies. Of these 3 use cases of $600 to like the top one was $1.1 million per year. One was a designer, one was a comms leader, and the other was a marketer. So none of these were sales folks. You can create milestone payments and there's a lot of nuances to that, which we'll get into a little bit more in the negotiation section. But there's a, that actually is a good segue to my point here. If you don't think it can happen for you, it never will happen for you. Right? So I'm not just sharing these stories to brag about how great these folks have negotiated and to browbeat you all into thinking that you can do better. The point is you need to believe that it can happen. And instead of saying that happens to other people, that can't happen to me, we need to start changing the script to how can I make that happen for me? How do I illustrate the value to show that that's possible? And if we're not winning those conversations, how do we talk to the right people where they're interested in having those conversations? How do I illustrate my value better? So I only share case studies to show it is possible. It's not highly likely, right? Most people aren't going to be open to that, but you have to find the ones that are. And that's ultimately why we're planning to find the better opportunities in the market. And the other point that's relevant here is all of this happened while we've been in this so-called market depression or down— downward pressure from VCs and private equities to bring comps down. So contrarian to the general narrative, top executives can still push through that narrative. and create opportunities that are not even on the maps. And so that's the main point here, is that we need to think it's possible for us and how do we make it happen? One, 2 of those were tech and one of them was outside of tech, actually in manufacturing. And there are nuances here. What's interesting is tech tends to pay more like upfront and look better on paper. But other industries tend to be more consistent and pay better long-term. So like healthcare contracts, as an example, there's more nuances to negotiate than a tech contract. And I think it's largely because there's so much information about tech compensation that it serves as an anchor that traps everyone into the boundaries of this is the only thing I can negotiate. And then when you do a contract like in manufacturing or in healthcare, there are other aspects that they care about, other teams they need to bring together. Other things that we're looking for, especially in Fortune 500. As you go from leading a team of 100 to leading a team of 500, there are different areas to break the boundaries and increase your compensation accordingly. There's also more role consolidation. So if you're doing the job of 2 VPs instead of one, there's different ways to trigger compensation gains there. Whereas in tech, you don't often see somebody say, look, we're going to Axe the CRO, the CMO, and the CCO and create one superhuman, and that person's going to be you. And by the way, we're going to limit that anchor to $350,000 base, right? So you don't see that nearly as often in tech as you do in some of the other companies. So there are some nuances there. And then I also have learned some of the milestone payments from working with clients in Hollywood and triggers and contingencies and things that they look for when Putting movie deals together so that we can apply in, in any industry, really. The point is, don't be so sure of what your industry is going to do that you wouldn't try something else. Right? We can't be limited in our thinking. We have to think, how can we make that possible? How do we break the mold there? And don't think that just because your industry is a little more old school, you can't present new ideas to them. Especially if you sell it with the right rhetoric and kind of persuasive positioning to get your way. And we'll talk more about how to actually do that versus the strategy of planning. So now I get to use— and I think every slide deck is required to have an iceberg graphic somewhere in it. So what we often see is the posted positions, what recruiters are talking about, and industry directories, things that everybody can see. Those are the most hotly contested roles. And that makes up about 80% of what you see, right? Like everything out there. Now, what's interesting about the 3 positions that I had mentioned earlier, the $600,000 to over $1 million earners, 2 of those were unlisted positions that we created, and one of those was a network placement from someone in their, in their field. So there's much more flexibility and negotiation power when you go through Kind of an untraditional source or this quote unquote hidden market that people don't see. And we'll talk about how to position yourself to create more opportunities and how to treat your career like that versus waiting for something to be posted online. So why do most executive job searches fail? Well, a lot of folks are very passive when they're job hunting, even when they are actively job hunting, meaning let's say I have a conversation with Paul. And I say, hey Paul, I'm looking for work. Here are all the things that I'm good at. And Paul says, Jacob, great. I'll keep an eye out for you. Bye. And we leave it at that. And we said, hey, guess what? I did my networking thing. Paul's gonna get back to me. No, he's not. Right? I love you, Paul, and I appreciate your support, especially at CMO Huddles last week. But the reality is people don't think about you as much as you do or think about you at all. So passive job hunting, you cannot leave your networking conversations like that. I also call that kind of being reactive, like you're waiting for someone to come along and say, you know, hey, Chris, you know, I got a job for you. Now, this is how a lot of folks have found jobs in the past, particularly when the market is really good. I call that dangling a carrot. Somebody in your network went to a new company and said, I can't live without Dan, or I can't live without Jeff, or I can't live without Jill. Right? You have to come over here. I've made a spot for you. I dangled a carrot and you choose that. And sometimes you move 5% of your comp or 20% of your comp or whatever that is. And that's how a lot of folks kind of follow their career passively. They never necessarily chose to make that move, but an opportunity presented itself and you capitalized on it. And so what's different in this market is you have to choose where you want to go, especially if you want to make a transition or do something differently. You have to build new networks. You have to fire new ways of thinking about your career and go outbound versus just waiting for it to come to you. I also see self-doubt kicks our ass, and I have an entire section on the mindset here, simply because losing job after job, or not getting the interview, or looking at— and I perfectly ATS matched my resume. I spent $5,000 on it. And I didn't even get an interview and this job was written for me. What the hell is going on? There's something wrong with me. Right. And that happens multiple times. You start to erode your confidence. And I tell you what, nobody hires a— nobody hires an executive leader that's not confident. So it only makes it harder for yourself. I've also noticed that if you are being dishonest about something that happened, if somebody says, what happened to you? And you struggle to say that you got fired. Or things didn't work out, or you're on a sabbatical, or you took time off for your kids. We always try to find these cute, creative ways to lie about these gaps because we perceive them as weaknesses. And so we just end up lying, which makes us look like shit. And those people that do hire you are comfortable hiring liars. And it's something we need to be mindful of. Ego also gets in the way quite a bit where we often say title doesn't matter, but it kind of does. Right. It's kind of hard to go from a CMO to a VP of marketing or, you know, any C-suite role and going backwards, even if the opportunity is larger, the pay is greater and the company is different. There's a narrative that you have to share with your network and your people. Right. And so oftentimes, and I see this quite often, a client will rush to get their first C-suite job. Congratulations. Right. But it's at a $25 million company, which is kind of like a director job because you're so hands-on and doing a lot of the work that it's really in title only. And then you have an opportunity at a $200 million company, but you have to be a VP. And all of a sudden you feel like, no, I'm a C-suite now. I don't know why I would take that position. And it's going to look kind of funky if you publicize that you've gone backwards. And as a society, especially American society, we look at ourselves and everything is up and to the right, right? You have to be doing more, more, more, more. And if you're not, that's where ego can get in the way and it can trap you. And ego doesn't pay your mortgage. Um, back to the, um, uh, the, the dishonesty, just lack of taking ownership of things that went wrong, trying to spin everything into a gain. It's okay to say when somebody says, hey, what happened here? It's okay for you to say, this is difficult for me to talk about. Honestly, I got my ass kicked a little bit. Here's what I learned. Right? And that's why we're talking today, because I'm here to learn and, and move my career forward in these ways from those learnings. Is that a problem for you? So taking ownership and lack of that is a big issue. Weak negotiation, seeing a stated range and saying that's the stated range. Plus or minus 10%, that's what I'll do. Learning from— oftentimes in this space too, it's the blind leading the blind. So we're getting advice from other people who are poor negotiators and then negotiating on our behalf, and it's just a race to the bottom when that happens. And so let's talk about some of the success patterns. Smart networking. Smart networking, meaning you're curious and you're showing confidence and you're I'm not particularly happy with this language, but I say you're weaponizing people in your network to go to battle for you. And it's obviously very aggressive language, which sometimes off-putting for folks, but it's your job to arm your network so that they can show up for you, not simply say, hey Paul, I'm sure you're going to look out for me. Thanks. And then I have to incessantly check in and be like, hey Paul, have you seen anything? And Paul's like, dude, leave me alone. Right? So we need to actively give them a reason to be our advocates. You must have a compelling and valuable story to share. If you're not a storyteller, you're not going to close executive roles. Ownership and growth mindset. I can't, can't, can't push that enough. Like you take ownership of the problems that you have, especially for executive roles. If you come in to an executive interview and they ask what happened when you were an executive at another company and you're trying to diddle around the fact that, you know, I didn't work well with the CEO or I couldn't get this or I couldn't convince the board. That's a lack of your leadership, no matter how difficult it is, right? Either you chose to work for the wrong people, or it was a bait and switch because everyone's working there, wearing their Sunday best in the interview process. It will always be perceived as your fault. Now, I'm not saying it specifically is your fault, but if you're in an executive role, it is your job to overcome those obstacles. And the reality is you failed to overcome those obstacles, or you didn't see it. Right. And we have to find a way to take ownership of that and have a growth mindset and say, hey, this is what I learned. Actually don't get along well with people like this. Are you a person like that? And being very clear about what you've learned about yourself and what you're looking for next. So that taking ownership and that extreme ownership is very necessary, even if you did kind of get screwed in the last role. Always want to find a reason. One of my favorite questions to ask some of my clients When they're— I'll often let my clients rant, right? Just rant. Just tell me what happened. Oh, this guy was an asshole. It was a bro culture. They hate women. Like, this is, you know, this happened, this happened. And all those things very much may be true. And then I stop and, and I say, okay, how much of that was your fault? And we constantly have to ask that. How much of that was your fault? Did you not see something? Could you have behaved differently if you understood a little bit more about behavioral psychology? Could you have— Build more— built more advocates for yourself to protect your job, and so on. Session 1 Workbook. Your first course assignment is designed to set you up for success by starting to build your professional network and create a sustainable routine for completing this course. We'll ask you to thoughtfully find new connections on LinkedIn and create a realistic schedule to watch course videos and complete assignments. Get started using the link below. I recently had an engagement where my effective hourly rate crossed $50,000, not because I charged that, but because the compensation outcome we produced in just a few hours moved the needle multiple millions of dollars per year. Although I can only serve a finite number of clients at the level I insist, and demand now exceeds that number, I recommend reaching out before you need me because the strongest outcomes that we've created for clients often start months before the negotiation does. Now back to the course. Session 2, Master Your Mind. An executive job search requires a change in mindset. Instead of viewing it as a simple quest for a job, think of it as launching a targeted sales and marketing campaign with yourself as the product, one with a value proposition that shows people the solutions that you can bring to their problems. If you can nail this mindset, effective storytelling, and intentional networking, you can position yourself as the ideal solution to the challenges your target companies are facing. All right, so what changes during your transition? So now I want to focus on the mindset a little bit, and just to— and I won't spend too much time here, but this is just to show that I understand what you're going through, right? The public perception is that you're going to have a career change. There's a title shift. There's a transition, right? Oh, you're going to— you know, David's going to land back on his feet. I have no problem with that, right? Everyone sees The best, and especially on LinkedIn, you get a highlight reel of every how freaking awesome everyone is. Humble brag capital of the world. It's like scrolling Instagram and going, "Wow, I can eat whatever I want, look amazing, and work from the beach all the time." Like this is great. Why is that not happening to me? Right? That's what we see constantly. But in reality, when you lose your job, you lose your identity, especially for the types of folks that have worked hard enough to be executives. You know, you tend to be Type A personalities where you're a little obsessive about things, at least if you're like me, and you've had to push your career that way. And then all of a sudden it's gone. Right. And, you know, I double down on American society here because when we say, hey, tell me about yourself, the first thing you lead with is I'm this title. Right. You don't say I'm a dad. You don't say I'm a mom. You don't say these things. You say I'm an executive, this. Right? So we, I, we personalize our identity with our title. We've also lost a lot of power. Our status changed. Our families can be impacted, right? We go, oh no, I only have $400,000 in the bank and can survive 5 years without a job. This is stressful, right? Or I'm eating into my, uh, my retirement, or I've got, and this happens all the time. Uh, most of my clients tend to be at the age where their parents are in failing health and their kids are graduating. High school, which is statistically the most miserable period of life to be in because you're becoming an empty nester and you're paying for all that school, and then you're paying for all that medical for your parents too. It's a very tough position to be in, and that impacts your, your family. And if you lose your job during that, that only exasperates the issue. All right, so I'll talk a little bit about the power dynamic shift here. So as a leader, you set the agenda. Others are looking to take your time away. You're responsible for evaluating other people and you control the company resources. But as a candidate, others are setting the agenda for you. You're trying to get their time. Others are evaluating you and they hold the resources that you need. So this is a big leverage change and something that we need to be mindful of and ultimately what we need to reframe, right? So. We can't go into, and I call this the, um, this probably isn't politically correct, but it's a, uh, I call it the Oliver Twist metaphor, right? Where you're just begging, right? Please some more, right? Please give me a job. Like we're in that mindset because you were making decisions. Now someone's making a decision on you. And so we need to reframe from being a job seeker, a candidate, and an applicant to more of a market player, a value driver, somebody who is an asset to a company. Like it's good for them to talk to you because you provide value. You're not begging for their time. They're lucky to have you in the room right now. I don't want that to come across as arrogant. There's a difference between arrogance and confidence, just like there's a difference between being aggressive and being assertive, right? We need to assert our leadership and our value into conversations, and we need to know that we belong in the room. Otherwise, if we have that self-doubt, we're just never gonna win the job and we'll keep spinning our wheels. So I have a kind of confidence framework here on why you need to know your worth, understand your value, and own your narrative. Choose your battles wisely, set your terms, drive the process. You have a choice in the matter here. And then understand your future focus. Where do you wanna be in 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years? How are you, uh, how are you planning for that and how are you building your legacy? We need to plan and think about all of those things. There's some powerful language here that I want you to adopt. So this is a good sticky note opportunity if anyone's taking notes actually physically rather than just relying on AI. The power of I choose versus I'm looking, right? So a lot of times we say, I'm looking for opportunities, right? That's like most common. That's the fastest way to lose your executive presence. I'm looking, can you help me? I'm looking. Right? You're not looking, you're choosing. This is the mindset shift. It's not about finding the fit. It's about choosing the fit, right? Which puts you in a position where no can be an answer, right? Which increases your leverage and your power. So if you're choosing and you go through a process and you are going through the interview process and you're getting red flags, you can choose to say no, right? Now you might say, Jacob, that's much easier said than done. Like, I won't be able to pay my mortgage in 6 weeks, right? Like, I'm operating under a position that you have enough money to survive for a little bit. I won't judge you if you take a position for the sake of paying your bills and taking care of your family. It kind of goes back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Survival is most important. I'm honestly not opposed to you being deceitful to get a job to pay the bills. Right. Right. At the end of the day, I'm an advocate for the candidate and not the employer. And, you know, typically the employer will do fine with or without you. Right. And your kids might not. Right. So I understand the position that you're in to protect that, but I still want you to come after this with a position of, I choose, I'm looking for this next. This is where I will choose to go. You don't have to abolish I'm looking from your language, but just know that you have a choice in the matter. I mean, a lot of this, the devil is in the details and words matter. And I know this, this particular session is very high level and strategic of ways of thinking about it. And it's because we need to plan for a lot of the next steps and choose every word that we have every step of the way very wisely. That's going to build up to our negotiation leverage later in the process as well. All right. So I want to focus on reframing how you search for a job. All right. So you're not. necessarily looking. You're not a candidate, you're a product, right? I know there's a lot of marketing and sales folks here, and then there's some folks that kind of have different backgrounds as well, but you are a product going to market. For those that are in sales and marketing, this concept will be pretty easy to grok, right? You're probably very good at bringing products to market, right? You know that you need to know the market well. You need to show value in that market. You need to build relationships. In order to test that product in the market so you can develop fit, you need to create opportunities around that, and then you need to sell the deal, right? So if you're marketing a software product, you get it in front of the right audience, you get feedback, you're doing your research, a couple of people close, you, you start to assess those percentages, and then you try to repeat your building process around that. So for those in sales and marketing, this should be pretty easy, right? For others, we just need to think about Putting yourself out there and being proactive versus reactive, right? We cannot wait for something to happen. We need to go out and test the market, right? We need to understand it. What are people looking for these days, and how do I fit into that market? What messaging do I experiment with? How can I get varying perspectives to see if that message is resonating? How do I continue to expand that to increase my likelihood? Now, one of the ways this is a little bit easier than than selling an enterprise product is that you really only need to do it once. There's a lot less channels to focus on versus selling a product. You have, you know, your, your traditional LinkedIn processes, your communities, you have a couple channels like this, but it's, you don't have to run advertising, you don't have to create this big thought leadership brand, you don't need to change the category or reinvent the wheel, right? Very, very straightforward on the channels that you can tap into and experiment with. All right. I alluded a little bit of this, this earlier of the stage that we're in right now. So we're planning the strategy on what it's going to take. So we're planning a way to go to market for your career. But we still need to understand the steps that are involved because, as I mentioned earlier, words matter and they're very important. So we need to understand that as we plan this, we need to start attracting opportunities. Right? We're mastering our reputation, the channels, and every effort that we do when we put out into the world. Whether we're messaging someone in this group here today or somebody in a community, whether we're messaging somebody on LinkedIn or doing some outbound or we're commenting, the word choices you use really matter. So we need to think about, am I coming across as needy? Or am I coming across as confident? Am I providing feedback or am I asking? Am I adding value to this conversation or am I just saying something? Am I differentiating my message or am I saying what everybody else is saying? Almost everyone sends the same outbound messages. Hey, I saw that you're a recruiter and you're doing this job. I'm an excellent candidate for this for XYZ reason. How about you give me a call? Okay. Recruiters get that 50 times a day. You're not going to stand out. Right? So we need to think about that as we're— how do we be more attractive? Hey, I saw you're hiring for a position. I know a handful of folks that could be a good fit. How can I best show up for you? Right? I'd like to help. That's significantly stronger than just pitching somebody. So this is why we need to understand how do we attract now? And we'll go into some of those tactical details in the next session. And then as we're thinking about closing deals in an interview process, we need to take ownership of that process. We're not waiting around to be led through an interview. Most interviewers are pretty bad at interviewing. So what we can control is how we show up. And how we take control of that. And then also everything that we say in the interview process is either serving to build leverage for ourselves or it's going to eviscerate it. So we need to think very— we need to be proactive in how these conversations can go and what language we use through that process. And then ultimately, how do we elevate the compensation once we're there? Or at least change it and negotiate it so that it feels like the right deal for you. So that you can get ahead of your hesitations and red flags and address those. So you have your eyes wide open when you close the deal. All right. So now back to planning. That was kind of the overarching strategy that we're going through with PACE. We have an understanding of the market. It sucks mindset. It sucks, but it doesn't matter because you're better than that. Now let's start getting into a little bit more of the strategy here. So we want to first understand, like, what kind of companies are you targeting? Right? We need to think about the unique drivers of that, right? Large companies, deal sizes tend to be bigger. The sales cycle of what it takes to close that deal tends to be longer, more decision makers involved. Sometimes you'll have to influence 6 people, 12 people. So in a long-term sales process, it's your job to build advocates and champions in order to move the deal forward. We have to do the same thing in an interview process. And that's why you see, when you already know someone at the company, you have a head start. That's where you can see that you can build your network to know people at companies you're interested in, and we'll talk through ways to do that. You also need to understand that if you're going from a smaller company to a larger company, right, their needs are different than a small company's needs, and you need to adapt accordingly. Now, what we have to do is position what you do as the solution to their problem. So you might say, hey, you know, in this larger company, there might be a lot of processes. You might be having too many, you know, strategic people. I would imagine I'm in the room because I'm very hands-on and you need someone that's going to execute and do XYZ things. Is that right? So we have to have a counter-narrative depending on what their expectations are. Now, the same goes for earlier stage companies. You know, I have a lot of folks that are in Let's say billion-dollar companies, and they're doing pretty well with their compensation. But for whatever reason, they say, hey, Jacob, I would like to kill my career and go work for a startup and take a chance. Right? And I jest a little bit, but this ultimately, it's very, very difficult to predict successful startup companies. And you can start to spin your wheels in what I call the startup meat grinder, where you're in a job for 12 months and then 6 months and then 18 months, and you're just adding more and more. Yeah, Dan's over here going like, I've done that. I know a couple other folks here have done that too, right? I personally did that myself. I had 10 jobs in 10 years. Why do you think I'm teaching a course on how to find jobs? I know how to find jobs, right? And I'd almost be concerned if you're really good at finding a job, right? So I don't expect anyone to know this kind of off the bat, but those growth companies are looking for specific expertise. And oftentimes, if you're coming from a big company, they might be attracted to you from the success of the company or the brand name. But they're also worried that, are you going to be too strategic? You're not going to have the resources that you had at XYZ company. There's not the same layers of reporting. Are you going to roll up your sleeves? And so I don't know what your answer is on what type of company you want to go for yet, but the point is I want you to think about what are all of the negatives they're going to think about you and how do we get ahead of them? How do we build narrative to get ahead of those things? Same goes for if you're going from a larger title to a smaller title, right? Like if I'm going to hire Anna and I know you're a CEO, right? My concern is, right? My concern would be, look, you've been a CEO. Are you actually going to take orders now? How are you going to collaborate with my team if you're not the one in charge anymore? At least not the ultimate decision maker. Right. You don't have to answer that right now. I don't expect you to, But you need to think through what are the cons here. And this is a big pain point. We talked about this at CMO Huddles a little bit. A lot of people perceive marketing to be a cost center and not an investment center, right? It is a cost, like marketing just spends money. It's hard to justify the return. I'm just spending and I don't know where the investment's going. They also think that marketing is just this switch that you can flick on and then all of a sudden leads fall from the sky and everybody's making money. I see a lot of Like people get exhausted with that messaging. And so because we know that's a problem, and I imagine you don't want to walk into that problem again, we can use our experiences as narrative, such as you strike me as somebody who knows that marketing is not just a cost, but an investment, right? This is typically what it looks like, right? It looks like you've had 3 CMOs in the last 3 years. What have you learned from that? Right? Here's how I would do things differently. So we need to get ahead of those faults and actually verbalize them and communicate them if we don't want to repeat the same mistakes. And that can go for anybody in their different, different career fields. All right. I also want to talk about, since we're talking about you as a product, let's talk about kind of the different layers that you bring to the table. So at the very base level, I call these table stakes. This is actually what most people communicate on LinkedIn and what most people communicate in their resumes. This, this core skills or industry expertise, functional knowledge, you know, the access that they have, the types of people they have. This is, this is what we often communicate the most with because there's usually justifiable metrics. Like it looks a little sexier when we talk about it, but the reality is you're not going to be interviewing for a senior executive role if you don't have those at all. And that starts to become table stakes. Like, we know you're a functional expert. If you've been a VP of marketing for 15 years, we know you probably know how to do marketing. Otherwise you wouldn't be in that career for as long as you have. Right? So we don't need to spend time trying to be impressive with all this, that crap that we used to do. We instead need to focus on more about what the top executives care about. So the next layer, layer up. Also, if you didn't have this, you wouldn't be in the room. How do you feel about building teams? How are you optimizing processes? How do you control budgets and P&Ls and EBITDA depending on whether you're in VC or private equity? What are the metrics that you do right now? This could be operational excellence. Excellence is really important for especially senior director and VP roles, right? You're a little bit more hands-on. You have to be in the nitty-gritty here. But if we start to move to C-suite, we need to really care about what's the revenue impact, what's our position in the market, how are we, you Innovating and staying ahead of the competition and building pipeline. How are we managing risks? Right? How are we controlling this piece? So the more senior you go, the more you need to focus on closer to the top of the pyramid here. You'll notice that I put a little star here, right? The star is what I call kind of the X factors here. And these are the soft skills that you need to show. You don't always need to say. This is where the soft skills are. Wow, Matt's a really confident leader. Carol is courageous and can speak up for others like these, these, these traits that need to be shown. You know, Yulia is not afraid to be confrontational, but I like it when she does it because of the way she does it. We should never underestimate a lot of the soft skills, like being a likable person and not an asshole. Now, I'm sure plenty of you have worked for assholes and you know that it probably affects your performance, right, as you work for those types of folks. So these stronger jobs, the ones that are more fulfilling, are ways that you get to show up as your most authentic self. And you can be comfortable and you don't have to put a mask on for the sake of getting the job. Right. Oftentimes we put a mask on, we overlook things that we think are going to be challenges because we just need the money. And ultimately that's what tears a lot of our companies apart, right? Because that's perpetuated. And then it's exhausting to keep up that face for a long time. And then you lead to burnout, and then it's kind of a self-destructive process from there. So these X factors, we want to be as authentic as possible and as honest as possible and confident along the way being able to do that. And oftentimes what's missing is just the tactical, how exactly do I say what I need to say? Right? So instead of hiding from it, we need to address it. And if you don't know how to address it, then we have a different problem, which is, okay, how do I address that? Let's think about different ways to bring this up. All right, so now I want to think about some of the key relationships that you need to develop in your inner circle, right? And this is what we're, this is what we're planning to develop here. So your inner circle is someone like former colleagues, mentors that you have, industry peers. I know a lot of you are from similar organizations or have met each other before, right? I know there's a couple folks from CMO Huddles as an example. That would be an example of an industry peer. We both work in marketing. We kind of like each other. We share tips with each other. They're in your inner circle. Oftentimes these are the folks that show up for you best. We also have network connectors. These might be the association or community leaders. Like if you're in Pavilion, as an example, this might be your chapter head that knows everybody, right? It's good to have those people on your side. Could also be private equity and venture capital contexts. You should have some relationships there, especially if you're in an executive position to focus on growth opportunities and you're kind of avoiding the public sector, as an example. I, I added this section called Growth Insight. Now, this doesn't have to be somebody who is an industry peer or even a functional peer, but somebody, let's say you're a, I'll use marketing again, and you're having difficulty explaining the cost of marketing and the investment of marketing, and you're just constantly getting your ass kicked with that question. Wouldn't it make sense to build some thought partners that are in finance, like some CFOs to connect with? Right? Who are the best marketers you've ever worked with? You know, what is it? How do you know a marketer is going to work out? Like, what do you want marketers to bring to you to make your job easier versus difficult? Like, you need to have partners that you can spar with that can help you understand different perspectives around the entire org. Right? So I like growth experts for growth insights for that. You also have subject matter experts, right? So if AI is an important part, Who are some leaders in AI that you can start to build relationships with? How can you learn from that? Use that as a growth lever for yourself. Then there are also market experts, right, that understand all of enterprise software or all of CPG or all of healthcare or one segment of healthcare. And those are folks that you're also going to want to build as part of your network. So we don't just want to focus on which recruiters are going to have jobs for me. I also added coaches on this list, but in reality, I don't recommend having too many coaches in your corner, just because you have to really, as with everyone, do your due diligence and find somebody who's going to click with you. And you want to make sure that you put everyone through the fire before you hire anybody in that regard. Then there's also company insiders. Let's say you have a list of 20 target companies. It would be a dream To work at Anthropic, or it'd be a dream to work at Mount Sinai Health, or it would be a dream for X, right? You want to start to develop relationships with those folks, right? And we will talk about a couple of strategies to do that. So you're not just blindly outreaching everywhere, but you need to start to establish connections with the types of companies that'll be interesting for you. All right. So I just wanted to share another way of looking at what process you're in right now. This again, I guess most of these folks are marketers though, so not a lot of sales folks here, but this is a sales funnel. This is how we're going to go through the next sessions throughout this course. So on Thursday, we're going to talk more about getting noticed, right? This is our attraction layer. We need to attract more people. That is our marketing assets like resume and LinkedIn, right? How do we activate our network more specifically and tactically than what I just went over now? How do we manage our outbound efforts? As we start to attract more of an audience, then we're actually focusing on closing a deal. We're not just interviewing. And I think a lot of, I think this is an important mindset shift to make because in an interview you're trying to be worthy, you're trying to be impressive, but what we're actually doing is closing. We want alignment with the people that we will be working with. We're gonna have to work with these people. I'd, I'd joke and say 40 hours a week, but we know for everyone in here, that's like 80 hours a week. You're often spending more time with these folks than your families. So we need to focus on alignment. So we want to find their pains and sell them the solutions that we're comfortable doing to prove our fit. So a different way of thinking about your interview process. And then as we elevate, we think about the negotiation. This is the structure of which we're going to work under. This is our contract. Oftentimes we're so focused on just getting the offer that we forget about the actual negotiation itself. We might say, oh, I can move this deal. I might ask for a little bit money, a little bit more money. But what happens is we'll go through this 3-month validation process. They'll say, hey, Tara, I'm going to get you a job. Here's the offer. You have 48 hours to accept, right? You spent 3 months trying to prove that I'm the right person. You only give me 2 days. Like, that's bullshit. So in the elevate, we want to focus on the structure, how we're capturing that value for our career, and then optimizing the terms so it's a better fit. I just wanted to visualize this in a funnel way as well to show you that this is a process that will repeat over and over. So now we're going to focus on some tactical aspects to get started here. This is where we'll spend kind of the majority of the rest of our session today on how to actually get started telling your story and ways to think about it. All right. So the big, big takeaway of today's session, and it's where I see probably the most mistakes, is that we're not selling your history. We're selling the future. This is very difficult, especially when our first instinct is to fix our resume, which is a chronological list of things we've done in the past. We fix our LinkedIn, which is a chronological list of things we've done in the past. Right? Everything is so focused on what we've done in the past that we forget about where we're going. And so we're focused on how do I explain this thing I did 5 years ago? How do I perfect? Like, what are they gonna ask me about this? Right? And so we're often on the back foot just trying to rewrite history, share it in the best light, and we forget that we're actually selling the future of what we're gonna solve next. And this is a, this is an important distinction to make because Everyone here has probably been in an interview where the other person doesn't really let you talk and they're just saying, well, Dan, tell me about yourself. You know, David, what did you do here? Karen, 5 years ago you led this charge and, and this is what it looked like, right? What value is that providing to the future conversation other than keeping you what I call on the back foot? So what happens is if you're waiting for them to ask the questions, they're typically asking questions about the past first to see if you're a good fit to continue the conversation moving forward. And when you're on the back foot, you're less confident because you don't know what they're going to ask you. They can ask you just about anything and it can throw you off. But the key takeaway is stop selling the history, start selling the future. Experience is a commodity, and the impact that you're going to have is the product that we're selling here. And so there's a couple of ways to do this. Oftentimes we lead with, I've had 20 years of experience doing this, and I led teams of 500, and I managed $100 million, and I implemented these systems and those types of things. That's how the average folks interview. I'm not saying that's not gonna get you a job, but that's not necessarily gonna help you create opportunities in the same way. That's gonna help you be judged versus being in a more confident and, and proactive position that's confident. So the new model is more like, in my— I, I accelerated revenue, tripled revenue in the last 24 months. I accelerated revenue 3 times in the last 2 years, or I tripled revenue in the last 24 months. I transformed the cost structure, which saved us $45 million. This is a much more direct way of saying what happened. I built an acquisition engine that, that drove $2 billion in value. Here's how I did that as an example. So it's not, I have experience, it's I did this thing. But we need to move it kind of to the next step here. Which is that we need to make it matter to them. So we have this achievement. I built this global engineering team from 50 to 500, or I 10x'd it, or think about however you want to say that. What exactly did that do for the company? Right? Well, it accelerated the product development, reduced the time to market. It helped us scale revenue. It created enterprise value, all of those things. And then what are you illustrating to them when you share your story that way? Oh, you've proven like you've scaled before, like that box is ticked. This is typically what you see in the job description here. Like, do you have global strategy? Do you have, you know, a scaling playbook? Do you have these? When you tell a story like this, you show that you have it. You don't say that you have it. Right. So you're eliciting the feelings that you're the right person for this. So we need to make it matter to them. And so as we look at a job description, every point that they have, we should have some type of story to get ahead of it. To make sure we're showing we're the right person for that. So let's get a little bit more specific now. So I'm coming up with a narrative. This is closer to your 90-second pitch because we focused on this model right here, which is your role, your achievement, their need, right? So you'll say something like, I'm an enterprise marketer. I'm best known for doing X thing. I suspect that's what you're looking for. I wouldn't be here today. Right. I think Beth's was, you know, I'm a performance growth marketer. I've had 5 exits. I suspect you're trying to do the same. I can help you get there. Where do we start? That's the whole tell me about yourself story. And it's 5 seconds, right? The key here is that we're shifting the conversation from, like, we could talk about my past all day and wax poetic on that, but let's instead start solving problems for the future. Let's instead focus there. It also shifts your own confidence dynamic to say, hey, these are friendly waters for me. Let's talk about these areas. I think they're most relevant to you. You shift the conversation and that gives you a sense of control. You start to interview back. You get to meet, be more confident and curious. The hack that I have for this is that if you go into that first interview, just pretend you already have the job. And they hired you as a consultant. Consult them on what needs to be done. Don't prove that you need to be there. Consult them on what needs to be done. You'll ask smarter questions like, if I were in your shoes, I would be thinking about hiring an executive like this. What do you know? What are some of the things you've gone through the last 6 months that would indicate otherwise? You're not saying like, I'm the right person for you. I'm consulting you on On the hire that you should make. So now let's do it for everyone here. So everyone's going to have their own unique area that they want to dive into, right? It might be that people typically call me because I'm the guy or the gal that you call when you're at this growth problem, right? I know this better than the back of my hand. Or you could say that If you're going into a position where, and this happens all the time, you're doing something but you're not technically qualified for it on paper, you instead say, I suspect someone is, someone like you is looking for someone like me because I'm thinking about things differently. And this is an area where we can be really innovative and kind of change the mold for how you grow through this period or something like that. So here's an example of a pitch template, and you're welcome to take a screenshot if you'd like. This is, I am a role best known for this. You're likely interested in me because of connection to their needs, and then end with a probing open-ended question to confirm why you're there. This works with networking too. And I'd say, Paul, you know, I see that you're in marketing. Right. You likely want to talk to me because I've helped a lot of marketers land roles and move their compensation forward. Is that right? And you're saying, yes, I want to talk to you for that. And I might add, did I miss anything? What about my background is interesting to you? And now Paul is saying, Jacob, I like this about you. I like this. I'm actually unsure about this and this. And I think, you know, I saw this other thing you did and you're an asshole. Like, let's talk about all those things. Great. You've given me an agenda and I know exactly how to sell you. If I wanted to, right? That's what we're doing in an interview process too. Yeah. So you're saying something like, I am a go-to-market executive best known for helping 5 companies exit. Most recently, you probably saw the one where we had $1.8 billion. I would imagine, or you're likely speaking with me because it sounds like you're also interested in what it takes to create that hypergrowth operation process or whatever. Is that right? Would you like me to dive deep into how we made that happen? What are some of the things that are working or not working for you on that vision right now? What are the gaps that you're seeing? If I'm walking into this company for the first time, where's the dirty laundry I'm going to step in? How assertive do you want the leadership profile to be? What kind of pressure are you under from the board? You see how this starts to catapult into here, all these questions I'm asking. It starts to put you in control, and this is also going back to that point where you're not trying to earn it. You're choosing. Is this the type of person I want to work with? Right as Dan was vehemently shaking his head at marketing being a cost, I might ask a question: Do you see marketing as a cost or an investment? Why? As you're now interviewing them. So this process should be at least 50/50, especially as an executive leader, because you're also illustrating the traits necessary to be assertive through the process, right? You can't just wait because then you're eliciting passive behavior. You're waiting for things to happen. Instead, if you're a consultant, start solving problems and providing value right away. So I have one final slide here. As a consideration, as you think about right now, we have a very generic script, right? I'm this thing best known for this. This is why it matters to you right now. We need to adapt that every single time depending on what somebody's interested in. The first 2 might not matter that much, but maybe it does need to change. I might say I've worked with folks that have been at one company for a long time. I suspect that's why we're here today. Or I know that Paul's in marketing and I know common pains for marketing. So I'll change my pitch to how I've supported marketers, or I'll change my pitch to how I've supported CEOs, right? As we have some CEOs on the call. And so what I mean by adapting your message, everybody has different drivers and different things that they care about. So if you're talking to the board, right, the board, first of all, a lot of board members are on multiple boards. They have multiple portfolio companies. So you might say, you know, from your experience, as we get to the question part, hey, I'm, I'm Jason. I'm best known for being the operational jack of all trades who solves these growth problems, right? From your perspective at a board, right? What companies in your portfolio have the strongest operational processes and why? Changes the question, right? If I'm networking and I know that somebody's out of work, How do I best show up for you? What are the roles that you're looking for and what's getting in the way of you getting there? If I'm talking to a recruiter, how do I help you fill this position whether I'm the person or not? And can I make your life easier? Because if I can reduce that friction for you, they're more likely to get back to you. If we're thinking about how to talk to a direct report or we're interviewing with somebody that's a direct report, let's put ourselves in their shoes for a second. They might've been vying for that position that you're interviewing for and didn't get it, right? You've probably all been there. That kind of sucks. Who, what asshole are they going to hire over me where I, like, they're not going to know nearly as much. I've been here for 3 years, right? So instead, as you go into that interview, instead of saying, this is how I'm going to change your life, you say, I suspect I can learn a lot from you given your experience here. What are the types of leaders you admire and how can I be that person for you? Like, what do you care about most in your career and how do I help you get there? So it's a very empathetic approach. I know we talk about all the time, like, it's very important to have empathy. This is how you show it. And we think about that with vendors. What are the best companies you work with? Like, how do I make sure I'm your most excited client? Right? How do I make sure that when you go back to your sales leader, you say, you know, Jacob is, you know, he's our advocate. He's one of our best clients, and he's gonna stay retained forever, and he's never gonna churn. How do I make sure I become that person for you? Like, that's how you talk to your vendors. With the investors, what are you most interested in in the growth metrics? What gets you nervous? What do you hope to avoid when you're hiring someone like this? And so we think about all those different things, and it ultimately does boil down to the generic, how do I best show up for you? The you is just always different. So one of the things I have a big problem with, with career coaches, is that they have you master your elevator pitch and it stays the same, and then you repeat it verbatim and it's full of so many damn buzzwords that I don't actually know what you said, right? That's why it has to be so simple. We really clean it up and then we just focus more instead of trying to focus on remembering the perfect thing to say. Instead, try to focus on what does the other person care about most? And if you don't have the answer to that, it's an indication you need to ask better questions. So it's kind of like my final takeaway here is to personalize your story. Anyone here in marketing knows that personalized marketing is significantly more effective than broad marketing. Even if, you know, in Jason's case, you are a broad leader, you can still personalize the approach to the individual. And Think about exactly how to position yourself for that. Session 2 workbook. This week you'll lay the groundwork for a marketing-based job search campaign by focusing on what makes you a valuable product and aligning it with your ideal roles. You'll start by reflecting on the strengths and experiences that set you apart, then turn them into stories that you can use in key scenarios. You'll also create a simple persona to better understand one of your target audiences And research companies that will help you define your next moves. Everything you're learning in this course is equipping you with the theory, but often variables like the market, the budgets, the memos, the comp committees, the competition, or simply your own limiting beliefs can get in your way of negotiating what you're truly worth in the market. I can only serve a handful of clients at the level that I insist on, and demand now exceeds that volume. But if you'd like 15 years, thousands of engagements, and over $1.25 billion in lifted outcomes in your corner for your next negotiation, all completely discreet and confidential, you can request an engagement with me using the first link in the description below. I recommend you reach out before you need me because the strongest outcomes that we've created for clients often start months before the negotiation does. Now back to the course. Session 3, Optimizing LinkedIn and Resumes. If your job search is a marketing campaign, LinkedIn is your top-of-funnel tactic. It's the channel for building awareness, generating interest, and establishing credibility rather than directly closing a deal. In other words, instead of focusing on job posting, think of LinkedIn as a platform to showcase your unique value and create opportunities through relationships. In this session, You'll learn about crafting a compelling profile, engaging thoughtfully with content, and nurturing your network in order to draw attention and start having conversations with key contacts, conversations that will make sure you're top of mind when the right role emerges. All right. Now let's hop right into one of my favorite and least favorite topics, which is the LinkedIn obsession. And you might ask, like, why, why am I the person to talk to you about LinkedIn? Well, I've built my career on LinkedIn. I probably started in 2008. I've moved millions of dollars through LinkedIn. I've watched it evolve over the years. I have spent no less than maybe 3 to 4 hours a day on LinkedIn for the last decade, and that is way too much time to spend on LinkedIn. And I promise you, I would love to quit LinkedIn, but I just can't quit you, baby. It is just The only platform that has ever been there for me through thick and thin. I quit Twitter, I quit Facebook, I quit the Gram for a while. I'm back on the Gram, but LinkedIn I can't seem to quit because it is so damn profitable and it's really built my entire career. I want to share a couple of common mistakes that executives make. Y'all share too much detail on your LinkedIn, and I think there's a reason for this. At the earliest part of our careers, we can't really put anything on our LinkedIn because we've never done anything. And then in the middle parts of our careers, we start to do things and particularly tactical things, and we start to have outcomes and dollar signs attached and, you know, just general impact we've had on companies. So we share all of that. Like, look at this thing I did. I increased open rates, or I was able to save our company X money, or I've been able to do these things. And we get really tactical in the details that we share. And so we tend to share so much and we're usually at a director-level stage when we do that. And I think what happens to a lot of folks is they think that being at the VP or at the C-suite level is doing more of the same, right? Like whatever you were doing in 40 hours a week, just do 60 hours and you're going to get there, do it in 80 hours and you're going to get there. People burn themselves out just repeating tactical things and doing more of the same. And so when they go to a VP level and they start to talk about that, they just hope their numbers increase, right? They hope those outcomes increase and then they share that. But I'll give you a quick story on why I think that's a bad idea. If you raised, you know, let's say you raised $10 million for a company, you might find that impressive. Some people might find that impressive. Some of the executives I talked to would call that a rounding error. Right? Like, it's not impressive at all. So the perception of what you've done serves to kind of keep you in the same place, which is okay if you want to be doing more of the same. But I know there's a lot of folks on this call that want to be growing and want to be doing more. And what's difficult about oversharing all these tactical details is that it's a timestamp on who you were in the past and not necessarily an indication on what you're doing in the future. And so if you're really happy at working between $100 and $200 million in revenue, say you work between $100 and $200 million in revenue, but don't expect opportunities at $250 to $500, or don't expect opportunities to come your way at $1 billion plus. So what you say serves almost as an anchor to where you are. And I'd argue that a lot of people on this call today are better on the phone than they are on LinkedIn. Show of hands, think that they're— who thinks they're better on communicating in person, meeting, networking, anything in person, not on LinkedIn, right? So we can't solve the problems on LinkedIn, but we can shoot ourselves in the foot by oversharing. If we can bring someone to a conversation with us, we can position ourselves however we want on the fly for whatever reason, without being burdened with this information that people already know about us and our reputation. So I'm really going deep on stop oversharing. People use non-standard job titles all the time. This is where things get really wonky. At CMO of the Super Huddles the other day, we were talking about why it should be the Chief Market Officer instead of Marketing Officer. Like, I get that that could start a conversation, but nobody actually searches for that because it doesn't really exist. So you're probably not going to get found for that. It also happens when people get cute with titles and they might say VP of Growth and Operations and Revenue. And the way that LinkedIn can decipher that could be VP of Revenue or VP of Growth or VP— it picks one. And when we've done testing with LinkedIn Recruiter, we can't actually tell which one it's gonna pick. So you don't know what you're actually optimizing for. And that non-standard job titles can really kick you in the ass, especially when you're using advisor or consultant or fractional. People don't often search, I want a fractional, right? So those things can actually add friction, including community memberships as your experience. Almost every community asks us to do that. Like, hey, say you're a member at X, say you're a founding member at Chief or whatever at Pavilion. And what happens is that becomes the top ranked thing in your experience and it changes the way you show up in search. The biggest problem I see is that people spend way too much time trying to fix their LinkedIn and not leveraging their real strengths. So they're trying to figure out the algorithm. They're spending a lot of time. Oh, this didn't work. They're doing a lot of A/B testing because I'm not seeing recruiter attention. I'm not seeing this inbound. I'm not like, and it's all this inbound focus. Like I'm not getting found. But what you need to be asking is, how can I go make myself found? Like you have to go to an outbound approach. at the more executive levels instead of trying to optimize the, the most attractive honey to get all of the bees in, so to speak. All right, so I'll go through some must-haves, which everyone's heard this before. I'm not going to spend a lot of time. Your headshot matters a lot. It really does. Like, it needs to look very professional. I used to joke that I could tell how much money someone made based off of their headshot that they had, right? If somebody spends over $1,000 on a headshot, I can tell. And it's not that you're gonna necessarily look more attractive or really stand out as this like total badass. It's just that you can tell that you care about your appearance, you care about your career, and people that care about their careers tend to perform better. So like we make that snap judgment. That is a bias that we have as humans. And through testing, we have found that the more attractive the picture, the better the outcome. Like I'll say perceivably attractive. Right? We've done testing with outbound where percentages of outreach will improve depending on how great the picture is. A lot of folks make this mistake with the headline, but they put so many damn buzzwords in it. They're like 4 or 5 different things at once. You can't be a master of B2B, B2C, GDM, everything, AI, ML, NLP, all at once. It doesn't make any fucking sense, right? You can't be all of those things at once. Now I understand you're trying to show up in searches. For all those different things, because you may be open to that, but it is a word soup that confuses more than it does align, and that hurts your chances. And I'll also talk about why the experience section is the most crucial for inbound. All right. I said, keep it simple, right? Here's some examples of some folks that I know, right? You'll look at their, look at their headlines like Tammy, executive revenue leader, go-to-market builder. Not a lot there, right? You know, Kim, I know actually there's some folks here that know Kim. Right? There's something that they also have in common. Dan doesn't even have a cover photo. What an amateur, right? Come on, Dan. I'll give him a hard time for that. Well, what I think a lot of folks would like to know is that all of these folks are multi-seven-figure earners annually, and that's really weird, right? Because it doesn't look like they're fully optimizing their profiles, does it? So it's interesting that you can rise and be a multi-seven-figure earner. Without perfectly optimizing your LinkedIn profile. And that always got me wondering, you know, why is it that they're doing that? So I argue very heavily, you need to keep it simple. Keep it simple. I have very strong opinions on the open-to-work circle, right? No, I don't think you're desperate. I just think it's like playing poker with some of your hands revealed, and it changes the way people think about you in the negotiation, especially at the executive level. If you're a mid-level manager, it's okay to say you're open to work. Like, it's easier to find people that way. I get that. But as an executive who has the opportunity to go from $250,000 a year to $400,000 a year based off of perception, or from $500,000 to $1 million based off of perception, this is shooting yourself in the foot. Like, it absolutely is, even if it just slightly changes the way somebody anchors you. That's an uphill battle. You're adding friction that you don't need to have. I share quite a bit. You don't overcomplicate your profile. Here's an example of somebody's job description where LinkedIn's features actually ask you, what skills do you have that are associated with this job? LinkedIn's user experience actually shoots you in the foot because they say what skills are associated. Now, as a director of content strategy and brand experience, Now, one of the problems with this headline is they could be ranking for content. They could be ranking for brand. We actually don't know until we look at the backend of Recruiter. So they may be only getting brand opportunities or only content opportunities. The challenge here is they added their skills to it and LinkedIn just throws it all under the description. So when you open up the profile to try to read about somebody, it's just, it's basically buzzword soup. I can't actually learn anything. It just adds friction and more like time to understand it, and they're more likely to click off than they are to actually learn more, right? I don't have a problem with this individual not saying anything about their job. Coincidentally, it's the problem of all of the skills being dumped under there. I also want to talk about that little circle that says hybrid, like the hybrid piece. LinkedIn asks you, are you full-time? Are you contract? Are you hybrid? Did LinkedIn help you find this job? Are you remote only? You don't need to answer that. It's unnecessary to give that much detail. So for example, if you said, I'm in San Francisco, but the role is remote, people say, oh, maybe they're in Sacramento. Maybe I'll pay them 20% less, right? Or maybe they only want to work remote and we want somebody that's in the office 1 or 2 days hybrid. Like we just can't control the perception when we share that information. So it may be that Paul over here, Is a remote worker, but he'd be open to being in the office. Hell, he may even be open to full-time. But because he shared the detail of remote, as I click on his profile, I might have a vendetta against remote employees. And I might say, you know what? I don't want to hire anybody that thinks it's going to be a remote role for an executive position. And you don't even get the opportunity for a conversation. Now, on one hand, if you're very firm and you're, I only want to work remote, go ahead and shout it, right? Because you'll do yourself a favor. By turning off all of the people that won't hire you for that in the first place. I'd still argue that it's better to be more broad and then convince them through conversation and through the interview process to make you remote than it is to never have the opportunity in the first place. So it's something to think about here. Also, what I found, the state and the city that you're in greatly influences how much money someone's expecting you to pay. So for example, when I lived in Montana, I told people I was still in San Francisco. Because I charge probably greater than San Francisco rates. And I don't want people to think, here's some hoedunk hillbilly in Montana, right? Why the hell is he charging me $1,000 an hour? This is bullshit right now. I've changed right now to Incline Village, Nevada, because if you know, you know, right? If somebody can afford to live there— now, I don't live in one of those big million-dollar houses, right? But the perception is, wow, this guy can afford to live in Tahoe, not pay income taxes, and he's in the 2nd most affluent area code in the country. So there's a perception there that if you know that area, you know that somebody is perceived to be more successful if they can be there, just like if you lived in the Hamptons, or just like if you lived in Aspen, Colorado, where there are areas that change the perception of your value based on the location. That being said, for most folks in tech or healthcare or most major companies, you want to be most associated with the closest metropolitan area. It's like if you're in upstate New York, you say New York City, right? If you're in Green Bay, Wisconsin, you say Chicago area, right? So you get the perception of, I'm going to have to pay someone more for that location, even if you're not physically right there. So it's something to keep in mind as we talk about words matter. Everything that you share with the world can and will be used against you. All right. Now I'll talk a little bit more about the LinkedIn algorithm, and I've done a lot of testing on this with LinkedIn Recruiter. With Discover Podium, we purchased LinkedIn Recruiter specifically so that we could target folks that were open to new opportunities. It gave us the opportunity to search for executives that had physically toggled the box, I'm looking for work. They didn't necessarily put the green circle, but they said, I'm open. So for us, that was an indication that they could be a client. So we reverse engineered LinkedIn Recruiter for lead generation for our company. And unfortunately, I'd rather use Sales Navigator because it's way cheaper than Recruiter. Recruiter is about $1,200 a month. But we use this to optimize and check, like, if we tweak our clients' LinkedIn profiles, how can we get them to rank higher than someone else? And we tested this, and I actually tested this with the head of data science for Walmart. And this is an interesting use case because, one, lucky me to talk to the data science guy at Walmart, like phenomenally talented. And he kicked my ass for 6 months while we tried to figure this out. And what was interesting is that Walmart has 3 brands. They have Walmart Retail, they have Walmart eCommerce, and then they have Walmart Labs, which is another type of kind of techie side of Walmart. And so originally we tested Walmart as his most recent job position as head of data, and he got ranked alongside executives from Home Depot. And executives from other retail stores. When we did Walmart Labs, he was ranking alongside other tech companies in Silicon Valley. When he did Walmart e-commerce, he was ranking with Amazon executives and other e-commerce platforms like Shopify. So we're like, interesting, we changed the company and it changes the bubble that you're found in from recruiters. And he didn't want to get found with Walmart employees. He wanted to get found with tech employees. And so when a company— this is most relevant to you who have worked in an early company that has been acquired. Do you use the earlier company name or do you use the acquisition company name? I worked with a gal who was the chief information officer of the Dollar Shave Club, and the Dollar Shave Club was owned by— it's not Procter& Gamble, but It's one of those, right? I can't remember the— someone can fact-check me on that. But we were trying to decide, like, if you're the chief information officer of Dollar Shave Club, she was ranking with Gillette and other shave companies, which was funny. And it's not like she was particularly interested in men's shaving, which is traditionally what that, that was about. But when we listed it as the main company, the Fortune 500 company, and it looked like she went from a C-suite at a startup to a C-suite at a Fortune 500 simply by changing the company name, all of a sudden her income potential was almost 4x. So when we had the opportunity to negotiate on her behalf, when they're saying, oh wow, she is an executive leader at a Fortune 500 company, the perception of her value skyrocketed. So the company that you work for is very important right now. I know there's folks like, I've never worked for a sexy company. What do I do? Right? We need to work on that, and there'll be other areas where we can focus on, on that. So the company size prestige impacts your visibility and outbound. And then again, title standardization is very important. Don't get too cute with that. So this is another problem that I see, the which goes first here. So this is from a client of mine who is a VP of product and design, and he's also started being a partner at Reforge, which is a community in the product world. Now, he'd been at Metabase since January 2021, and he started this executive partner role at Reforge in May 2023. So when you update your experience on LinkedIn, what happens is the most recent thing pops to the top. So when he updated this, executive partner went above his VP of product role, and what happened was recruiters stopped reaching out to him. And you can't figure out why, like, he's still a VP of product that's still current. But with the way the algorithm works, when we were testing this with clients, the most recent experience dominates the inbound. For those that are familiar with SEO, this is like your title tag, like what is the page about? And so now I'm gonna have to give him a hard time because is he product or is he design, right? Like which one's he trying to optimize for? Because those 2 things are technically different and can shift the way he's found. Now, Originally, that executive partner showed up. I asked him to shift it, and then inbound attention returned. So these are the little things, the little nuances that not a lot of people understand, because I don't think they've reverse engineered Recruiter to try to see how it works. I hope they fix this and can read better. But in our testing, no matter how many keywords we put in the summary, no matter how much bullshit fluff we put in the headline, no matter how much we added skills, It did not impact the search materially. But when we changed the title or the company, everything changed. One other piece that I actually don't have in the deck, but it's really important. The industry you choose to associate yourself with changes how you're found as well. So in the— when you're on your profile and you click the little pencil to edit things, It gives you an opportunity to, to test what industry you're in. So it's like computer software, healthcare, manufacturing, whatever. And that particular piece actually influences your search quite a bit, and you wouldn't even know it because it's hidden. And in some cases, somebody changed it. You probably changed it 10 years ago and didn't change it again. And so sometimes you need to shift that to computer software. Sometimes you need to shift that to healthcare, whatever it is, maybe AI. If you're running into a situation where you haven't been found by recruiters for a long time, I like to toggle that and just change the industry because there's a lot of very adjacent similar industries where you could argue maybe I belong in any one of these 3. You can switch your industry in that section, wait about 72 hours for LinkedIn to understand the change. We call that propagation, right? And then see if inbound attention returns. So there's like one little quick hit where you can change it and see, is anybody coming my direction? Again, I'd argue not to overly emphasize this because we don't want to wait for someone to find us, especially when people are waiting to take money for our mortgage. Like we need to get active. So optimization things, everything in the experience section should be high level. And don't worry, I'm going to walk through some use cases here. And then we also have a lot of details in the workbook on how to cover This, I'd argue to remove advisor, consultant, fractional from your job titles specifically, unless you want to only be an advisor or only be a consultant or only be fractional, right? If you are fractional, you should know that you're not going to get a lot of inbound attention. You need to sell your ass off to close more deals. Like, that's the reality of what we're working with here. So you can, in theory, shoot yourself in the foot by doing that. Really, the lesson here is only talk about things that you want to be doing more of, right? It's too much of a logic leap for someone to go through your experience and see all this stuff and then magically predict that you want a W-2 again, or magically say, oh, I'm going to give this person a shot at $500 million instead of $100 million. Like, that just doesn't happen. People don't do that. And I think there's a reason for it. It's that if you're an executive hiring another executive, You have to hire someone who's been there before to cover your ass, because if it doesn't work out, you can turn to everyone and say, what did you want from me? They had all the experience on paper, right? Like, you get to cover your ass. I hired this job that's 10x what you were, and I took a chance on you, and then you shit the bed on me. Like, I'm getting fired too, because my dumb ass took a chance on you, right? So people don't do that. Most people play safe, right? So Paul has to be exceptionally persuasive to win me over to take that chance. And we'll talk about more ways to do that as well. And honestly, it's fear, and I think it's bad leadership to not take a chance on people, but that's the world we live in. All right, now I want to go to a live demonstration, which means I'm going to have to stop sharing for a second. Oh, here's Dan again, right? Some of the things here, just simple, simple progression, one sentence per role, right? Because when you expand this out, and if I'm trying to actually learn about Dan and I expand this out, I can actually very quickly scan. Okay, Roku, 7, 8 years, Ad Council member, great. Cornell, great. Nielsen, right? This tells a story. He doesn't have a lot of data, but it shows like a chronological piece. And if it was packed full of 50 skills or if it had a ton of content here, you got to scroll and you got to scroll and you got to scroll. And then every one of those pieces that you have to read is a reason to disqualify you. So it's some— it's a— it's I can't stress that enough, that less is often more, especially for executives. It's okay if you're a director to say, I'm the email wizard and these are my email outcomes, because the person that's going to hire you is an executive saying, I just need someone to solve this one problem, right? Executives are more broad in their scope. I also wanted to quickly show what a good recruiter looks like, right? You'll notice that all of these folks have great headshots, like front and center, like with Kate here. She does share a little bit more, but keep in mind she's a business owner, right? This is more of an entrepreneurial profile. Talks about these are the things that she's focused on. This is where she starts to share some of her featured work because she's a business owner here, right? And then you'll see in the experience, she doesn't have to say much because her reputation is so good. Now, I might give her a hard time for the hybrid piece, but I honestly, I'm kind of scared to talk to Kate negatively ever. Quality is more important than quantity, right? I have 90 recommendations and nobody really cares. Basically, I'll get people, can I talk to some of your past clients? Because I want to see if you're worthwhile. And I'm like, do you want to just reach out to any of the 90 people that are on my profile, please? Like, and do some digging, right? So people don't often see that. But if you have a powerful recommendation, like, make sure it's somebody meaningful. Right, and focus on those. One of the things I do like for recommendations, it's not really something that I think works against you or for you. You probably should have about 10 at this stage in your career naturally. What I like the most about recommendations is how do other people talk about you? Like, if you ask other people what your superpower is, the value in that is the perspective you're going to gain from their opinions. Right now, not all opinions are created equally. One of the things I did is I took all 90 of my recommendations and I put it into a— I put it in Claude, which is like ChatGPT, and I asked it, who am I based off of what you know from how people talk about me? And so there are— I know there's a lot of marketers in the room. Marketers use client testimonials to inform their messaging, right? We can do that for our careers. We think about going to market for ourselves and putting ourselves out there. How people talk about you when you're not in the room is part of your reputation. Now, psychologically, I'd like to guide how they talk about you, give them the words you want them to use and, and help them. And we'll talk about ways to do that as we talk about influence. But that, those are some of the elements that are most important, right, when it comes to that. So I wanted to real quickly talk about a, an example of like the influential an influencer profile like Ruben here, almost 450,000 followers. Influencers tend to have close headshot, colorful backgrounds so that every time it hits you in the feed, you recognize who it is, right? So this is a marketing mastery type play, right? It is very quickly positioning them as thought leader in AI here. And you'll also see very simple master AI before it masters you. Very provocative statement. I'm not really sure what that means. I don't know. For some reason I feel like I can trust this guy with how pink everything is. Like all of his branding's on the same page. He doesn't share too much detail, but that's, he shares like impact statements, 8,000 to 400,000 followers. Like what I'm doing is working. There's proof points here. So maybe this is for Jared, right? As you're talking about your entrepreneurial efforts being your most recent, your positioning for your business is different than your positioning as an employee. And so the real takeaway here is you have to commit to the direction that you're going. Don't take advice from Ruben if you're not going that path, right? Don't look at my profile. I'm like, Jacob seems to know a lot about LinkedIn profiles. Let me copy his profile, right? I am an entrepreneur that pushes millions of dollars through LinkedIn. Job seekers and entrepreneurs are different in terms of their positioning, and we need to be mindful of that. Another example, like Ravi here, he's got this little subscribe to my newsletter, transform your influence so you can sell, impact, and inspire. Trusted by, here's some third-party validation, right? So this is an influence trigger. Got a nice headshot. I'd argue that you should be a little bit more zoomed in. You know, Ravi, you got a great face. Show it off a little more, right? Typically the profiles with a closer headshot tend to perform better. Otherwise, you'll note he's telling stories here. He has featured— this is an entrepreneur's profile, different than how most folks will go to market. Um, also, if you don't know Ravi, I recommend following him. He's got some great tips on storytelling. I want to say this is where I would spend more time on LinkedIn, not publishing content like this per se, but this is an example of a post I did while we were at a conference last week. And actually it was one of my more higher performing posts of recently. So I don't want you to pay attention to the details of the post necessarily. I'm not trying to turn everyone into a broadcast journalist here. Instead, I want to focus on the conversations that are happening in the comments, because for a lot of folks here, I think publishing content regularly sounds like a chore. Like it's pretty difficult, right? You need to come up with a perspective on something. You don't want to use AI all the time and look like everybody else. You want to kind of focus, like it takes some time and it's a lot of mental energy that you should probably be spending networking and having conversations. But what you can do is you can take folks that are already active, right? That already have followings. Like Drew Neisser of CMO Huddles as an example, like always creates a lot of engagement. There's, you know, Sam Jacobs and Pavilion always creates a lot of engagement. There is somebody leading a community or somebody, some figurehead who's a subject matter expert or influencing larger swaths of people. You can also do more generalists. Remember if we talked about the types of people you should have in your circle in the first presentation we had, like you could go to a Chris Voss about negotiation and look at some of his content and engage in the comments section. Just having smart engagements and seeing what people are saying helps you find the right people to talk to naturally. So that helps you identify alignment. So rather than setting out like, here, here's my broadcast, please come to me. Like it takes a long time to get your messaging really, really good. It takes a lot of effort. And I'd argue that just reaching out cold outbound, you might reach out to 100 people and hear back from one. That sounds like a miserable experience. But if you can go read on folks, find the conversations and comment, start to get your face more familiar with certain publishers, that's going to be a significantly stronger use of your time on LinkedIn than tweaking your profile and trying to attract recruiters through inbound or going straight outbound and trying to sell everyone and get on the phone. Like, that is where we found the most impact that moves the needle. So conversations in here, tagging other folks when relevant. Seema here had some questions. She also got 5 engagements from her question. So she got 5 people to at least understand who she is to a degree, or at least get some recognition of her face. And you'll notice that that short about section or that short headline, it's very easy for her, Chief Marketing Officer at Expel. Right. I know a lot of folks say don't use the company title or, you know, like, do more. This is your opportunity to sell, right? Well, they only show a few characters. You better hook them right there or people aren't going to know what you do, right? Same Kimberly here, chief marketing officer, chief revenue officer, not sure which one it is, but then we can't read the rest of it anyway. So we only have this much space to make Yeah. Sammy, chief marketing or growth-focused CMO, chief marketing officer. That's it. Right. So some things that at least understand, oh, this person's coming from an executive position in marketing. That's all I need to know. It sets the stage and the frame of which you will be judged. I wanted to have a list of ideas that could be a takeaway. So everyone feel free to take a screenshot here. This is really some metrics you can follow, some tactical ways that you can look at it. Like, just spend 15 to 20 minutes a day on LinkedIn and make that a habit. Comment on a couple things, follow a couple folks that make sense to you. Just get in the habit of doing this, but don't stress out so much on doom scrolling LinkedIn waiting for a recruiter to find you kind of thing. So just a few tips here, and I'll move on to resume. All right. Now we want to simplify your resume and When I think about, when I think about the last 2 years of my clients, I cannot think of a client that was, that got a job based on their resume. I can't think of a client who got a job through applying for a job online. The last 2 years of my clients, I cannot think of somebody who went to a job post, applied for their job, submitted their resume and cover letter, and got that job. In fact, even my clients that tend to be multi-seven-figure earners don't get interviews when they apply for jobs the traditional way. So I want to just simplify, simplify the resume. Similar to LinkedIn, we often focus too much on tactical details. Some of the data is too— like, it's outdated, right? You're sharing stuff from 20 years ago that's no longer relevant. That stuff tends to be more tactical than the leadership that you're doing. Most folks really struggle to quantify the strategic impact that they've had. So if you're going to include stuff that's older on your resume, think about it with what you know now about business and what impact you actually had. Like, it's important to— like, I've probably updated my resume well over 2,000 times, and I don't apply for jobs. I'm just always interested mostly in How do I think about what it is I've done and the impact that I've had? It's almost a reminder to help you with storytelling more than it is a marketing material that's out there in the world to close a job for you. So the purpose of the resume is to start a conversation, not get the job. You can't sell yourself immediately in a resume. You just need to be interesting enough for someone to say, yeah, I want to talk to that person. Well, that looks great. Tracy says she's this badass executive. Sometimes they only read the first line in 6 seconds and say, yep, I want to talk to her. Right. And if you think I'm full of shit by saying the goldfish attention span on this stuff, you've never hired anyone before, or you've never sifted through 250 resumes. Like, you won't do it. Like, maybe there's a future where we throw all that into AI and it says, look, here are the 3 people based off of these factors. Like, maybe that's happening. I don't really know how to optimize for that. I do know how to control network and have conversations and bring deals to you. Really focus on being concise, 3 to 5 important bullets per role. And then the framework that I like to use is an adaptation of the STAR interview framework. If anyone's familiar with STAR, when you're interviewing, it stands for the situation you were in, the tasks you were assigned to, the actions you took, and the results. Now, I don't know the difference between situation and task, so I just shortened it to CAR. Which is context, action, result. So what is the context of what you did? What's the action that you took and what's the result? So here's an example of writing a bullet for your LinkedIn. Again, we won't go into too much detail here, right? But it's led reorganization of 300-person team during a downturn, implemented this territory-based structure resulting in X, right? So that's the framework for things. Here's the context. Here's the action. Here's the result. We have this stuff in the workbook too. So again, won't go into too much detail, but I want to cover it just to show we can keep it simple. A lot of folks ask, should I have a 1-page resume? Should I have a 2-page resume? Should I have a 3-page resume? It honestly doesn't matter that much. Most of the times you're sending a resume that's going to impact you materially in the search, it's going to be sent through email to somebody asking for it specifically, not necessarily through an ATS. At this level specifically, it's important that we set the stage with the executive summary right off the bat. We focus on the last 10 to 15 years more heavily than others. Now I want to go— I'll share my resume real quick, which everyone can have kind of as a template just to take ideas, whatever. People steal stuff off my resume all the time, just in terms of how to position things. And again, we've optimized this over Over years of studying what works and what doesn't work. So I'll share briefly how I would think about your resume here. So there's a couple things that are of note here. So name, easy, easy number, easy contact information. Great. When it comes to the headline, this is what sets the stage for how you will be judged the rest of the, the profile. This is similar to the headline on LinkedIn. And that this is what I want to be known for specifically. I will be judged whether that's true or not based off of everything else I see afterwards. So I think the headline section, the first third of the resume has to speak the message that you need. The rest of it, like I may or may not get to depending on how interested I am in you. We have a compelling bio. We call this a word cloud, things that you're best known for. Moving into executives have things like signature achievements or leadership attributes or Executive resumes tend to have a differentiation based off of a couple key areas where they're focused. I went deeper on this intentionally. I went deeper on this because the purpose of my resume is to educate, not to sell. So I'm giving different ways of messaging things. You don't have to use all of these ideas. It's specifically to see context, action, result in Working order, different ways to position different things you may do. The idea is for you to take this as a guideline, not as gospel. Okay? Which is why I also extended it out to 3 pages, which it hasn't been in years. So signature achievements, different areas to bring things together, most recent professional experience, why those things are important. Relatively straightforward here. Again, most of this is in the workbook for you to dive into. I also included consulting experience so that you can see how you can differentiate W-2 experience from consulting experience if you choose to market both of those things in your content. This is one way to do that. And then if you don't want to share the details, but you want to share the brand names you worked for, you do something like this, like, hey, here's some prior experience. It's really just there to note that I've worked in some other areas. The, the reason that I included this is that I think I've been on marketing teams that were acquired 5 or 6 times. And so there was some learning through that that a lot of people tend to be interested in, in the software space. Oh, you've been on teams that have been successful enough to be acquired. That means something. Let's talk about that in more detail. Honestly, I never talk about any of this anymore. And if you go to my LinkedIn profile, I have hidden every company I've ever worked for. Which you think would be a benefit for me to have. You know, Jacob was a chief marketing officer once, or Jacob was a director at a Fortune 500. Like, you think that would provide benefit, but instead I'm only focused on the future and helping executives find work. So positioning-wise, you want to be mindful of what you keep in here. And then I give an example of how to share thought leadership and influence. You'll notice that I don't have college education on here because I didn't go to college. So there's that. If you want to know how to position college, it's usually right there. Hey, I went to Harvard. I got my master's. It looks like this. Put the dates on there. Relatively straightforward. Not something you need to obsess on. Session 3 workbook. This week, your assignment is to turn your LinkedIn profile into a magnet for hidden opportunities. You'll take actionable steps to make it stand out. Like updating your photo, headline, and about section to highlight your professional story and leadership focus. Then you'll create a simple strategy for creating and engaging with content. Remember, a solid profile is important, but meaningful networking is what will open the right doors for you. Session 4, Networking That Drives Results. We'll say it again, the most successful executives approach their search like an enterprise sales cycle. They build systematic processes, measure meaningful metrics, create and nurture insider champions, and focus on high-impact activities. While others frantically apply to posted positions, successful job seekers spend 80% of their time cultivating relationships and creating opportunities in the hidden job market. In this session, we'll help you set weekly targets for meaningful conversations, build your network by offering value, And track progress on relationship development. Network and net worth. All right, this is the meat and potatoes of what I want to talk about. It's good we have a little bit of time. All right, so I want to talk about the networking value exchange and ways that we can do this. So I have a couple tips here. We have some tips in the workbook as well, but this is really where the rubber meets the road for finding executive jobs. And if you haven't done this already, that's an indication that you're struggling right now. If you're feeling struggling right now finding jobs, it's probably because you haven't been doing this well before, or you don't have— it's not strong enough to carry you through tough times like a market change or those types of things. So this is again the crux of what we're talking about today. A couple, a couple notes. And I think I'm gonna get into this in some later slides, so maybe we don't need to go into too much detail. But we make introductions real time during calls. So when we're talking to people, we just introduce them to other people while they're still on the phone, because what we're doing is triggering a reciprocity imbalance. So if I'm talking to Mala, we end up getting to know Mala. I'm like, hey, you know, this is great. You know, it sounds like we're, we're both in the same industry. You know, I have a handful of folks I want to introduce you to. Right? Let me just text them right now and do it. Right? I'm providing value to you and making introductions on your behalf. And if the text comes in while we're still on the phone or we're still in a Zoom, you're going to feel a little guilty because you haven't done anything for me. Right? And so that's a little bit of psychological warfare. But if I want to guarantee that Mala's going to make introductions or speak highly of me, I force her to by providing value first. And I think a lot of people don't do that. I also, I also continue to provide value whether I'm still on the phone with Mala or not. I'm like, hey, there's 3 or 4 more people. Just, just spam her texts like, meet Paul, meet Carol, meet Sakima, meet— and I just keep filling that up. And she's like, stop. Like, this is too much. Like, you're really showing up for me. And then the imbalance is so great. She, she, when she talks to those people, she's like, yeah, he's really great. He introduced me to all these folks and I met so-and-so. And all of a sudden she's speaking highly of me, right? So I think that's the takeaway. We need to provide value as soon as possible and do it while they're still on the phone and they can't say no to you. Um, so here's the, uh, start the network expansion, uh, to create, uh, what we call the daisy chain. So I want to talk about the daisy chain effect because I am, uh, I think I, I am what People would categorize a super connector. I have about 3,500 executives in my phone at last count. Um, it's a lot. Uh, I can connect people really, really quickly. And I, I owe most of this as I study this to this kind of theory that I've been working with. And a lot of folks ask, how do I start? Like, look, I'm not you. I don't have 3,000 friends. I use the term friends loosely, right? I don't have 3,000 contacts. Right. I have 5 people that believe in me, right? So a lot of folks say, where do I start? And I like to do this thing called the airport test. So as you think about everyone in your network, if you flew into their town and you called them and asked them to pick you up from the airport, who would say yes? Who are those people? Right. And if you don't have any of those people, that's a problem. We have to get there, right? And sometimes we do that by saying, hey, when you're in town, I'll pick you up from the airport and you start that reciprocity right away. Right? And so we typically start with those folks. Those are your tier 1 contacts. If I flew into— Jill, wherever you're from— if I flew into your hometown and you picked me up from the airport, like, you would be a good friend to me, right? That means a lot to have that experience and have that downtime. So those are our tier 1 contacts, those types of folks. Our tier 2, maybe colleagues, maybe folks we've worked with that maybe we have a strong opinion on, maybe we don't, but we have some shared identity. Went to the same school, worked at the same company or in the same industry, peers like that. And then we have tier 3 contacts, which might be friends of friends or like loosely connected in some way. Those folks are harder to engage with from the beginning. And if you start there, then you might get discouraged about networking and not want to continue because people don't know you very well. So I always like to start with kind of your tier 1 connections when we get started here. And even if you only have one person, one mentor that's looking out for you, you can start this process. So when we go through the conversation, your call to action is that, do you happen to know 2 to 3 other people that I can connect with about X? And all we need is for one person to daisy chain into 2 or 3 more. Like, that's the primary focus in order to get somebody to take that action for us. Probably helps if we're not an asshole. It probably helps if we're not simply trying to take and take and take. In order to get someone to take action, we have to give outstanding value ahead of time. So if I'm talking to Brian for the first time— Brian, hi. No, you don't know me well yet, but if I'm talking to you for the first time, in the first part of that conversation, I'm trying to discover how I can help you. Like, how can I best show up for you? What is it that you're working on? I'm not going to ask necessarily such direct questions and be super salesy, right? But I'm, I'm working as I'm getting to know you. I want to know, what can I do to make your life a little bit easier? How can I provide either happiness in your life or value or a connection or any one of these things? And ideally, I can start to do that immediately, right? So that you can see I'm providing value. And then I want to focus 2/3 of that conversation on you and not me. Because what we're doing here is we're triggering a reciprocity imbalance. Ideally, I know this sounds a little Machiavellian, but I want to make you a little uncomfortable that you've been taking so much from me and you don't know what to do. You know, Brian's like, shit, you've given me 3 contacts. You gave me a, a podcast to listen to. You said this is other influencer, you know, like I can talk to them. Like I've got all these things to take action on. I'm, I'm getting excited. I'm building some enthusiasm. And he's like, Whoa, whoa. Like, I'm gonna have to do something for you. And this goes back to our tribal brains, like back to the caveman and cavewoman days, right? If somebody came and brought meat to your tribe and you didn't protect that individual or you didn't support them, or I don't know, rub their feet so that they're not so sore and they can go out and hunt for you again, you would die. You would die as a tribe if you didn't take care of each other because living in that world was so difficult. So psychologically, We are trained to be reciprocal and support those that take care of us. And so in order for people to be champions for us, we have to be champions for them. So if you want, like, if you want somebody that's a super connector, if you want like, man, I just wish I had that mentor in my life. In order to create that, you have to be that. So be that person that you need to see. Right. So ideally we want to create this reciprocity imbalance. So I've, I've been asking support from Brian. If it's a 30-minute call, I want 22 minutes dedicated to him. When we get close to the end of that call, he's going to say, Jacob, this is all great, but I, you know, what can I do for you? Like, how can I help you? Right. Then I have the opportunity to say, you know, nothing, right? I don't need your help. And, but I just want to help you. And here's how that can happen. Or with the people I introduce you to, show up for them. Right? Just do me a favor. When I, when I introduce you to Carol, like, do me a favor and just ask her a lot of questions and see if you could show up for her. She needs a friend right now. Right? And so now I'm being like really generous and giving away the value that you owe me to someone else. Right? That's an option. Or I could say, you know, Brian, I've really been trying to connect with some more leaders in AI. Right? And I know that's probably amorphous, but do you happen to know anybody? Like, I'd like to talk to 2 or 3 other people. Now Brian has to think, how can I trust Jacob with 2 or 3 other people that I know? How can I trust him? Well, I've just given him all this value, this value imbalance, so that he knows if Brian introduced me to his best friend Dan, Dan's not gonna think Brian's an asshole for wasting his time because Jacob also provided that same consistent value to Dan as well. So it's my job to convince Brian that when he introduces me, I'm going to make Brian look good. And that's the process, right? It's that reciprocity process. And it starts with giving more value than you expect to receive in return. You know, you're targeting decision makers, that group of people you should have in your network. You may ask someone about different, different areas of their expertise, like if they happen to know super connectors or You know, you might ask a question like, if you only had one person to talk to, who is that person and why? And should I meet that person? Right? So there's different ways to get to different areas within your network as well. All right. So this is a little bit deeper dive on the daisy chain method. And so, because I'm, I'm starting high level and I'm trying to get more and more tactical because someone's going to say, hey, where do I start, dude? Like, this is all nice and everything, but I want to get to actual conversation starters here shortly. So the real process here is that we're leading with recognition. We're maybe saying like, Sakima, I saw some of your work at Yahoo and was really inspired by it. You know, can you tell me about your experience there? I've been thinking about going to work for Yahoo too, or I've been thinking about working for similarly large tech companies. Like, what are some of the pros and cons of that? So I want to recognize you for what you've done. People like to be recognized. It kind of gives a dopamine hit if done in a non-cheesy way, right? I don't suggest you do used car salesperson approaches. We want to be authentic and vulnerable, show real challenges to create human connection. Like, we don't need to be these perfect human beings, which I think is especially in Fortune 500 and the really kind of old school corporate type environment. You have an opportunity to be a pattern interrupter, right? So they're used to, you know, what is it that you're looking for? How can I help you? What introductions, right? You have an opportunity to break that pattern. And you could say, they say, you know, how can I best show up for you? What introductions can I make? And you're like, you know, I really need help figuring that out because I've been lost the last 6 months, right? You seem to be somebody that really has it together. Whether that's true or not, I'm not sure. Right. But, you know, can you help me here? Like that shows more humanity and authenticity than just saying, I need to meet, you know, CEO at Uber and I need to meet so-and-so here. And I know you're connected. It looks like you're connected. Like that's the worst way to network. Right. You know, you could still bring that up, but first say like, I'm having a bit of a loss. And as I was looking through people that you knew that I might be interested in, Like, is it unreasonable for me to try to even connect with someone like, you know, Brian at Uber or Michelle at, you know, Stanford Health? Or, you know, is it unreasonable for me to try to reach out? Like, do you happen to know anything about them? Like, it's, it's a little bit more human in the approach of making your asks. So I, um, I can't stress enough the creating value first, immediate value. If you can do it while you're on the phone. If you can use it as bait to get on the phone. I saw this. I saw that you were on this panel, had some ideas, would love to talk to you about it. This was just another panel, and it looks like they were using ideas similar to yours. We can learn from this. We could create some shared identity through that. Again, deepen discovery through listening twice as much as you speak. You build lasting connections by personalizing every follow-up based off of the needs that they have. So if Brian said, Jacob, I really need to think through this, do you happen to know anybody? Then I personalize, hey, I know somebody who can help you with this part. I know someone who may be able to help you with this part, so on and so forth. And I provide those introductions and then I foster advocates by turning meaningful connections into natural champions. And so this is a psychological trigger that everyone can take a note of. We really like to have a good reputation. It feels good. Now, not everybody shows you that they have a good reputation, but you can assume they have a good reputation and give them that positive reputation to force them into having a good reputation. Right? So that's a pretty complex— everyone's like, yeah, I think I get that. Right? But it's something like, if I've known Brian for a couple years, and again, I'm still picking on you cuz now you're front and center on my screen. I'd say, you know, Brian, I really appreciate that you've always been there for me and you've always been an advocate. Like, that's going to feel good for Brian, right? And he can't deny it. He can't say, well, I haven't been an advocate for you. I actually have never thought about you at all, because he can't. It's going to make him look bad, right? And even if I've only talked to Brian once every 2 years or whatever that is, I'm still making him feel good of like, yeah, I have looked out for you. And when I say that to clients, hey, I appreciate that, you know, when you talk about me, you've always said such nice things. Thank you. Like, I reward the behavior, whether I know they're doing that or not, to encourage them to do that behavior. So this is how we create champions. Like, I think Chelsea, you and I have done this. Like, when you were— she was a client one time and I said, thank you for always looking out for me, right? When you— she's talked to like 4 or 5 prospective clients in the past. Thank you for speaking highly of me. And, you know, what is it that you'd say differently knowing what you know now? And then I get intel and feedback and then further foster that relationship and create champions. So this is like the, the where do we start piece. So hopefully this is going to be a very, very small on my teleprompter. So you have to bear with me. So these are some conversation starters and industry trend discussions. You could say something like, I've been following This crazy consolidation in our space, and, and I suspect you have a hot take on it. You open to talk about it? Right? It's, it's not this like, hey, do you happen to have a job? Like, I'm looking to meet so-and-so. It's like, hey, I'm seeing these things in the industry. I've noticed that you've noticed these things too. Like, let's shoot the shit and talk about it. And that might be a valuable conversation. You know, this is one that has more authenticity and transparency. I'm worried about this thing. Right. But I bet you're not. Like, that's creating this psychological difference. Like, I'm worried about it, but you look so put together that I'm sure you're not worried about it. What do you think about this thing that happened? Like, are you seeing this big impact too? So it's a little bit more provocative ask that we're looking for, you know, career journey questions. Somebody has gone from, you know, a company you've been at for 10 years to another company. Right? Maybe you're trying to figure out how to network outside of that. Like, how did you make the transition out of here? Hey, I've been trying for months and have failed. Like, what's the secret sauce? You clearly know something. If you get that message, you're more likely to respond. This is going to improve some of your outbound. You know, I'm about to follow your footsteps, right? I'm about to do this thing that you did. Like, what are the landmines I'm going to step on? Right? I'm trying to do this thing that you did. This is building mentors with conversation starters. Oh, okay. Here's the next one. Value adds. Hey, I just read about this thing that I know you're also interested in. Like, have you seen it yet? Sometimes you don't even need to ask for, you know, a phone call. It's just, hey, I saw this thing. What are your thoughts? I'm connecting you with so-and-so next week. This is where we lead with value. You don't know me, but I'm connecting you with someone because they need to know you. I'm interested, like, what makes you do something like that? Why would you go out of your way to help me when you don't know me? I did that with Ruben, who I shared earlier, to 450— he's got 450,000 followers. And I said, look, I mentioned you in this article because you helped me a lot. Thanks. Didn't ask for anything in return. And now he's talking to me. No reason to, but I provided value before he even knew who I was. I'm about to talk on a panel. This actually worked with the, if you remember that post I did about CMO super huddles, I went out and I proactively talked to 5 or 6 other CMOs and said, hey, I appreciate your perspective. And I want to run some ideas by you because I'm going to talk about you on the panel. If you're going to talk about someone publicly, like they're going to want to know what you're going to say. Right. So they always get back to you. I use this hack when I was, I was a freelance writer for Forbes. Which is the ultimate conversation starter, by the way. You go into anybody's inbox and say, I'm working on an article for Forbes and would love your take. Everyone's like, yeah, let's have that chat no matter what. So sometimes with clients I'll say, hey, look, I'm doing a, I'm doing a roundup post that I'm going to send to, you know, 10,000 people, or I'm going to send it, I'm going to submit it. I'm going to publish it publicly somewhere. And I want to mention you. What's your take? Right? That's a great way to engage with folks and create conversations. Authentic personal connections. Reading comments from folks again, engaging based off of information you've gathered in the past. The thank you, the thank you text. There are thank you emails. What do you do here? A lot of people think too much about this. So I use the KISS model. Keep it simple, stupid. Right? The sometimes I'll text someone five times in a row, and I don't care if they text me back or not. But the, the key part that I wanna stress here is that I'll let you know how it goes. Peace. Because that's me telling you, I'm gonna talk to you again. And the reason we wanna talk to someone again is because we wanna stay top of mind, right? Even if all it is that we're doing is being grateful. Hey, talk to Kathy. It went great, right? She's amazing. I need to share it with you. Open the chat. Right? This is actually burying a little bit of the lead. Like, this is amazing. If something went really well, too much to text. Let's talk about it. Like, you're encouraging someone to have that conversation. When Brian introduces me to Jill, I thank Brian for the introduction to Jill. I tell him I'll let him know how it goes. When Jill introduces me to Sakima and Carol, I circle back and thank Jill, but I also circle back and thank Brian. Because the introduction that Brian made created more opportunity. And if I talk to Carol now, I'm like 3 levels deep. I'm still— I'm talking to Carol about Brian too. I'm talking to Carol about Brian and Jill and maybe even Sakima, and I'm building more network while I do that. And then I'm going back and I'm looping with everyone to thank them through the process. I learned this because I tracked over $1 million in revenue from my business back to a single person. Who made an introduction to another person who made an introduction to 4 executives at Comcast, who made introductions to Spectrum, who made introductions to Harvard and Wharton Business Schools, who made— I tracked the entire daisy chain back, and then I went back through the thread and I thanked everybody that created that. Now, I wasn't doing that actively to start, but then when I started going back through everyone that helped me, They introduced me to more people because they felt good about being thanked and recognized, and they could see that they put some good into the world. So we can't forget about giving someone that dopamine hit, right? Brian's getting a lot of dopamine hits right now because I keep saying his name. He's already introduced me to Jill and Carol and Sakima. Like, he's totally crushing it for us all. So I hope he's in your networking group here shortly. All right. I won't talk through all of this, I promise. This will be a screenshot slide, right? So everyone go ahead, take a screenshot. These are some principles here. There's influence principles. I think the most important one here is the onus is always on you to take action and be top of mind. You can never get upset when somebody doesn't reciprocate. You have to expect it, right? Just take note of that and don't help them as much in the future. You'll find the people that reciprocate the most. Right? There's like a 99.1% rule that I use. 90% of people you, you meet aren't worth shit to you in any way, right? There's 9% that you may know and may call upon again. And then there's 0.1% that are really going to move the needle for you. These are super connectors. This is your husband or your wife. This is your mom or your dad, right? These are the closest relationships. And we spend our entire lives trying to find that 0.1%. That change our lives and make it differently. So when you go out and do this, don't expect it to work in like right away. This is a discipline and a habit that you maintain your entire career. And when I assess those that are the most successful from those that are struggling to find work, the ones that are the most successful have had this as a habit for 20 and 30 years. So we scale it up or we scale it back depending on our urgency, but we never stop. Similar to whether you're going to run a marathon. It's a lot easier if you've been running your whole life than if you just decided to get off the couch and do it at once. All right, now the most important KPI, and we'll get to the networking piece here shortly. The only thing that I want you to track is how many conversations you have in a week. That's it. Set a target for yourselves. I want, I want to have 10 calls this week. I want to have 20 calls this week. We turn it up or turn it down. Depending on your urgency, 50 calls in a week. What would it take to have 50 calls in a week? What must be true? What you'll notice, I don't want you to focus on applications sent, recruiters outreach to, like none of that. It's how many conversations can I have? I want to fill your pipeline with conversations so that you can work through your messaging, that you can get practice so that you can figure out who's worth your time, who's not worth your time. So you can learn those lessons live and you can practice on the fly. Conversations is most important. When I built Discover Podium, I had 10 to 15 sales calls a day for 5 years, Monday through Friday, talking to executives. That was a shitload of calls. If you, if you have that many calls and you don't learn, there's something wrong with you right now. Some will say that's like chewing glass. The introverts just fainted and quit. They left the Zoom. Like, absolutely not. Right? But I promise you, you can't— there is no shortcut to this work. There just isn't. And if somebody's telling you otherwise, they're lying to you and you should be highly skeptical. Session 4 workbook. This week, you're going to kickstart your networking activities by setting measurable goals for your job search and developing a structured networking strategy. Once your plan is in place, you'll you'll start putting it into action by reaching out to contacts, having conversations, and recording outcomes. The goal is to create a consistent process that helps you build connections and uncover new opportunities. Session 5, Executive Interviews: Answering the Big 4 Questions. Executive interviews aren't about reciting your resume. They're about painting a picture of transformational leadership. The best responses to questions reveal both your leadership philosophy and your execution capability. In this session, you'll learn how to make sure every story you tell in interviews serves as evidence for why you're the right leader for tomorrow's challenges, not just someone who succeeded yesterday. So today we have a very meaty conversation because, as you can imagine, interviewing— quite difficult. Quite a lot of context at the executive level, lots of psychology to consider. And we want to start first with some softballs, which is the 4 core narratives that you need to master every single time you're interviewing, whether they're asked of you or not. We're going to need to be prepared for these. I also want to concentrate on the psychology behind driving decisions at the executive level and how you can set yourself up to close yourself as the solution through those deals. We want to talk about why it's okay to control the conversation instead of waiting to be led, and how that will create confidence for you throughout the process and help you ultimately close a stronger deal. Then we want to talk about some storytelling tips to improve all of the stories that you share across the board. All right, so we'll start with the core 4, and first I want to get Real quick into the mindset necessary. Again, I've, you'll, you'll notice that I mentioned mindset quite a bit when it comes to these interviews. And it's because as I study the thousands and thousands of folks that I've, I've kind of supported through interviews, I've always looked for what's the common thread on those that are successful versus those that aren't. And I couldn't really determine whether it was their skillset or how many people they've left or The quality of the companies that they work for. It was really these 3 soft skills that I saw performing and outperforming even being awesome at your job. So some mentioned earlier, fake it till you make it. I still suggest you have the skills, but you also need to show up in these 3 ways every single time to maximize your success. That first one is confidence, and you have to be able to answer the question, do you believe in yourself? Because if you don't, how is another team going to believe in you? And how are you going to rally the team that you're supporting? Curiosity is an important component to bring to the table, and that's ultimately to show that you're interested in the company ahead. You're asking questions, you're showing that you're interested in their future and not just selling your past. And curiosity in the quality of questions that we ask It's one of the most authentic ways that we can showcase that trait through the process. And then enthusiasm. Do you actually want to be here? Right? Sometimes we're interviewing and it's kind of like pulling teeth because, you know, you need a job because you need to get paid, but the company's really boring, or the people that you're interviewing with don't really click. So do you fake it? Do you say, oh my gosh, this is the best thing since sliced bread, or can we actually create some authentic enthusiasm about the opportunity? And part of the framework that I walk you through is how to create more natural enthusiasm as you start to create roles that are a stronger fit for you, which is sometimes contrarian to the roles that are listed and the type of executive or leader the company thinks they need to hire. So if you can feel confident creating a role that better suits your skills and selling that role naturally, you can become more enthusiastic about the opportunity. As well. So what are the core 4, right? So the core 4 things that you always need to answer, whether it's asked of you or not, is the tell me about yourself, which is probably the most vague question you can get asked. How many people here have heard that question before? Just simply, always look at that. Tell me about yourself. Well, where do I start? Right? From a young age, I was a wee lad growing up in Grass Valley, California. Or you hear the dreaded, you know, at college I did this and you're like, oh, here we go. We're about to hear 20, you know, 20 years of monologue. We have to be mindful of that. Why did you leave your last job or why did it not work out? So we've all not been at work for some period of time, and sometimes that can be awkward to bring up. So we want to come up with some tips on how to best do that. What about the what's next for you piece? Does anyone have any difficulty sharing that? Like their ambitions? Do you feel like, I'm very ambitious, but I don't want your job, right? Like, I want to do everything except for take your job, right? That one can be a little difficult. How do you showcase how ambitious you are without being overly ambitious and therefore coming after someone's job or threatening your boss, which is sometimes a case that we encounter? And then what I think is the most important question to know how to answer, because this is where I see the most leverage lost is how much money do you want? Does anyone know how to answer that? We'll get through that because most of the advice I see on that particular topic is wrong. So we'll get into that, and that's ultimately where we're going to recoup all the money you spent on this course in one single question. So I'm looking forward to that. All right, tell me about yourself. I'm actually— let's see if I can move this down here. Perfect. Now I can actually see the slide a little better. So again, these slides are definitely a little meaty by comparison, so feel free to take screenshots. Obviously it's going to be in the workbooks after and you'll be able to review, but it's long intentionally. So if you recall in the first session we did, we started to set the— really set the stage for this conversation to happen by saying something like, I am a role best known for major achievement. You're likely interested in me for X, Y, or Z reason. So we set the stage for how to answer this. What we definitely want to avoid is a 5-minute, 10-minute, 15-minute diatribe of your past where you explain every single thing you've done. If you catch yourself rambling or going into ancient history or getting nervous or feeling like you're on the back foot, you're losing that interview. Right? You're losing right from the get-go. You're either losing attention, you're losing confidence, you're losing and you're falling off. It's okay if it happens from time to time. It's okay if you start to monologue. It's okay if you ramble. It's okay if you're not perfect in your practicing the words to share. You're talking with your hands, you're figuring it out like you're being human and authentic. It's okay to show that level of Practice. What we want to say in those cases is, oh, bear with me for a second. I tend to ramble because I get excited about this. And then instead shift the conversation back towards more comfortable territory. So there's a couple of points that we want to make here. We want to keep it to about 30 seconds, really tight. We want to plant seeds for future conversations. So for example, if we're saying, Most people are interested in me for X, Y, and Z reasons. X, Y, and Z might be ambitious things you want to do. It might be things that you're interested in in the future. It might be things that you want to have conversations about later in the interview cycle. So we'd be, we are very strategic with what we share in our tell me about yourself story. In this case, I kind of like to think of it as a table of contents. That you're sharing, you're saying, hey, here are 3 to 5 things that I want to talk about. Are there anything that you want to talk about? And that helps us build the agenda for how to frame the entire conversation from there. That naturally leads into how we guide the conversation and lead the witness. For example, if you say most people want to talk to me because I'm really good at hypergrowth, or I'm really good at building high-performing teams with strong cultures, or I'm good at promoting early-stage sales folks and bringing them up to become leaders someday. What you plant in that conversation is guiding the conversation to a direction of either friendly water or an area that you don't want to touch. So we want to be very mindful with what we share here. And naturally, we talked about words mattering and using power language. We want to use confident and assertive language every step of the way. Which is why we frame things like, these are the, like, you're likely interested in me because of these. I'm confident in these things. This is what people like about me. Now, I had a question pop in on LinkedIn about, this sounds really good when it's an inbound prospect, like somebody's come from you, like they're coming to you. So naturally this language makes sense. But what if you are doing outreach and they don't know you so well, or if you're doing it in a networking context? It's just a slight pivot where instead of saying you're likely interested in me, you say other people typically want to talk to me for X, Y, and Z reason. So these are the reasons other people like me. And so from a psychological perspective, I call this bragging through the lens of a third party, right? So I might say something like, you know, so-and-so typically wants, or, um, Let me reframe this. People typically reach out to me when they want to move their career forward, and I suspect that that's why you're reaching out to me today, or I suspect that I can help you with that problem. So we just think about reframing it depending on the context, but you can still use the same messaging, and it still shows that you're confident and assertive with who you are. All right, so I want to move on to why did you leave? Why did you leave? This is such a difficult question for many people. I would say that most of my job is getting executives comfortable with telling the truth, right? So there are different angles. So we want to practice, especially those that have tricky, why did you leave? How do we address it head on? And how do we showcase it primarily about the lessons that you learned, that you learned specifically, the own, like you take ownership of what your fault was in that situation. You might even say, I made some mistakes that I won't make again. For example, right, when things got difficult, I didn't address the problems head on right away, right? I learned about that. I won't do that again. And so showing that level of authenticity can really help have a more engaging conversation. And ultimately, if they respond poorly, it might be the red flag you're looking for to jump out of the process, right? So this can help you with due diligence later. Ultimately, it's not just trying to win someone over. It's to see how somebody responds to you being truthful, because if they start to, you know, like, Anna, I'm disappointed in you taking a sabbatical, right? Or Jason, like, that sounds like total bullshit. I don't like it. Right. And you're pouring your heart out to a degree. You're going to have a pretty quick understanding of who it is you're working with. So I agree that if you're just trying to win someone over, keep it short, say enough and move on. But if you're trying to do diligence and find a position that's more fulfilling for you, Go ahead and go deeper, spend some time trying to articulate and not trying to be as polished and say, yeah, like you strike me as someone who wants to go a little deeper here, right? So I really want to share what I've, what I've learned through this process, right? If you want to move on, that's totally fine too, right? You can frame the conversation like that. And I think that if your job is to get a, get a job at any cost, it's okay to be deceitful. If your job is to find Or if your ambition is to find a role that's very fulfilling and people understand you and you build stronger relationships, then I'm okay going deeper on that. The what's next for you piece is the right now. So I'll give you an example. So I have a handful of chief revenue officer clients that are already being interviewed for CEO roles, but have this hesitation that they're not ready yet, or they specifically want to be a CEO at a larger company than where they're currently getting asked. And so They have hesitation because they don't want to interview with the CEO and tell them they want their job. So how do you frame it in the what's next for you piece? So in this case, with my clients, I'll ask them to say, yeah, I've actually been interviewing for some CEO roles already. I suspect I need another go-around at the CRO level to accomplish this. And so what I'm looking for is like, again, I'm choosing, I'm looking for A CEO that I can partner with who will help take me under their wing and show me, like, give me more visibility into the organization and kind of expand my remit from there. So you're not saying, I want your job. I just want you to show me and provide breadcrumbs for me. And so sometimes that planning, the what's next for you piece, sharing that ambition shows that you're a hard worker and you want to get that direction. But how you frame it is really important so you don't come across as overly ambitious. But in this case, when, when clients are already interviewing for up-level positions, it's also creating validation that other companies or other investors or other executives are already interested in you at that position. And you're choosing, let's say, a different C-suite title or a different position for now. Or you might say, I'm interviewing for a C-suite role for the first time, but the company is much smaller. I think I'll have a better impact at a company this size in this type of role. And one of my favorite things to do also is say, what do you think about that? Like involving your interviewer in the process. Do you think that's a natural progression? Especially because in a lot of cases you're interviewing with somebody where the hiring manager is somebody who is ahead of you in their career, whether that be the CEO or an investor. I might ask, have you seen people take paths like that? If you were in my shoes, what would you do? Now we're involving them in your career decision process and getting them to be advocates for you in the process. We'll talk a little bit more about that later, and we have a lot to get through. Now I want to show an example. I know a lot of us are interested in Mad Libs, like, how do I just do this? Just give me the template and make it happen. I wish it were that easy because there's a lot of nuances to consider. But here's an example of bringing it all together. I want you to answer. Tell me about yourself. Why did you leave and what's next for you in all of about 30 seconds? You can go 60. Like, again, this is just a rule of thumb, but I want you to address all 3 of those things on your terms. And so it looks something like, I am a, a chief operating officer best known for my growth and experience at Zoom or something like that. You're likely interested in me because you're doing XYZ thing and there's a, a Alignment there. And that's why I'm here today, because to be honest, I was missing that in my last role. I was, I'm looking for the opportunity to expand my remit and do XYZ thing, right? So that's answering the what's next for you and showing the ambitious thing in one sentence, right? To be honest, that's why I'm here today. That's why the other one wasn't working out so much for me, or that's why I'm looking. So you could answer that all in one fell swoop, and they might dig a little bit deeper on that. But essentially we're trying to take some of the wind out of their sails. And by saying something like, I'm sure we'll dig more into that later, but let me ask you now, what interests you in my background and shift the frame back to them. Essentially what we're trying to do here is collect more information out of them. So we know how to better answer, tell me about yourself, or better connect to the experiences that you've had to what they're going through and get more intel so that you know how to answer better across the entire process. But it's the how much money do you want? Yeah, I will never go first with the answer, and I will never go first with a range either, right? Because when you say I want 300 to 400, they think 280 and you think 450, right? Or whatever. Naturally, there's really no way that going first benefits you in any way. It can serve to anchor too low, right? If you don't, if you're not perfectly knowledgeable about the market, which let's be honest, nobody is, right? Companies negotiate sometimes 100 times a month when they're hiring and you do it, what, 5 times in your career, maybe 10, right? You're at a, there's a significant information disadvantage. I call this information asymmetry. Other negotiators talk about how we need to create a win-win and be all up front right from the get-go. Make no doubt, like there's no doubt about this. It is not a win-win environment for job seekers. It is a win-lose and you lose every time. They give you something of an infinite resource, which is money. You give them something that is a finite resource, which is your time and your mental health. And that is not an equal exchange and it never will be. And the more you move up in your career, the more that becomes more true because money becomes less and less important to you. And so. It's always a win-lose environment, and we need to understand kind of where they're coming from more so than you having an idea of what you think you want. So Chris Voss has a really good quote with this. It's never be so sure of what you're worth that you wouldn't accept more, right? So if you're like, I'm worth $500,000, they're like, shit, I was about to give you $800,000, right? They're either going to think you're not as senior as they thought Or they're going to get a steal, right? Or maybe they, they give you $550,000 and you're like, man, I really crushed it on that interview. But you never know what that delta is that you left out on because you went first and you anchored that number. So it typically only serves against you. So instead, usually you get this conversation right at the recruiter stage. How many people have had a recruiter and one of their first questions is, how much money do you want to make? Right? Quite a bit. That's typically an indication that you're working with a more junior recruiter. Very senior recruiters, ones at Korn Ferry and maybe someone like Diversa Partners in the portfolio looking, or TruSearch or those types, they typically don't push that early because they've already done a better job targeting the right type of candidate for them, and they know that conversation happens later. So typically when you hear it early, they're trying to get your anchor right away and just determine whether or not they're going to waste any time, right? So how do you keep that process moving forward? Without immediately wasting your time. And so instead, when somebody says, how much money do you want to make? We turn it around and say, look, at this stage in the conversation, it's too early to commit to that. I don't talk about compensation until there's a written offer in front of me. Is that going to be a problem? Or we might say, thank you for respecting me. I don't have that conversation until the offer stage. We might say, I know why you might be asking, is there a range you hope to keep this position within? Right? So that was one piece. I know I heard that in the audience, like, hey, what'd you have budgeted for this? Right? And the problem with that is that now you have to respond to the range that they articulate to you, which is, are you going to be happy? Are you going to be disappointed? Are you going to be stoic? How do you respond back to that? So typically I only advise pushing back on what the budget and range is if you're really worried about wasting your time. Or you have an indication that it's not going to get to where you think it's going to happen, to see if it's worth exploring further. But I would prefer you just defer the conversation until later and assess everything at a later stage where you have more complete information. So for those that are— I'm sure many of you have hired agencies before, or you've been consultants yourself, or freelancers, or you've worked in some capacity like that. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with scope creep. So you say, I'm going to do this project for $250,000. And they say, great, like that's within budget. This is what the role is stated at. And then through conversations, they give you another team and they give you another mandate and they give you another project and they do all these things. And then when you come to negotiate on the other end of the table, they say, but you said it was only $250,000. Right, but then the scope increased. So it puts you in an awkward position where you don't have leverage later. So one of my favorite, favorite pieces here is, look, as we find alignment through the interview process, I have no hesitation that you'll make a competitive offer, and that's really what I'm looking for. So we want to turn this back around on them. Session 5 workbook. This week you'll prepare to perform in executive-level interviews with confidence and and clarity. Start first by crafting and practicing responses to the Big 4 interview questions. Then use the CLEAR method to outline impactful stories that will showcase how you've navigated professional challenges in the past. I recently had an engagement where my effective hourly rate crossed $50,000, not because I charged that, but because the compensation outcome we produced in just a few hours moved the needle multiple millions of dollars per year. So if you'd like 15 years, thousands of negotiations, and over a billion and a quarter dollars in lifted outcomes in your corner for your next negotiation, completely discreet and confidential, you can request an engagement with me using the first link in the description below. Although I can only serve a finite number of clients at the level I insist, and demand now exceeds that number, I recommend you reach out before you need me and join the The best engagements with the strongest lift start months before the negotiation does. Now back to the course. Session 6, Executive Interviews, Strategy and Storytelling. One of the most important things you can do in the interview process is to create advocates. Top executives don't just answer questions, they lead strategic discussions that transform interviews into collaborative planning sessions. In this session, You'll learn about the Closer Framework, a proven technique for diagnosing challenges and co-creating solutions so that you show your interviewer how you think and solve problems in real time. So the quick hacks for this, right? How do we get ourselves in the right mindset when it comes to handling these? That the Big 4 really helps you get away from like that intro part of the conversation. Like, that's how we want to set the stage. For the conversation. Now I want to talk about the middle of the conversation and how to control the interview from the beginning all the way to the close. Okay. And so we'll talk through the process here. The quick hack for this is just to pretend you already have the job and that you're a consultant. Like, that is the quickest hack. If you can actually personify that behavior naturally, everything else that follows will, will be easier. So if you're a consultant that already has the job, you would say, You would ask deeper questions. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? We're exploring alternatives. We're assessing your strategic thinking. We're showing the care for the outcomes because you're already part of it. We want to think about yourself more as the helping them find the solution rather than trying to sell yourself as the solution. So if you are in their shoes, What types of candidates would you look for? Naturally, you'll start to use language like we versus I. That's a big thing. When we accomplish this together, when we find the right hire here, right now you're the one being interviewed, but you're using language like, as we find the right hire, you're collaborating with them and you're on the same side of the table. And that sets the stage for a stronger negotiation later as well. Because you're working collaboratively on solving a problem, whether you're the solution or not for that. This also shows that you're, I guess, more impartial. You could be trusted more because you're helping them decide whether you're the right fit or not through the process. So this is also how we help create opportunities versus just finding jobs. So we're not just selling towards the posted job description. We're doing a discovery process to understand what types of challenges that they're having. If you discover through your work that they have something scoped at a director level, but they need leadership and they need to bring in vendors and they need to bring in a transformation to whatever function you're running, you might determine through your analysis that they've underscoped the role. How many times has someone interviewed here and been like, man, they want to see— what they want is a C-suite, but they want to pay for a director, right? How many people have seen that? Right? So it's up to you to persuade them and show what this sounds like is a role like this. Is that correct? Right? It sounds like you want the autonomy of a strong leader. You want the executive presence. You want the leadership. You want these things. Have you thought about hiring a VP, or have you thought about hiring a C-level instead? Why or why not? And so that's when you start to ask really deep questions, and that's you increasing the scope and the remit, and it's also driving the price tag up for the person that they're hiring. So that's why I'm a big proponent on pretending you already have the job and you're a consultant so that you can really get to the root of the problems. The way I see a job description or a job posting or even a recruiter reaching out is that they have some type of challenge. They think it looks roughly like this, so they're raising their hand and saying, hey, somebody help us. And it's your job to help them and consult them through that. That naturally will position you as more of a leader as well and someone that can be trusted. So the key here is that you're the one solving a problem in the interview process. Again, you are not, you have nothing to sell. You have nothing to be impressive. You wouldn't be in the room if you didn't belong in the room. Simply start solving a problem and providing value from day one. Your job isn't to close the deal in every single interview, it's to just get the next phone call. You're doing hooks more so than just spilling your soul out, right? So we do hooks and then we ask questions, which helps us be more proactive. We steer the conversation towards future challenges and solutions. You're showing your preparation and your expertise when you ask smarter questions. For example, when you ask a question like, have you thought about hiring somebody like this? Now, why would somebody who wants the job ask if you've thought about hiring somebody different from them? That's very counterintuitive for a lot of folks because it sounds like you're selling yourself out of the role. But really what you're doing is trying to identify who the right fit is for them. Naturally, when they see somebody that's open to exploring the best solution for them, they'll be more attracted to you as the answer. So there's a little bit of a rubber band effect here, like I'm going to help you solve the problem whether I'm the solution or not, because I'm somebody who can get to the bottom of solutions. If it's not me, there's someone in my network I could recommend to you. So as I've seen companies go through the stages that you've gone through, in some cases I am the best fit for it. In other cases, I might recommend Jared, or I might recommend Michelle, or I might recommend Anna for their expertise. I want to make sure that regardless of what we do through this process, we find the right solution for you because that's what they're interested in. And if you're the person that helps them find the right solutions, you're going to be in a better light there. All right. So here's an example of being the solution, right? So we're hiring executives that have an opinion on things. Right? Have an opinion on what the company should do. Offer specific actionable insights based off what you know about the company or what you know about the industry, or what you know about things that you've learned in the past. This is proactive. So this isn't, hey, this one time 5 years ago I did this thing. It's instead, when I've seen companies like yours go through this, here's one way we've overcome it. Have you tried that? It's a different shift. You're still saying the same stories, but you're, you're sharing them proactively versus reactively when they're asking you questions. The use of we language and including the names of team members. This is a tribe mentality behavioral psychology hack where we use names to show that we're already part of the team. And we use things like when we accomplish these things, it shows that you're already thinking about doing it with them. So that language is something that must be incorporated to show that you're also enthusiastic about the opportunity. I'll keep going through quickly here because this is the meat and potatoes of this section here. So this is how we run the middle part of an interview. It's called the closer framework. This is adapted from a sales methodology I picked up from Alex Hormozi, and he was talking about how he trained his sales team on this to close more deals. And I just adapted it for an interview process because it makes a lot of sense. So we go through that initial hook. We go through the hook of, tell me about yourself. What's next for you? Why do you want to leave? Ideally, we've skirted away from the money question. When we're in a deeper hiring process, the money question doesn't come up nearly as often. It's usually a recruiter process or an HR process. So we've gotten through that initial framework, and now we're going into Exactly how we do this. So we want to clarify why we're in the room. That's what we do off that first question. Hey, what is it about me that you're interested in? What about my background is exciting to you? That's the start of the closer framework. So hook to clarify. And what we want to listen for is what are their true challenges? What are they talking about? Where's the pain? Like where— it's usually not directly correlated with the job description if you've seen one. It's usually said in different language depending on who you're talking to at the organization. Like, HR is going to talk about it differently than the CEO, who's going to talk about it differently than the growth officer, who's going to talk about it differently than the engineering team. So be expected that each person is going to have a different way of framing the challenge, and it's your job to clarify that and listen. Then we want to label them with a problem. It sounds like— and I'll actually go through, we have some, some hooks on this in the next slide. So we want to label them with a problem. Then we want to overview what it is they've done about it and what, what it is they're trying to do about it next. Why hasn't this been solved before? Right? Have you found success doing this in the past? Why or why not? So this is really a discovery process. And then we want to sell them the vacation. And this is my favorite part, is to psychologically plant yourself as the solution somewhere down the line in the future. I know Anna's smiling real big because we talked about this before. But you say things like, fast forward 6 months from now when we've accomplished this, what's the next order of business? So you're selling yourself 6 months from now. Picture it. You're right next to me and we're in a better headspace now. We're selling this. Whereas most of your competition in an interview process are still focused on things that they've done in the past. Oh, I've done this before, believe me. And I'm saying, we've already accomplished this in 6 months. Now let's go accomplish the next thing together. Who's gonna win that deal? So we want to explain away any objections or pain points that you anticipate. So you might say, hey, as I've seen this process go, go to market before, or as I've seen this roll out in the past, here are 3 major headaches we need to avoid. Have you thought about those? So we're like, hey, we gotta look out for this. This is basically expectation setting, right? If somebody said, you know, build me this strategy and I want it done in 6 months. And it's quite literally a Herculean effort that cannot be accomplished. That's our opportunity to say, look, we're going to run into speed bumps here and here and here, right? Or what's the, what's the con of setting overly ambitious goals that the team can't accomplish? When this happens, we need to look out for the team being disenfranchised. Here's why. It's like we explain different areas to set better expectations. And then we reinforce and lock in the value and your unique fit and say, very comfortable doing this. Like, we're going to solve these problems again, go back to selling the vacation and reinforcing. I call that also beating the drum consistently, sharing that same message. And here's a slide with some of these hooks here to see how this would naturally flow in conversation. So let's picture you have a 30-minute interview scheduled with the CEO. The first, say, 3 to 5 minutes, we want to get through that. Tell me about yourself. What's next for you? The pleasantries. Why did you leave your last job? And then we want to shift towards running the interview like this closer framework here. Before we dive in, I'd like to understand what you're looking to accomplish in the next year and a half. Like, I want, I want to hear it from your perspective. You might also say, I heard from HR, or I heard from the recruiter, but I'd love to hear Your perspective on it. Give them a pedestal to share their pain. Then we want to reaffirm that we heard their pain. It sounds like the real challenge isn't just scaling the team, but transforming the culture while maintaining momentum. Is that right? Ideally, they're saying yes. You've labeled the problem correctly. Now we're attaching it to something we've done. I faced a similar problem at Oracle. We needed to rebuild the trust, drive growth, do all these things. It sounds very similar. Here's what I learned from that. Have you tried those things? It's overviewing. Now, because you've done it before, you can do it again. Now we sell the vacation, right? Fast forward to having the leadership team so aligned that decisions happen in days versus months. That's what we experienced at Oracle. I suspect that's what you want to happen here too. I also like to use very emotional language when possible. Chelsea, 6 months from now, when you have to walk into that board meeting and share the work that we've done together and what we've accomplished as a team, how, how do I know you're gonna walk into that room with your head held high, like confident? Because how many people have walked into a board meeting kind of nervous or full of anxiety, right? You're not really sure what you're presenting, or you, you don't feel good about the performance and you have to spin it in some way that looks good to everyone else. If I can visually walk someone through a stressful situation, but having it done in a more confident way, and then being attached to that, you're going to get better insight into what you need to accomplish in that role. And then you're going to again build that confidence with the leader that you're going to be the one to support them. Then explain away any concerns they have. This is part of the expectation setting here in this explain and reinforce section. The key to making this work will be Balancing the quick wins and the long-term, the low-hanging fruit, so on and so forth. Let me share how I would accomplish that in the first couple days and then have an opinion on that. Based on what we just discussed, this is where we need to start, right? And we might also say, I can get started on this in the next 6 weeks, just to plant that I'm ready to go, right? And so I'm already providing value, but I'm ready to go. I want you to be able to get your way. Because as you start to walk somebody through this process, you're building your confidence too, because you're leading the discovery and you're leading the sales process of yourself as the product. And so the gauntlet here, I think, is really important that— and let me, let me explain what the gauntlet is to me. So the gauntlet is my first conversation is going to be with Jill. My next conversation is going to be with Paul, and then my next conversation is going to be with Brian. And I have 3 calls in 1 day. How many people have had an interview process like that? Right? Several, right? I call that running the gauntlet. Sometimes it's 6 people, sometimes it's 10 people, sometimes it's really obnoxious. Sometimes it's 10 people over 6 months when you're in the really high-level positions. Like, I've had clients do 10 and 12-month negotiations off of waiting for companies to get acquired and scooped up and positions to open up and all that. So running the gauntlet is to show that you need to essentially build champions internally at a company. And you need each one of those people to sign off on you. And so this is, this is how we run the gauntlet. So we say, we have a conversation with Jill. Let's say Elizabeth was the recruiter. You say, hey Jill, you know, Elizabeth got me excited about the opportunity to talk to you today. She said I should ask you about X, Y, and Z, but I'd love to hear from you. What excites you most about talking to me, or what are some of the pains that you see that need to be solved? Right? I might start that way, but I'm using Elizabeth as the hook. You know Elizabeth, she got me excited because you like Elizabeth, therefore you should like me a little bit more. It's just a subtle hint. And then I might say, my next conversation's with Paul, I guess. So let's go through the closer. Let's fast forward near the end. Jill had a great conversation today. You know, I gotta talk to Paul next. What are some things I should avoid bringing up to him? Or in your perspective, what'll get him excited? Right. And what I want Jill to do is coach me. Oh, don't bring this up. Paul hates SEO. Don't do it. Like he'll roll his eyes. Just don't even talk about it. And I, and I might, that's gonna give me a lot of insight. And I might say, you know, why is that? What experiences have you had? What, you know, and then I can drill down into a couple more questions. But what I want Jill to do is to coach me on how to take care of Paul. Right. So now Jill is an advocate for me and a coach, and a coach wants their players to be successful. And that also helps build your confidence. With Jill too, I also like is that reinforcement piece of the closer framework. Hey Jill, it sounds like this conversation went well. When you have to talk to Paul and you have to talk to Jason next, have I earned your support or is it too soon? Right? I want to actually encourage the type of feedback. I also like a question. This is one to write down. Is there something that I didn't bring up that I should have? That's a great way to elicit feedback. That's just one of my favorites. Or I like to say things like, hey, Jill, if you were in my shoes, what would you ask Paul? Or is there anything you would like me to bring up in my conversation with him later? Because now I'm serving to create alignment throughout the journey. Then I go to Paul and I say, hey, Jill told me not to bring up SEO. Is that a sore subject? Right. And just see what the reaction is. Right. And it's showing that like, I have these insider secrets with you and your colleagues already. I'm already a part of the team. So Jill got me excited to talk to you because she said you were going to love X and Y and Z. And when I talked to Elizabeth, she said you and I were going to click for these reasons. But I'm curious, like, what's your take on all that? Is there anything in my background that excited you? Now I'm shifting to clarifying why I'm there, right? But I'm using Jill and Elizabeth as the hook to get Paul's interest to drive the conversation forward. Then I rinse and repeat. Hey Paul, my next conversation's with Brian. To be honest, I'm a little nervous because I don't often get along with technical people. Right? Sometimes you can share and just be kind of funny if that's part of your personality, or you can share, I'm not sure how to win Brian over, right? If you were in my shoes, what would you ask? And you can keep that process spinning forward. Lots of different ways to bring that, but this is asking others in the process to coach you. And when you say, I had a fantastic conversation with Jill, what you're doing is you're bragging about yourself through the lens of a third party. Jill, this person you were Respect likes me and got me excited. So I'm reinforcing that message. I'm also— you're communicating to yourself that it's been going well. So this is a psychological trigger in 2 ways, right? You're telling people it's, it's going well, it's gonna be great, it's gonna be huge, to quote some politicians, right? You're building hype. This is important rhetoric to consider, right? Jill said it was gonna go well. Jill said you and I were gonna get along. Elizabeth got me excited. I'm sure like you and Brian are gonna really kick my ass on some of these things, whatever. Like you're reinforcing that team mentality and rhetoric. But when you say it's gone well, she said it's gone well, I'm sure it's gonna go well with you. You're also talking yourself up. And the influence trigger for yourself is that it's commitment and consistency. The things that you say are happening are more likely to happen. So you're saying things are going well and you're more likely to believe it. As well. So you, you actually have to say this isn't like some weird fluffy vision board type of thing. You're like, I'm going to be this someday and I need to speak it into existence. But it's very similar, that repeat, to build your confidence along the way. All right, now I want to talk about leading the next steps. Speaking of taking your power back, right, this is how we close conversations, like the very, very end. So we've gone through first 5 minutes and then working and trying to Persuade the conversation back to that closer framework. Now, how do we end the last couple minutes of a conversation? Right? So our goal here isn't to get hired right away, and our goal here isn't to wait around forever because how many people have heard? Oh, we'll get back to you. If you hear we'll get back to you, you didn't get the job. Just chalk it up to that. Assume it's over. Okay. Now, in many cases, you'll still get the job or still get. Follow up sometime in the future. But in that 7 days, 15 days, whatever the days are between, we'll get back to you and when you hear it back, you're an anxious mess, right? Especially if you only have one opportunity at a time. And that anxiety hurts you for looking for other jobs and hurts you from building pipeline and hurts you. And again, that tears your mindset apart. So I want you to get comfortable setting the next steps, not waiting for the next steps. This does a couple of things. It says you're essentially selling kind of that next step in the process, but you're building scarcity by saying I'm only available a couple times, so I'm not going to wait around for you forever. You might say, hey, I'm gonna continue my conversation with Jill. I'm gonna talk to Paul and I'm gonna talk to Brian. Elizabeth, I'm gonna loop back to you after I've had those conversations and chat with how it went, right? With Jill, I might say the same thing. Hey, I'm, I'm gonna talk to Brian and Paul next. I'll let you know how it goes. So I'm planting the seed that I'm gonna have a conversation with you next. As we get through the entire process and we're waiting for next steps, you'll say, hey, Elizabeth, met with the team. Sounds like it went really well. I'm available to talk again on Thursday or Monday next week. What works for, you know, it sounds like I'm gonna need to talk to Jill again. I told her I would share what I learned. I'm available on Tuesday and Thursday. What makes sense? I'm setting the stage. Like, I'm not waiting for them to figure out what their damn process is. I'm controlling time with when I set the follow-ups and I'm forcing them. And you, I'm sure I'm getting comments here. Well, that sounds too assertive, right? That sounds like it's not gonna work. But when I'm on the phone live, that's when I want Elizabeth to say, no, that's not going to work. Right. I might say something like, look, I promised to Jill that I would get back to her. Right. Is it best to go through the recruiter or should I contact Jill directly? Or can you send a text for her for me? Like, I like to offer different solutions to get to people. Ideally, like, I love getting people's phone numbers through the interview process so that I can text them and just not to blow them up all the time and be obnoxious, but to provide value. Hey, just had a call with Paul. It went great, right? Thank you. The tips you gave me helped me out. I'll follow up after I talk to Brian. Like little things like that. And then how you control the nuances of the follow-up emails and the thank yous to position yourself assertively is very important. It's like you wrap up a call. And you say, hey Paul, thanks for the time. The insights you gave me about Brian went really well. Would love to circle back with you. I'm available Thursday and Friday next week. So you can also follow up with each individual and break them out of the process. You pattern break, right? I'm going to consult with Paul on the side of the interview process. I'm going to consult with Jill. I'm not waiting around for HR to solve this problem for me. Now I want to talk a little bit about storytelling. I'm not gonna go too deep here, but this is, that's how you control the interview process. Now, how do we make the stories we tell more engaging? And so this is also where we get to be more authentic and honest and transparent. How is it that we do this? Right? So how do we tell a great story? We have to share a little bit of context, and every great story has conflict. Something that didn't work out that makes it more engaging and more interesting. I think a lot of job seekers mess this up because we always want everything to look great and we like try to polish everything we've done in our past as awesome when in reality a lot of our jobs kind of suck. And there are a lot of nitty-gritty details, especially in tech. If you're in tech, you know, like, I don't know how long I can sell spreadsheets to millionaires and, and walk around with a smile on my face. Like, am I making humanity a better place? I don't know. Right? There's some conflict there. There are folks that are like, man, I make a lot of money in this space, but if I were working with saving puppies, I would be a much more fulfilled human being. There's conflict there, right? I haven't figured out how to make $400,000 a year at the SPCA, so therefore I don't do that, right? Or volunteering. Like, there are other things that we often find more passionate in our lives that can create conflict with our jobs. Every great story has a turning point. Which is like, ah, the aha moment. This is when I learned, right? I found this out about myself. There was a core lesson here, and then there was a transformation of you as a stronger leader because of that. And if you're thinking that this storytelling framework sounds familiar, it's because it's the backbone of every Disney movie ever created. So I'll give you an example, right? So one of my favorite movies growing up was Lion King. Right? I don't know why, because it's like the saddest movie when you're 4, when it came out. Very, very sad. But the context is there's thriving Pride Lands under Mufasa, and a young Prince Simba is being groomed for leadership, right? But Scar is plotting from the shadows. So that's some context, right? The conflict is that Simba's dad dies brutally, right? Simba's exiled. From the Pride Lands, and the kingdom falls into ruin with his absence. That's a pretty big conflict, right? Now, the turning point is that, like, Simba starts growing up. Rafiki helps Simba confront his past, and he says, remember who you are. That's the aha moment. He's like, I need to go back and reclaim this land and therefore bring this Disney movie home, because every Disney movie has to have a happy ending. Right? So he returns to reclaim the throne, the throne. He embraces his responsibility and restores the kingdom to greatness. That's a story, right? You apply that to Toy Story. You can apply that to Moana. You can apply that to any Disney movie and just watch it happen every single time, right? This is how stories are engaging. So I'll give you an example of how to use this in a business context, because we're probably not going to talk about Disney movies that often. So I have a client who was with one company for 7 years, grew that company from 0 to $200 million. He was like employee number 3, right? For 7 years. And then honestly got burnt out and quit and didn't work for a year. Right now people are like, what the hell's wrong with you? How dare you take a break? Right? Yeah. And the reality was he was losing connection with his family, had 2 girls under 5. Right. And he was flying 300,000 miles a year for work. He's the chief revenue officer, right? So flying all over the world, barely home, doesn't recognize his daughters when he comes back home. Like, that's, that's some interesting context to consider here. And so he was out in that period. So he shared that context. Hey, you know, I was flying, I'm, I was flying 300,000 miles a year. It was time for a break to reconnect with family. That's the context of How to answer, why were you out so long? The conflict was, to be honest with you, I started to become a little bored and understimulated intellectually, right? So I enjoyed family time. I enjoyed getting my break and refreshing. I think it's important that we all do that, but I was a little bored. And so what I started doing was, here's the turning point, in order to scratch that itch, I began taking calls with investors and former colleagues. And that's when I started consulting because a lot of folks wanted to have Some of my insights from growing this company from $0 to $200 million, right? The transformation is that I learned about where I was most impactful at organizations and where I can provide the most value. And that is opportunities at around the $100 million mark with these parameters. So obviously this is truncated across the board, but this is how you answer a difficult question. Why were you out so long? Well, I was a little burnt out, but then I got bored having taken a break for so long. And there was also some subtle cues we added to this. Like, fortunately the exit was quite good, so I could afford the time, right? So that positions you as a position of dominance versus somebody who's desperate, as an example. And then it builds towards the, I'm choosing where I'm going next story as well. So context, conflict, turning point, transformation in just how we answered, why were you out so long? And you're not always gonna be asked all of these details, but I have an example here. This is probably a good screenshot moment. You should have a handful of stories ready to go that you've practiced. Leadership stories, growth stories, relationship stories, achievement stories, things that likely come up. And I believe we have this in the workbook where you could just take some notes down, just thinking through it and writing it out once or twice, whether you're gonna be asked of it or not, is a good practice to have just so that it can be fresh in your mind. So I like to consider this— these stories are the arrows in your quiver. So picture yourself with a whole bunch of arrows. You don't have to shoot them all, all the time, but sometimes you're gonna be like, man, it would be really handy To have that story on how I transformed that culture, right? What was the context of that story? What conflict did we have trying to make that change? What did I learn through it, and how did I transform because of that? Why am I for the better? So we follow that playbook, we write these stories, and then we keep them just so that it's top of mind and fresh for you should you have to bring it up in conversation later. We also have in the workbook an extended framework for you we call the CLEAR framework, and this is one that we're working on. So that you can go through the context, the leadership that you had, the things that you executed, and so on. So that'll be something as a take-home assignment here. Yep. And so this is just a subtle reminder that silence and pacing of your stories is important. So it's not monologues. We've all seen that. We've probably all networked with somebody like that. We're like, this is clearly a script, right? Like, please don't script me. Like, I'm a real person here. Let's talk like real people. If you're, if you catch yourself finding that in, in your networking conversations, give somebody an opportunity to relax, right? And, and actually call it out and say, look, like, no, no need to be on script here, right? Like, we can have a conversation, just call it out. Like, I'm sure that's gonna be relieving for both of us. Like, just find ways to make conversations more comfortable. Even if it can be uncomfortable to bring it up. Incorporating sensory details. We talked about that. Uh, I think a lot of executives in their interview process focus more on being the logical hire and being the most credible hire, and they forget about the emotional hire. So in order to win deals that you're not the most qualified person for, You have to win the emotional battle. And so this is Aristotle's rhetoric, like 101 ethos, pathos, logos. And people focus too much on being credible and logical, but especially when you're breaking compensation bans, it's not logical to do so, and you might not have the credibility to do so. You have to build an emotional connection with folks to get them to win you over. And typically that's going to come from Being more authentic and personable and honest and having more casual and comfortable conversations versus simply reciting your resume and focusing on the past. That's great. There were some great notes on reading and adapting to the room, right? Uh, it's also important to note that your job isn't to become mini Jacob, right? I've had clients do that. We're like, I did exactly what you said, but they didn't understand the context that everything is nuanced for who you are. So your job isn't to be funny if you're not funny, right? I've had folks that are, they're like, I did, I used the joke that you said. I'm like, don't. Only I am that funny, right? And it didn't work. It didn't hold over well. So you wanna lean into your strengths. Like, that's what I'm trying to give you the confidence to do. You are not trying to be someone that you're not. You're leaning into your strengths and being more confident doing that. And then managing story length and detail, keeping it tighter as appropriate too. Session 6 workbook. This week, you'll focus on preparing for initial interviews by using the closer framework to structure and deliver compelling conversations. You'll start by researching a company and role that interests you by identifying their key challenges and goals. Then you'll write a script. For a phone or video interview and practice it with a peer or mentor, focusing on confidently selling your value to the interviewer. Session 7: Negotiation Techniques. Landing the deal you deserve involves knowing how to control the conversation from start to finish. This session dives into powerful strategies for mastering negotiation at the executive level. You'll learn how to ask strategic questions to uncover what really matters, Navigate compensation talks with ease and turn any objection into an opportunity. All right. I told you it was meaty. We're crushing through this. So I'm proud of you. I don't see that many eyes glazed over. I want to talk a little bit about strategic questioning and one specifically that I think builds your leverage more than any others, because I know everyone's looking for more actionable takeaways in negotiation, but it's the thought. I like to say it's, um, Understanding your, your competitive advantage here and driving a wedge between you and your competitors so that you can differentiate yourself. So this line of questioning is something like, have you thought about— have you thought about hiring somebody more junior? Have you thought about promoting internally? Have you thought about going to your network? Have you thought about hiring a You know, someone with more industry experience. Have you thought about hiring an agency? Like we're exploring all of the alternatives that they have, and they have to tell us their reasoning for why or why not they're doing that. And so a lot of folks, they'll go through an interview process, they'll lose the job. They'll find out who won the job and say, son of a gun, like they went to college together, right? Or somebody was in their network, or it was, they went to the same company. Like that was a shoe and I never had a chance. Well, I'd rather you find out on the phone than later after you lost the job. And this is how we can get to that. Like, have you thought about hiring someone like this and hiring someone like that? And my favorite is the, have you thought about hiring someone less expensive? Right? Is there a cheaper way to solve your problems? Because again, we're focused on solving the problem as efficiently as possible. And when you say something like, have you thought about a less expensive option to solve this problem? What have they been? And they say, no, we need an executive with autonomy that can do this and they can do this. And they talk to them, they, they give you every point that you need to pitch. What you're psychologically doing is saying you're valuable and they're gonna need to expect to pay you more money. And so through questioning, you can drive your value forward. You're also starting to probe their priorities, right? Oh, we can't hire someone junior that hasn't worked out for us before. I need someone that can just take this off my plate and run with it so I can focus on X, Y, and Z. And then when they say, so I could focus on X, Y, and Z, you have the opportunity to say, I also have interest in that. I'd be happy to support you there too. Right? So not only am I solving this problem, but now I'm helping you with these problems, and you're starting to become more and more valuable through your strategic questioning. But unless you ask what their alternatives are, you'll never know. Right? You can make assumptions based off your experience. I imagine You won't work with an agency because XYZ reason, or I imagine you've gone through this hiring process and it's starting to get frustrating. So you can make assumptions, but it's better to hear it directly from them by setting them up to tell you what all their alternatives are. And then the sexy close here is when they talk through all their alternatives, then you say, ah, now I understand why you're talking to me, because it sounds like I fit that box perfectly. And so I want to give you another example because this is how we turned another deal. from a $650,000 range into a million-dollar-plus range. Because as we were running our strategic questionings, this wasn't a Fortune 500 big tech company, for what it's worth. So context-wise, the, the company launched a whole new division and they're staffing it up right now. And the president, who is the hiring manager for my client, mentioned that they're going to bring in 4 senior director roles. Right. And my client was previously a VP, very good in the space, doesn't particularly want a senior director role, but was doing the job of what 2 of those roles were already. And so through the conversation, we actually combined the roles, reduced the headcount, elevated the compensation for my client, and then won over— hey, the difficult for me, like perception-wise, it won't look good with me going from VP to senior director. Can we have a public role that's different? So publicly they have a global head of position instead of a senior director of whatever, whatever. So we worked together to create a title that would be more impactful in that role too. And they were open to it because we broke the boundaries of what they were expecting, combined roles, and actually made the reporting structure and equity structures easier for them. So talk about creating a win-win situation. You have less direct reports, less paperwork, you have more impact. Like the compensation came up, but it was still saving money for the team. We got to overcome the title issue, and that's part of the back and forth that happened there. But we only got that way by understanding, like, what are the other people you're hiring for this role? What does it look like actually understanding the full scope? And that's where that information came in so handy for there. All right. I wanna hit on this again, uh, because the, uh, the money question is the one that trips a lot of folks up, and I'm not sure I answered it well enough last time for folks to feel confident. Uh, and that is to defer the early discussions on compensation. And I also am very contrarian of where I don't want people to use ranges. Like, I just don't want you to anchor yourself at all. And it can be an uncomfortable back and forth, but I wrote down a couple of shorter answers. So when someone says, how much money do you want to make? And you say, you know, I'm not in a position to have that conversation right now, but I have no reservations about the team making a competitive offer. Right. So at this stage, I know we're going to get there. If we find out that I'm the right fit and we're all aligned, we can move forward. Right? Another one I like is, I've learned not to talk about compensation until there's a written offer in front of me. Is that going to be a problem? Now that's a— that is a much more assertive tone, right? Or you could say, is that unreasonable? So I have one example. I, I, I wanna talk a little bit about milestone payments in this because this is something that breaks ranges all the time that I don't think a lot of people consider. And it's how we got a $700,000 a year deal to $3.5 million a year with triggers. And it's not being afraid to connect your performance to different types of triggers. So as an example, we knew this— the CEO we were negotiating with and their investors was a private equity firm. We knew that their focus was on turning this company into a unicorn, And they wanted to like 4x their valuation and get an exit in 3 years. What's interesting about private equity plays is 9 out of 10 need to work versus a VC play where 1 out of 20 need to work. And so we knew that— and this is where that strategic information comes in and the probing of questions— they wanted to increase the valuation. And so given that this position was a chief revenue officer position, highly responsible for this, We attach triggers that when we hit this valuation, I'll get X amount and more stock or X amount and more cash incentives. And we hit the ultimate trigger, we get X. And what's interesting in this particular negotiation, the success of that company was relatively inevitable. Like it was going to happen anyway. We just were able to attach some milestones to it because we were so confident in its playbook. And so look, What you can't negotiate today, you can negotiate tomorrow, right? So when we get to that state, you're going to feel a lot happier paying me. I learned a lot of these tips from like Hollywood contracts and sports contracts. Like Tom Brady made an extra like $2 million when he won the Super Bowl, and he made an extra million when he won the game before that, and so on and so on. You get performance triggers if you win more than 10 games a season. In Hollywood, if you're the solo writer or you get credit, with the credit, whatever the company is that gives you writer's credit, you get a $50,000 bonus or a $500,000 bonus. There's all these contingency trigger clauses based off of the performance, and that's because you can't predict your performance ultimately upfront every time. But you can confidently say that when we get here, it will be worth X amount. And so this is a way not a lot of people think about milestone triggers. And it's not like you go into a conversation and say, let's talk about milestone triggers, because That's not how it's gonna happen. You say something like, look, we have a great deal here and I'm ready to get started. Are you open to us making it better for both of us? Like, who's gonna say no to that? Like, how can this deal be any better for both of us? Right? And it's like, look, like, let's get incentivized and aligned on when we hit this major goal, this happens for both of us and this happens and this happens and so on. So I wanna talk about handling objections and, and turning them into opportunities. Right? When somebody is essentially saying no to you, it's not necessarily a rejection. It's your ability to understand where their, where their hard lines are. So a common objection is we can't raise your base salary anymore because it's public and everyone can see that and there's precedent, right? So maybe that objection is, okay, so we're not gonna push there anymore, but what are the other levers that they have to play with? To make it interesting. And this is where in that one of those stories I was sharing earlier, the $600,000 to $1 million, when we were getting that $800,000 signing bonus, that signing bonus started at $250,000. They could really come up front on the cash, but the actual base salary only came up $30,000 a year. So objections can mean that, that you've reached the limit on that lever. There are other levers that you can consider. And I'm sharing this in a very low-risk way. I'm not suggesting you make ultimatums or talk about other levers very matter-of-factly. It's that very low risk is, hey, I understand you have a lot of different levers to play with. Can you help me understand how we can make this deal come together? And when I shared earlier, I said, don't talk about ranges. I am comfortable with you sharing ways that you like to get paid. So as an example, you might say, I know all companies have different levers that they can pull and each one is unique. I'm usually compensated with a strong base and bonus percentage equity, but I've also seen retention bonuses or sign-on bonuses or milestones or XYZ thing. And that can start to open the playing field a little bit. Like, oh, we could, like, we can start to go into assigning bonus territory. And it's a 30-second ask that could make you $100 grand right there. In this last case, it made us $800 grand, right? So that's some life-changing numbers kind of thing. And so handling objections and pushbacks is really important, especially while like staying calm to do that, reframing it positively as a win-win for everyone and proposing solutions such as, have you thought about different levers here? Here's what I'm used to. Let me help you through this process. I mean, it works at McDonald's, like in some ways, like you can push for 10% raises there, you know, like little stuff. You're not going to get milestone payments on how many customers you push through, but like it works at even things like going to a hotel lobby and getting an upgrade. Like my favorite thing, like the favorite advice is what's the chance? Like it's such an innocuous way of saying something. What's the chance one of those— what's the chance there's an upgrade available? Right? Like, what's the chance that, you know, there's a discount today? Or what's the chance I missed something in the flyer or whatever? I mean, you can practice in little low-risk ways just to get accustomed to pushing back, and you'd be surprised at the things that can happen. Like, somebody— the dealership took my BMW the other day and, like, had to do a performance update on it or something. And they said they were going to fill the gas tank and detail it, and they returned it and it was on empty and didn't detail it. So when they asked me how it went, I just said, hey, I don't want to be a pain in the ass, but they said they were going to do this. Like, what's the chance I give them a hard time for it? And they just responded and sent me a $200 gift card and they said, we'll detail your car and fill it full of gas as soon as you come down to the place again. So it was like a little, like, obviously not really a big stressful thing, but it was what's the chance? Right? I give them a hard time, like jokingly, and they were just like, yeah, let's just make it right. So it was just a very simple way to approach that. And I want to give one, one example here because this was a half a million dollar mistake that we picked up with a, with a client in late stage negotiations for a chief revenue officer position. And the The problem was when we negotiated severance, we had six months of severance on target earnings. That was what it was worded. When we got the legal paperwork back, it was six months of severance on salary. That's a big difference because the on target earnings is twice as much as as the base salary. And so my client called me saying, "Oh man, we just lost." It was actually it was three hundred and fifty thousand. So he's like, we just lost $350,000 and I'm suggesting going back to the CEO and just splitting the difference and going right in the middle, like $187,500 or whatever it is. And I said, why don't instead you just ask him what happened? Because you communicated that for a reason and that's where that number came from. And when we went back, he's like, oh, I don't know about this. Like, it seems risky. We should just split the difference. I want it. I want this deal regardless. I said, just, just ask and see what happens. Right? So he goes back and says, look, like I noticed in the paperwork it came back like this, and what I intended was OTE. And the CEO said, oh, must have been a mistake. Let's just go correct that right now. So the client was just voluntarily going to negotiate against themselves and lose $187,000 in protection. And instead, just by shifting the framework, which is really what I want the takeaway to be here for people, is it's not going to happen. Let me compromise to How can I make it happen? What's the right way of saying it? If that's the takeaway you have, this is a successful workshop today. And in that case, it could mean big-time money for executives. Okay, so want to talk about bidding wars, right? I don't know how many folks here have been in a bidding war or hope to be in a bidding war or falsely bluff their way into a bidding war. I've seen that happen too. But this is really where we can make some big money in short time. And this is really about creating opportunities outside of the one you have, like creating your alternatives, right? So if X company doesn't work out, I have Y company and Z company. And the more of those you can stack up, obviously a little more chaotic your interview schedule is and all of the work that you're doing to try to win those deals. But the more leverage you start to develop and you strategically start to drip information with each other. And as we want to, if we want to speed a deal up, we might say, I'm expecting an offer next Thursday, right? And I expect to make a decision in the next 2 or 3 weeks. I want to be respectful of your hiring process, but I need to be transparent. I have a couple other companies that are interested in me. And I want to basically navigate and get as much information as possible here. And, you know, I'm looking at some of the chats here coming in. This can also happen for those that have a job that are about to quit. You're about to quit a job, and you should ideally have another offer ready because that gives you leverage with your current job, and it doesn't necessarily burn that bridge. If you say things correctly. And I have an example about this. I had a client call me, had a competing offer. This is also a Fortune 500 tech company, 2 of them competing for this gal's talent. So she had a competing offer. She said, Jacob, I'm going into the office today and I'm going to quit. And I said, call me instead. And because quitting, she was frustrated, didn't want to stay at the company regardless of what they came back with. But I said, this is when you have the most leverage. This is when we can find out how much money you are leaving on the table by not standing up for yourself. So you owe it to yourself to understand what they would do to keep you, because there's a couple of ways they can throw some money at you, or they could say, good riddance, we didn't like you, right? And then you're going to know you made the right decision either way, right? So rather than just quitting, we came and said, look, I have another offer. We were transparent, said it's with so-and-so. And I'd like to stay, but I don't see a path where we can. And her hirer, her boss said, you know, give me until the end of the day. And in the next 3, I think 3 or 4 hours later, the CEO of the company called and offered her $500,000 more a year in cash to stay. Like per year, like increase of base salary. We need you. Like we, they, they just did a CEO transition. They were bleeding talent. Like they needed to keep Leverage in this case was so much in her favor that she knew, like, there was money on the table. They offered to fly her around the country and be a public speaker with the CEO, and she still chose to turn the job down, right? So this probably sounds a little scary, but that is ultimately when you have some of your best leverage. I have another client going through this right now where the answer is, I've accepted the job, but I want to quit this one no matter what. And I said, don't be so sure, right? I fully support somebody that wants to quit and is going to quit for any reason, but just understand what were you leaving on the table? Because if you announce your resignation, say, I just don't see a path to stay, can you help me? I'm open to it, but I don't know how. If they choose to not go to work for you, they didn't like you and you deserve to quit. Or they go to work for you and you see how much money you're leaving on the table and you can still choose to quit. But regardless, what I'm trying to do is give you as much information as possible so you can make the smartest decision for your career. That's a very difficult topic. What if I don't have a competing offer? Right? And I want to share that the ability to say no ultimately gives you unlimited power. Right? So if you have created the opportunity to walk away from a deal, You'll have unlimited power, just the ability to say no. And I think a lot of folks, especially when they're out of work, and maybe there's a lot of folks like this on the call, you don't feel like you have the ability to say no, right? You need something. And again, my challenge for you is ask yourself why you're in this position and look back at some mistakes that were made, some of which were your fault and some of which were not. Right? Not predicting the layoff, the market conditions, some of which could be that you chose to work in a struggling industry or the function, and it's been hard to transition out, or you didn't know how to. There's some gap somewhere that made it so at this moment in time you have urgency, you've lost your leverage, and you can't say no. If you are fortunate enough to be in a position to say no because you either have the confidence that you can create more opportunities for yourself There are other suitors interested in your services, or really just, just having the ability to say no because of your confidence, knowing that you'll find something else if this doesn't fit, or that you're one step closer, then ultimately your leverage is significantly higher. And one story that I share that is, is definitely obnoxious. Some of you have probably heard it, but I call it the G-Wagon story. And it's where I had a CEO client of mine who had 2 CEO offers competing. On paper, they were roughly the same, and she was ready to walk away from both of them because she had the privilege to do so. She had done well for herself in the past, right? So she has power to walk away, and she's asking me for help, and we really exhausted all potential creativity. It's also— I think I wasn't as creative as I am now in this instance. And I said, they're going to ask you what it's going to take to close the deal. And what are you going to say? And she's like, I don't know. And I jokingly said, like, what kind of car do you like? And she said, well, I like Mercedes. I'm like, well, then say that, like jokingly. Like, we're— I was actually more exasperated with her and frustrated than I was helping her. And she went into the conversation. They said, look, what's it going to take to bring you on? And she jokingly was like, I don't know. I like Mercedes, like as a joke. And they said, what model do you want? And we were just so surprised because she was ready to walk away. She just threw it all out there like, screw it. Like, I don't know, I like Mercedes. And then so she got a G-Wagon and she's like, I've always wanted a G-Wagon. I've wanted to be like a CEO mom driving a G-Wagon. It's like this weird fantasy of mine, whatever. And they're like, done. And the lesson there is because she was ready to walk away, she was more creative in her ask, right? And the other lesson there is that while the company couldn't do anything on compensation or bonuses because it was a public company, everything was shared with the board. They were already under scrutiny for needing to push prices down or compensation down for executives. Everything was publicized, but they could have write-offs on heavy vehicles. So like that cash could go on a different budget and it could go to her to Persuade the decision over. And so sometimes there's a creative pie somewhere to be created, and sometimes that answer is just a little outside of the thinking outside the box. Yeah, we're actually almost done here. So just want to be mindful of finalizing negotiations with precision too. So you've done all this work to get deals moving forward. We want to make sure that we're Summarizing the terms like this is what the first 90 days are gonna look like. This is making sure that everything is vocalized, making sure that everything's in writing. If you have hesitations, this is where you can create more opportunity for yourself. You might say that, you know, I'm like, I'm all on board here. I'm hesitant about our hiring plan moving forward. Can we talk about that first? It's like we can do more due diligence in our hesitations before we sign a deal, and we always want to make sure we're expressing our appreciation. Thank you for being an advocate for me. Thank you for doing your best for me. Thank you for bringing this offer forward. I'm excited to work with you, and so on. So I'll go through these sections a little fast so we can have maximum Q&A here. And laying the groundwork for more too. So I mentioned earlier What you can't negotiate today, you can sometimes negotiate tomorrow. And so we want to plant seeds for that. Accepting your opportunity is really just the beginning. Now the actual real work begins. And so we want to set the— we want to plant seeds for what we're trying to accomplish in the future. I'd also mentioned in an earlier workshop, if you want to be a CEO, you need to start talking about it now, right? We want to show that whoever it is that's hiring us can be a mentor for us, and we find value in that. We're here to support them. And in exchange, we'd like them to guide us through that as well. If we don't get our way entirely in a negotiation, but you really want the job, we can use a line such as, look, to be honest with you, I'm excited to get started. Why don't we work together for a little bit, see where their performance is and have this conversation again in 6 months or 3 months or whatever. So like, let's pick this back up after we've done some testing. Right. And we get to know what it's like to work with each other. Yes, you've lost a little leverage in that, but you've planted the seeds that you're not going away. And you're doing that in a polite way just to make sure, hey, please take care of me as we see this stuff through. Ultimately, it's always on you to deliver the results too. That's one thing I'm not good at with my clients. I don't know if they can deliver or not. I have to assume that they can. And we talk a big game too, and ideally they can show up and do that. But you always want to make sure that You're consistently performing and exceeding expectations. Those table stakes are maintained. Otherwise, you won't be laying the groundwork for more. You'll actually be laying the groundwork for a possible termination or layoff. And being the tall poppy, when you negotiate hard, you are the first one under scrutiny. And so you have to accept that responsibility and put yourself out there or shy away from it and go with more of a low-risk opportunity or low-risk negotiation and then be okay with not earning more. So you kind of choose which battle you want to have there. All right, now final piece in this, and then we'll move into kind of a summary section here, is that integrity is the cornerstone of your negotiation. And I can't stress this enough that I do not want you to be deceitful, right? I have seen people bluff. I have seen it be successful. I ultimately don't want people to have to put on a mask to show up to work because it's exhausting to do so. Like, if you had to be someone you're not in the interview process for the sake of getting the job, you have to be someone you're not through that job to keep it right. So your character traits follow through, and it's why I push for being more assertive in the interview process and really understanding what it is about the role that That gets you excited, that character trait that you express needs to be consistent because that's what creates kind of that long-term impact. And it's also that your reputation's going to outlast any deal that you make. So I want you to make the right deals. And sometimes no deal is better than the wrong deal when it comes to protecting your career and making stronger decisions based off your integrity. Like you might say, I will not work for a company like BlackRock. Or I will not work for Pfizer, and I'm picking on a couple of, you know, or will not work for Nestlé. Like, your integrity and what that means is important to you, and that can be the cornerstone of your career. It's something to be mindful of. We can do— severance is really important because it's very awkward to bring up, and the timing for this is awkward as well. So in most cases, Companies don't voluntarily give you severance, right? They don't just throw it out there like, hey, when we fire you, we're going to give you a year for free, right? It has to be negotiated for. Now, what I advise my clients do is to assume they're going to get severance while knowing that they're probably not, right? So this is a mindset deal. So you go into the conversation And the timing for this is important. So you've already negotiated your compensation. You've, you've come to terms with everything being within your zone of agreement, right? So compensation's okay, bonus is okay, all the big heavy things are okay, and it's the day you're going to sign it, right? And then you send the message, hey, getting ready to sign, but I didn't see your policy on severance. Can you forward that to me? Right? So like HR sends all the paperwork. Here's our culture, here's our this, here's our that, here's our benefits plan, all that. You're like, okay, I'm ready to sign. Like, this is a done deal. Can you send me the severance agreement? Right? Because you're assuming you're going to get it. And they're like, uh, we don't have one. Then that opens the door for a conversation about severance. And this is particularly useful that if through the interviewing process, You built demand for yourself as an executive leader that is planning to hire other— and this is usually the term that's used— A+ talent. Oh, somebody hires me because I bring in A+ players, right? When you go that path in your interview process, at the severance stage, you're going to say, oh, okay, can I help you create a severance package? Because as I go to hire some of these folks, or, or the 10 people you want me to bring onto the team, they're going to ask me about this and I don't know what to say. Right? Like they're going to expect this too. What do we do about this? I'm happy to be the use case on creating this for the first time. And so this way you weren't going to get anything. Typically smaller companies will give you 3 months. Ideally we want 6 to 12. Big company hire, like Fortune 500 C-suite hires are getting close to 2 years, sometimes more, very rarely more, but sometimes more. Some CEOs will also get like accelerated pension and things like that that we can negotiate ahead of time, or on the transition out, we can occasionally negotiate severance, even though you have significantly less leverage. And as we're going into this, you might say, I'm used to having— like, I'm familiar with anywhere from 6 to 12 months. I've seen companies also do like 6 months standard plus 1 month for every year served. Which is the path that makes the most sense for how you want to structure this out for our team? It's like we, we be the solution and we provide and we consult them on that if they don't have a plan in place already. This is just a summary of principles, and it's important to know that there are no rules. There, there are no hard rules for negotiation because every person and nuance is different. And there's a lot of differences between cultural norms and status norms and industry norms. And there are so many nuances to consider that these are simply principles that you must make your own. I do highly recommend studying this stuff because mastering executive negotiation is what's going to advance, advance your career the most. If you want to retire several years earlier, get better at this. If you want to make millions more, get better at this sooner. Psychology and negotiation is what uplevels the final part. That's what keeps you in the C-suite too. It's what keeps you at that high level. And these are, these are basically the main tenets that I've been able to figure out through my work with clients. We're working on putting together more specifics because this is such a deep topic that's hard to articulate. It's— there's so much to consider. That we're working on putting a, like, an actual focus together on how we go through an entire negotiation process so that we can spell it out. I want to make this probably a 10-hour course in the future to really go into the details and learning on this. In this accelerated course, we could really only scratch the surface. But the way that I've been thinking about it is first we gather that information. We're primarily doing that through that interview process, what we can find online. Then we're aligning with the people on the team that we'll be working with. Then we're focused on influencing them, how to make them advocates for us, how to get them to work on our behalf. Then we're navigating the challenges as they come up, and then we're securing the deal after. And so we're working on putting together a full framework for this to get really hyper tactical. Session 7 workbook. This week's assignment will help you approach negotiations with confidence and clarity. You'll evaluate what matters most to you in a compensation package by ranking key elements like salary, bonus, and equity. Before we move on to the next lesson, I have a story to share. An executive I represented was once told the salary band topped out at $600,000 a year. For many of us, this would have been an immovable barrier. We closed at $1.1 million. If you want the evidence and the expertise behind over a billion and a quarter in lifted outcomes on your side of the table for your next negotiation, request an engagement with me using the first link in the description below. Session 8, Negotiation Strategy. The most successful executives know that negotiation is a strategic game that starts long before the offer and continues well after you say yes. In this session, we'll show you how to approach negotiation like a chess master with the Think Warwick Gains framework, a method for orchestrating career moves that position you for long-term success. We'll also talk about how your emotional intelligence, your EQ, can be your secret weapon to securing the best deal. And I'm excited to get started with everybody, and this is not a topic you're going to learn in 2 hours. This is something that takes an entire career to concentrate on. But what I want to do is spend a little bit more time sharing stories of what can be done just to open your mind. And if at the end of today's conversation we get to a point where you're thinking, instead of how do I make the benchmark, instead, if we're thinking, how can I break benchmarks? How can I get creative? How can I create the lifestyle that I'm looking for? If we can get to that mindset, then today's session will be a win. And I hope to accomplish that through a lot of the storytelling and then the, uh, the fundamentals that we share here. So part 1 here, I want to talk about negotiation fundamentals, why the, again, mindset, which comes up quite a bit, is very important. Your preparation and EQ is absolutely necessary. Want to go through some negotiation techniques, not every technique in the book, But some negotiation techniques that are most common and helpful, ways that you could maximize leverage throughout the entire process, and then long-term considerations on how you can continue to negotiate throughout your career. So first, I'd like to start with some of the fundamentals, and I, I want to start with the areas where people make the biggest mistakes. If you correct these mistakes, then you'll make tens, if not hundreds of thousands more throughout your career. So the first big mistake that I see is that everyone undervalues their worth in some capacity. And I think you, you often hear from negotiation experts, you know, know your worth, know your worth, know your, know your number, fight for that number. And from a contrarian perspective, uh, Chris Voss, who's an FBI hostage negotiator, you negotiator you've probably heard from before. One of his favorite quotes is, never be so sure of your worth that you wouldn't accept more. Mm-hmm. And so we look at benchmarks and we have these great resources that say, you know, Beth should be making X amount or Chelsea should be making X amount. And my thought process on the benchmarks is that they are a mean, they are an average. So do you negotiate for average if you're exceptional? It's, it's a weird thing. It's like a weird concept. Like, I just want to be making the bar. Well, there are people out there that rise the bar. Why can't that person be you? And what's interesting, all of my clients think they're exceptional, and I have to agree and push into that and assume that they're exceptional as well and negotiate on their behalf. So because everyone thinks that, why not push the boundaries further? So we need to break down that those benchmarks are just a suggestion to get you a general ballpark. But there's no reason why you can't break them, double them, or create different types of options that are outside the status quo. And if we're not thinking creatively, we'll never do that. Inadequate preparation. I think a lot of folks go into their interview and negotiation process thinking they know exactly how it's going to go. And that is— information is your currency, and you need to treat it as such. So as you're doing your interview preparation and as you're doing discoveries through the interview process and through the entire job process, all of that information is serving your negotiation at a later stage. We've all been building up to this point, and it's about having positions to take and having fallback positions if they don't go well, or if something is not received well in your counter. What do you fall back to? How do you navigate that conversation? How do you do it with stoicism and poise? Speaking of which, the emotional entanglement is very difficult for lots. Many people say, hey, Jacob, why can't you negotiate on my behalf? Well, to be honest, it's very difficult to negotiate on your behalf. You have a lot of blind spots. There are a lot of emotional triggers. There are a lot of things, drivers like, can I pay my mortgage? The school dues are coming. My spouse is upset that I've been out of work for X amount of time, or They don't really care how I make the money or if I'm happy, but just that the end number is $20,000 a month or whatever it is. And there's a lot of emotional entanglement with why you are negotiating the way you are. And companies don't care about the emotional entanglement. That's on you. And we have to separate the emotions from the negotiation. And someone like a third party like myself can do that. And it's very easy for me to do that because I don't have to live with the consequences of your decisions. Right? So this is an area where a lot of folks make mistakes, and we just need to do our best to separate that, and where having sparring partners can be very helpful. Poor timing. Timing is— this might be the number one thing that people make the most mistakes on, and that is that they don't realize that they're negotiating when they are. So I have— I've had a really hard time. I'm sure everyone here knows that I obsess over word choices quite a bit. Like, if you've looked at my profile, it changes like almost every day as I try to figure out who the hell I am. I'm hesitant to call myself a negotiation coach because the psychology and perception of negotiation is that once I have an offer, I will negotiate. And everybody thinks, okay, now that I have an offer, Jacob, come help me make this better. Right? And the reality is, if you wait that long to think you're negotiating, You have significantly less play. You have less leverage. You have like— so much has gone into getting to that point that I may be able to increase your deal 10 to 20% on average. But if we started much sooner, I could have doubled it, right? Or we could have put plans together to create unique opportunities that we never even thought possible after it's too late. So poor timing is very difficult. This often comes up with severance as well. Like, severance is an awkward topic to talk about when you're starting a job. Like, hey, let's talk about the terms of our divorce before we're married, right? That is a difficult one to bring up, and I'll talk a little bit about severance timing a little bit later. Another mistake: position-based— like, my stuff's in the way here— position-based, uh, negotiating versus partnership-based negotiating. If there's one kind of visceral mindset tweak that I can get you in when you're negotiating with someone, it's that it's not you versus them. So if I'm negotiating with Chelsea right now and she's on the other side of a Zoom, or we're in a conference room and we're looking across each other from the table, physically it's an adversarial position to be in. Like, it's me versus you. We have this point, we have this challenge in the middle that we solve, right? I'm at— I'm Advocating for my position, you're advocating for your position. That is a losing endeavor when it comes to negotiation. What I'd like people to think about when they're about to negotiate is, if I were physically in the room with Chelsea, I would want to be on the same side of the table with her. If appropriate, I'd want my arm around her like we're buddies. We're going to work on this problem together and we're going to solve our mutual interests together. This is not the same as win-win negotiating. This is just having empathy and compassion for the other person and trying to understand everyone's point of view and where they can and cannot move. This is also where we start to strategically reveal more information later on in the negotiation process. But if there's one little sticky note you take, just picture being on the same side of the table. We are a team. It's why we also earlier in the process said pretend you already have the job and you're a consultant. You're part of the team. We're doing this together. We're solving this together. It just so happens that we can both win and gain from this as well. Negotiating alone. I think a lot of executives are isolated. They're afraid to talk compensation with other folks. Sometimes it's for fear that, you know, Karen makes more than Liana and that's frustrating. Or, you know, I'm afraid to share that I've negotiated poorly in the past or It's just in society, not in, in also in many other cultures, not okay to talk about money in that context. And I think I'd say one of the reasons I've gotten good at what I do is that the first, one of the first questions out of my mouth when I talk to people is, how much money do you want? And I'm not using it against them because I'm their advocate right now. When you share it with a company, You know, they're using it against you. When you share it with me, I'm here to help you, right? And then when somebody says, I want $250,000, I ask, why? How are you so sure that that's what you want? What if someone gave you $300,000? What if someone gave you $400,000? Those types of things. So I can break that down. So having sparring partners with this is important. Some people will call this your personal board of advisories, right? Your advisory folks. So they're your mentors. There could be some colleagues of yours. There could be some folks in other industries, similar to how we build out that networking chain that we talked about in the second session. We have these different groups of folks that can provide information for us. And when we go into a negotiation situation, we advise with our board of advisors. We ask some questions like, hey, if you were in my shoes, what would you do here? Knowing what you know about me, what do you think I should advocate for? Having this support system can be really critical in helping you develop the confidence That's required to push back and ask for more. It doesn't always have to be an expensive coach. It could be your friend group that is just rallying together to support one another. Another major mistake: revealing your position too early, which is essentially the same as saying, this is how much money I want, right? Or you show your urgency too early. This can be with some of the language you use where you come across— I'm going to use the word desperate for sake of conversation and impact, but showing a little bit more urgency to accept the role, like you're eager. We don't want you to come across eager. We want you to come across enthusiastic. There's a difference in that language. Similar to, we don't want you to be aggressive. We want you to be assertive and confident. Confidence is not the same as arrogance. Right? So these word choices matter, and we don't want to reveal your position too early with that. And we'll talk through some of the ways that we do that. And then another killer, and this is particularly a killer for women and minority women I've seen more frequently, and that's the fear of asking or just assuming you're not going to get it. And I want to share a story about this that happened recently with a client I've been working with for over a year. And she has never advocated for herself. She's doing fairly well for herself, but been in a company for about 10 years and makes significantly less than she could be. And she never knew how to ask for more, just period. I think some of this is from fear of an offer being rescinded, right? Like, oh, you asked for too much, so we're gonna take it away. For what it's worth, I've never seen an offer be rescinded from one of my clients. Even when pushing aggressively. So in this instance, um, she'd never had the confidence to ask for more. We were in a counter, uh, situation where she received a competing offer from another company, which her boss is actually pulling her over to. So we built that succession plan and built that relationship so that we can have this optionality. And the offer came in low and she was disappointed. It's like, wow, this is like 40% less than what I'm making. 40%'s a big number. It feels insurmountable. And so it's not what you say, it's how you say it. So when we came back, it was really only a 2, 3-minute conversation with the talent manager in this case. And we said, look, this isn't gonna move the needle for me. And this is when we revealed how much we were roughly making before. So I stand to make about 50% more than this. Like, we're in the 7-figure range, and that's before being considered for a, a promotion. So conservatively, I'm going to make significantly more than this, and this is difficult for me to, like, basically to, to digest. And the response immediately was, well, here's what we can do, like, right away. So we just— they kind of threw a number out. Here's what we can do on the back end. And before that conversation was over, we had come up $440,000. Wow. On that call, which sounds absolutely ridiculous, right? It came up in equity, it came up $30,000 in base, and it came up, I want to say, $250,000 in sign-on bonus in that call. And we didn't respond positively or negatively, just thanks, I want to see it in writing. And the response back was, I haven't really earned her trust yet. So the response back was, I'm not sure if this is enough yet. Let me circle back to the leadership team and see if I can get you more. And she was so taken aback that not only did the offer increase significantly on the phone with what they were basically allotted to go for, the talent manager expressed that it probably still wasn't going to be enough given the new anchor that we set. And he went back to go work on her behalf. And so we're actually— that deal was signed yesterday, and it was the largest sign-on bonus that we had seen all year. It was $800,000 in cash. Sign-on bonus on this, and this was a Fortune 500 company for what it's worth. But it was not an executive role; it was a mid-level role, which is interesting. So just overcoming the fear of asking, just knowing it's it's it's not what you say; it's how you say it. Thinking about if you're just afraid of asking, find a different way to say it. Now I want to start with the pillars of negotiation here, which does apply to this if. Even at your current company. So the 3 things that you always need to keep in mind is information, timing, and power. Those are really kind of where you're at when it comes to delivering, where your leverage is. Information is your currency. You're gathering intel strategically while controlling what you share. And this is what we approached in the closer process in the interview. This is why we asked so many strategic questions. We're trying to get as much insight as possible without revealing the, I'd say, the most egregious urgency on our part or fear or anything that kind of damages our position of strength. That's what we want to hold back until a later point. So we don't always want to share like, you're my favorite company ever. I can't wait to work here. I'm so excited. Like, you can't be overly eager, right? You kind of have to play it cool in the meantime. But when you get closer to a, the end stage, they know they want you, then we can start to reveal more of that information and more of that excitement to get them excited about going to work for us and make a bigger offer for us. So that's where the information that you've controlled starts to get leaked out at the right time. And that's what creates power and leverage. So we're playing, everything builds up into this, and this is a This is a pretty meaty topic to cover. If you want to dive more into this, I would recommend reading You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen. It's definitely old school, like old white dude in the '80s. So be mindful of that language that's in there, but the concepts on information, timing, and power are timeless. And it helps you think about and simplify negotiation in terms that are more grokable. For example, he'll, he'll talk about negotiating a dishwasher sale at Sears, right? Significantly easier to understand than a highly complex technical deal in the multi-seven figures with Facebook, right? So breaking it down to its basic principles is important. And we'll talk about how these 3 pieces come together. Now, I want to refer back to the mindset that we had in the interview process and add One last component that's necessary once we get to a stronger, or let's say the conversation actually starts to become more meaningful for you, right? Interview processes are nice. We're exploring, we're, we're throwing softballs at each other. We start to scale up the pressure as we get closer to making a decision. We want to know where the dirty laundry is. We want to start asking the due diligence questions, the hard-hitting questions. We want to ask for $100,000 more, right? Whatever that is. As things get more difficult, we need our mindset to get closer to that of gratitude. And so we are still confident. We are still curious. We are still enthusiastic, but we have to express, express gratitude. One, so people recognize that the work that they're doing on your behalf is reciprocated and it feels good to take care of you. And the second part of this is for you, because when you're grateful for your opportunities, you have less anxiety. The gratitude and anxiety take the same space in your brain. So if you feel really anxious, like, oh God, what if they say no? Like, what if I come— like, I'm gonna ruin my reputation. What if I push too hard? You're feeling all that anxiety. Instead, shift it to, I'm grateful for the opportunity to have this conversation. I'm grateful for the chance. Right? Like you have an option and a lot of people don't have options. There's a reason to be grateful right there. And so your gratitude can serve to alleviate that anxiety, build your confidence, help you express things with more curiosity and keep your enthusiasm high in the most high stakes situations. Oftentimes when I'm in, uh, and this week has been a little hell for me. I have 4 clients in late stage negotiations, all of which are complicated and all of them Need support immediately. And if I can just get them in that headspace of gratitude and confidence, they perform significantly better. And it's a, it's a volley back and forth, but this is the core mindset that you need. All right. I also want to talk about the power of preparation in a little bit more depth here. So this is why we treat our interview like a discovery process and that you're a consultant. We're doing our homework, we're researching the company, the industry trends, but we're also leaning into your experience about the market in general, your business knowledge, your business acumen. We're reinforcing your value when we share stories and when we ask smart questions. When we have that information, we're better able to anticipate challenges, and then we're also able to set our goals and change our goals based off of what we're learning. Like if we learn that a company's about to do an acquisition and scoop up a bunch of roles and they need somebody to manage that, and you volunteer and put your hand out there, if you haven't anchored yourself with a low salary, you might now absorb some new responsibility, push your career forward and make more money. But you wouldn't know that if you weren't adequately prepared and asking the smart questions. So this is where things are radically different than when you used to find jobs in the middle of your career. When you're a middle manager, or maybe even a senior middle manager, kind of working your way up, it's highly tactical and you're told what to do. Someone else tells you where the challenges are and says, go fix them. Someone else gives you the goals. This is the mindset where you set them for yourself. And that's a key difference. That's what helps you break through that ceiling there. And so I'll tell you, I alluded to this earlier as we talked about planting seeds, but I mentioned that we had several deals that were starting at a $600,000 range that were upleveled to 7-figure ranges. So I have a client who had been a VP for a long time, larger companies, and was being interviewed for a senior director role. And they liked the company. They liked the— they knew some of the executives, had some internal champions. The company wasn't expecting to get somebody with that level of executive presence and experience, and they had budgeted for a senior director. Now, there's a couple of things that we can do here. You could walk away and say, they're not gonna pay me enough. I'm gone. Right? Or you can explore it. Now you run the risk of wasting your time, but you get the benefit of practicing your pitch, being persuasive, trying to understand the company's needs. So we followed suit with, let's pretend you have the job and you're a consultant consulting them on who they should hire. Right? And so we approached the interview more from that consultative approach, saying, okay, so here's what I bring to the table. Great. It sounds like you're looking for this. Have you thought about X or Y or Z? What— like, in— we were able to continue the conversation because if we had determined that there was no alignment, My client was gonna make an introduction for someone who was better aligned and continue to help them solve the problem, which is the focus, right? But through that process, they fell in love with her. They fell in love with her as the client. And at this point, they're like, man, it's like, it's like going to test drive the nicest car on the lot and going, well, I can't go back to the other one, right? And then you have a negotiation that happens. So through that process, You know, we addressed that. And he said, I certainly didn't mean to, to come in here and disrespect your hiring process, right? This is likely more horsepower than you were looking for. Is there a way we can make this work? It's very vague language. Is there a way we can make this work? And they said, yeah, we absolutely want you. Let's find a way. And one of those ways was to break the comp band by going instead of a senior director, we've gotten approval for it to be a VP. We actually probably could have pushed for C-suite in this instance, but my client was very concerned about being the tall poppy and getting fired. I'm sure many of you have felt that pain before, right? So kind of wanted to fly under the radar there. And for what it's worth, this is a $200 million company. So this isn't a, this isn't a big Fortune 500. This is relatively small, tighter team, less, less process to have to really muck through. Still about 6 people coming up with the decision-making process. But as we focused on the value that they would provide in the role and the impact, we actually focused on how the company would have this big win if they were able to attract top talent like this and create a story about it and how it would bring different folks. I can't name the function that they're in, but it would bring different folks into that function and show that they were more innovative. And it actually turned into a PR play and a win in, in a big move in innovation for the company. And that ultimately helped rescope the role and nearly double the compensation from that $600,000 range. So lots of nuances there. I want to be out of the box, right? I want people to feel so confident that they're differentiated because like your job is to help them find the right solution. Now, ideally you are the right solution, right? And you'll, you can communicate that. You could say, look, I hope I'm the right fit for you. And I ideally will find alignment. And I anticipate that we will, but should we not, I know these conversations will be fruitful because I'll be able to point you in the right direction on who you should hire best as I start to understand your needs better. Putting the sales hat on again, and I'll also use car sales as an analogy. If you see a, let's say, midlife crisis father with 3 kids and his wife coming onto the lot and she wants him to buy a minivan and you show him a 2-door, right? And you try to talk about like, the 2-door is the right solution. The 2-door is for you kind of thing. And he buys it and you win him over. There's no alignment there. He's going to fight with his wife, right? They're going to have problems later down the line. and the salesperson's to blame, right? So if you, you have the ability and you have the capacity, especially the folks in this room, you have the capacity to be deceitful. You have the capacity to force yourself into alignment and say, I'm the best fit regardless. But is that the best decision for everyone if it creates something down the line? We, we will talk about like long-term reputation and those things. If you rush into Being the right fit because you need the job. And again, I understand, like, if you're in a position where you need to make the money, you might need to soften this language a little bit and just take a job. But I want you to recognize why you don't have leverage to be your true self and why you don't have leverage to fight back and say, I'm not the right fit for this. And we work to build that leverage later. There's a rubber band effect here psychologically, and it's certainly not easy to do. Right? Especially when you really want something. So I'm not asking you fake it. It's just that you become very differentiated. So I actually like that you say, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this. Most people do. Now, we promise to be differentiated. We need to be different to be attractive, to be contrarian, to be provocative. People like that. People are attracted to that. And that's ultimately how you can win some of these jobs. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, you know you need to run towards it. And negotiation is very uncomfortable, but you have to ask yourself, why is it uncomfortable? Is it uncomfortable because I don't know how to ask for what I want, or is it uncomfortable because I don't believe I'm worth that? That's gonna open up a slew of other questions, right? Is it comfortable because I'm not confident saying I'm not the right fit? Why is it? Because I'm not confident in who I am as an executive. Maybe I need to solve that. So it like starts a tree of questions that know, like, if it's uncomfortable, how can I make it comfortable? How do I make that? It's an indication that there's something to learn and something to run towards. And it's likely something you're gonna fail at multiple times. And if you have a growth mindset with it, you'll be failing forward. And unfortunately, you just have to deal with some of those pains and black eyes along the way. All right, now I want to share the, uh, strategic information management flow here and why it's important and kind of how it builds momentum through the process. So we start by asking these smart questions. We're deferring away the questions about money, the questions that kind of reveal our position, and we focus the conversation on asking more questions. It's like playing poker. And instead of revealing 2 of your cards, you're just asking them to show theirs so you know how to play the hand better. We're trying to get some more information, which is why we ask smart questions. And then we focus on listening more actively. We listen 2 times as much as we speak. 2 ears, 1 mouth principle. We want to be understanding and getting folks like— we want people to be on a soapbox just sharing what's going on with the company because that's giving us the information necessary. To be able to navigate our pitch and our story and also navigate how we negotiate later to build momentum and ultimately look for opportunities that others don't see. Opportunities that could include combining roles or upleveling an agency or like, there's lots of different things we might see if we listen and understand and ask the right questions. And then as we continue our process, we share more and more specifically or more strategically. So that they start to get to know us in the right order. And I wanna go back a little bit to timing here because like there is a time where you can start to become more and more personal and it's later on, like in the process. So if you start to get a little more open kimono, like you don't say, oh yeah, I was totally hammered last night drinking with my friends until you've worked with somebody for like a month and a half and know that that's acceptable. Right? So like there's a time and a place to share that. Maybe that builds camaraderie with you, maybe it doesn't, but that's just one extreme example of you don't start off the gate with that. But later on, as they get to know you and they start to trust you more, you can feel more like, hey, like the, the team I used to work for, like I noticed something was wrong right away. Have you ever felt that way? Then you can start opening up with more risky conversations. The better you know folks, you have to understand the drivers of the person you're speaking with. Specifically what information they can or can't have. And you want to understand your goals with that person you're speaking with too. So the goal of the HR person is to win them over and have them be an advocate and just to pass you off to the ultimate decision maker. And so I like to approach those conversations with, what are the types of candidates you get most excited about pushing forward and why? And how do I make sure I become one of those people? And just like very assertive ask, maybe presumptuous, right? If you're worried about being presumptuous, you say, I don't want to be presumptuous, but it sounds like our conversation's going well. How do I make sure that you're confident moving me forward and sharing with, you know, with Karen, you know, what she cares about most, or, or what you learned about me, or how do I make sure that you're excited about this? And so we know they don't have the power to understand the nuances of your particular role. necessarily. Many, and especially top recruiters, are going to understand the nuances probably better than the people that are hiring you, right? Those we want to be mindful of. That's a different person to consider as well. But with HR, it's— you might want to ask more questions about— and this is where having your preparation is important— with your experience with HR, what do they care most about? How do they get paid? How do they keep their job? What are their OKRs, right? Do they get judged on DEI? Do they get judged on their team culture? Do they get judged on retention? Right? Think about what HR leaders care about most, and then we incorporate that. So I would assume, like, if I'm talking to HR for the first time, I'm gonna assume that you'd really like to make sure I'm a good culture fit, right? And that we stay retained. Like, that's something I've always focused on as a leader myself. What are some of the, you know, biggest pressing things that you're interested in? Like, what makes you confident to move someone forward? And so that's a different ask than talking to the hiring manager and saying, you know, what do you need the P&L to look like next year kind of thing? Everybody has different motivators and drivers, and that's where you need to think about that. And that's where that strategic preparation comes in as well. All right. Now, I'll reinforce the timing portion here. Timing is very important. You're building momentum over multiple conversations. You're not selling on day 1. And I think the biggest takeaway is, this is probably a sticky note thing for everyone here. Haste equals risk. The faster you go, the more risk you take on. And this is a little counterintuitive because if you have sense of urgency and need to pay your bills, Like, haste is not risk for the mortgage company. Like, it's every time the same day, still coming, still coming, still coming, right? And so it feels counterintuitive to drag the process out, but when we drag the process out, we do more due diligence. We understand demands more. We understand whether we are hopping into a position and it's not a good fit and we're going to get fired in 3 months, right? Those are things that happen all the time. When you rush into a situation, you don't have time to look through all the dirty laundry and find out where all the skeletons are. You don't have time to ask the questions because you're so focused on just start paying me. And that risk, when compounded over time, creates mediocre careers. And so it's okay if you're feeling that urgency now, but the challenge is I want you to look deeply and say, why don't I have leverage? Did I spend too much money? Could I live with less? Should I have been searching more proactively earlier? Did I not anticipate the market fluctuations? Did I not see layoffs coming? Like, which part of it is my fault, right? So that I can understand how to be more proactive and avoid it next time so I don't find myself in this underleveraged position. And I'll add this one point because this seems to resonate with folks. So how come, how come a company Can spend 4 months to get to know you, send you through 15 rounds of interviews, ask you for deliverable after deliverable after reference check after background check. I had a client the other day had 15 background checks, like 15 different backchannel conversations, and one came back negative and it changed the deal. And so how come they can do all of this, right? Then they extend an offer to you and they say, You have, uh, 48 hours to accept. Like, tell me how that's fair. So there's information— I've talked about information asymmetry. They have the power and you don't. My job is to give you the power back, right? And so, no, I, I need time to review this offer in writing. I'm gonna look it over over the weekend. I'll get back to you on Tuesday. Right? We need to control time and give you the tricks to control time. And timing is what ultimately creates leverage, right? If we can go through the entire process, be differentiated enough so that you're the only answer for them. Like, Rashmi, you're the only one I want to work with. Like, there are 3 others in the process, but you're the one I want to take to prom, right? Like, you're the one for me, right? You want to work that process, and then as you drag it out, the likelihood that they fall out of the process is greater. Therefore, you're eliminating their alternatives and becoming their only option, which increases your power. Now, there is a way to do this strategically, and it's a pretty reasonable ask to say, I'm going to take a couple days to review this. We also want to plant positive intentions like, I look forward to working with you. Therefore, they think it's a done deal, right? I look forward to working with you. They might even Internally say, we're going to hire Rashmi, right? And if they're verbalizing that you're already there, they're going to have to more or less yield to some of your, I'll say demands. Let's, we're not making demands, we're making requests, right? They're more likely to yield to some of those things as the pressure on them gets higher to bring you in. It's one of the reasons I love negotiating around the holidays because you can say, oh, I'm out for Thanksgiving. It's a great time to discuss with your family. Right? Or I have PTO for a week. This is— I'll discuss it here. You can drag stuff out, and yet companies are urgent because they want someone in seat Q1. Like, they're trying to hit their budget. They have a greater urgency than you do. And instead of hiding, you don't necessarily need to push back very assertively if you don't have those skills developed yet. You can use the holidays as a placeholder to push back for you. And get some more time and push things along. We want to do this respectfully and with a lot of compassion. I imagine there'll be some questions for that part too. This is a very strategic conversation, how you drip information, and this is also how we build our power. So one of the key principles that I share every time is that a company needs to know that they can get you or they won't go to work for you. So they need to know that you're— that's where that enthusiasm comes in. Like, they need to know that you're actually interested or they won't even bother. And so you might say something like, I've had a handful of interviews. Um, or you might say, I was, I was in an interview last week for a VP role or a C-suite role. This is where you can plant that other people are validating you for high-level positions. And you might also choose to share for a Fortune 500 company. That's going to set the perception that you're about to make a lot of money, right? And they're like, oh, I don't know if we can get this person. But then you add and you get ahead of it and say something like, but if I'm honest, I make a better impact at a mid-sized company like yours. And so I owe it to myself to entertain it, but ultimately I'm more excited about this conversation for these reasons, and I look forward to working with you on that, and I'll keep you posted on the process. Right. And I'll let you know how it's going. And that helps create control. It's like, look, I do have other suitors, but you're the one for me. Right. And I don't want you to be deceitful here. It's very easy to tell everyone you're the one for them, right? If people think back to dating in high school, right, it kind of feels that way. And you're playing the field. It's, you want to find a reason to be enthusiastic about each company that's genuine. So you might say, you know, I'm torn on, like, I know it's likely gonna pay well. And I know the title's good, but if I'm really honest, I'm more excited about working with a smaller team because I like to see things grow and I like to see my impact. And I'm afraid that won't happen at a company that size. Like, if you were in my shoes, what would you do? Right? They'll probably say, well, you should entertain everything and keep your options open, but you're also psychologically planting the seed. Other people are interested in you. You're a scarce resource. It's not you're all in and you're the only one for them, right? And that helps to create like you're in demand. And so there's a lot of different ways to bring this up and there's a lot of different times to bring it up, especially if— and we have a slide on creating bidding wars, right? Especially in a situation where 3 or 4 companies are after you at the same time. The mastery of negotiation is controlling the stars to align. So all the offers fall within, let's say, 5 to 10 days of each other to maximize the information you get so that you can control time better so that you have maximum power. And then we go back to those 3 principles there. So I, uh, I want to talk a bit more about the psychology of persuasion through this too. And this is— I don't recommend many books. I did recommend one here earlier. Influenced by Robert Cialdini is the best book that you're going to read for your career. And again, highly recommend that you go through the principles. Marketers here will immediately see the things they do on landing pages and content and say, oh, that's what I'm doing. If they haven't read the book before, sales folks will see that as well. Product folks will see, oh, that's why we do this. That's why we do that and see that it's baked into our lizard brains. And I just don't want you to lose sight of this. Like we're building rapport, we're creating scarcity, we're using social proof. Like social proof in this instance could be like when we had said, most people talk to me for these reasons, or I was recently in an executive interview at Amazon, or I was talking to, like you're doing a little name dropping or brand name recognition there. That's building your social proof. Right? If you're using the names of people inside the organization, hey, you know, I just had a conversation with with Brian, and he said that you and I were going to have a great conversation, and yada yada yada. You're using the proof of people within the organization that you're valuable. So these psychological principles all play to building kind of the greater concept here, and never never underestimate the power of being likable. And bringing light to difficult conversations. In a similar vein, another principle is the emotional intelligence piece. You have to be hyper self-aware of how you are communicating constantly. You want to be aware of confidence and power language versus desperation and neediness. You want to demonstrate empathy strategically. You want to side with folks, understand their point of view. Probe at their questions. And to that question we got earlier about, I'm hesitant on offering other people in the interview process. It sounds counterintuitive, right? If you're demonstrating empathy, you should understand that the hiring manager, they want you to be successful, but they ultimately don't care who is the person that's successful, right? In an open-ended search, right? I'm not gonna get into nepotism or, or any of those other deals like insider trading kind of stuff. But they want you to be successful, but they honestly just need the problem to be solved. And if you're being the person that promises to solve the problem and support them, they're gonna be more attracted to you. And they may say, I need to work with somebody that's this much of a straight shooter, because honestly, truth in being a straight shooter and that confidence is lacking through all of corporate America. It is not. I mean, you know it when you see somebody that's genuine and it's rare. And we all know that to be true in some capacity, right? And so that demonstrating empathy is really important. Uh, regulating your reactions. If somebody lowballs you, you don't get sad, right? You, you, you will take your stages of grief, but do that off of the phone, right? Don't do that publicly. Usually what happens is I get the text message. It says, what the F? Question mark, explanation. Like, I can't believe this. Can you believe this? I don't. How did this happen? Right? And my job is to let people vent. Sometimes I'll get frustrated with them too, and I'll say, look, like, we knew where the alignment issues were here. Like, this is this, this is that. We're regulating. Sometimes we're explaining, but then we come up with a plan to come back and we stay calm under pressure because emotions erode your leverage. Right? We talked about getting overly emotional and taking ego into it. That stuff starts to hinder your ability to think more objectively. Also, we should never forget to read the room context-wise. It's also why I give the big warning: don't be Jacob Jr., because there are situations where I wouldn't behave like this in public. There are situations where it's okay to be funny, and there are situations where you need to be hyper-serious and direct, and you need to read the room and take cues and mirror Be receptive to the changes that you see. Session 8 Workbook. Your assignment this week asks you to imagine you've been offered an executive role at one of your top companies. You'll practice using the GAINS framework to prepare your negotiation strategy so that you can secure the best possible offer. You'll also think through EQ strategies for dealing with tense negotiating scenarios. A point that I like to make with a lot of my clients is that you should always be looking for work, even if you have a job. Having an executive career is kind of like having all your eggs in one basket. If an employer decides that there's a change in direction, or they shift the strategy, or investment runs thin, or the market dynamics change, you're the one that's left vulnerable. So how do you protect yourself? Well, instead of waiting around for that moment to happen, which inevitably it will, because history tells us companies lay off. Every year. It shouldn't be surprising to you that you might be affected by that. Instead, work to continuously build pipeline for yourself. Some opportunities that you create today will take 5 years to flourish. Some will take 10. The idea is that you set opportunities that might take a long time to come to fruition, but you keep nurturing those deals over time simply to protect yourself in case of any difficulty. The best way to do that is to follow our KPIs metric and tone it down. Instead of 20 calls, 30 calls a week that are outside of your day-to-day job exploring your network, tone that down to 1 or 2. Stay active. Drag that timeline out a little bit. Instead of catching up with people every other day, maybe it's every 4 months. Set a cadence for yourself. Go back to maybe a spreadsheet where you're tracking the last time you spoke with someone or a custom CRM that you built for your job search. I have a lot of clients that do that. And set follow-up reminders. Hey, every 4 months I'm going to check in. Maybe every Christmas I send a thank you card or a happy holidays card or whatever it is. You need to find ways to stay top of mind always instead of just staying top of mind when you need something. Not only is your network going to appreciate it, but your bottom line is going to appreciate it when you you don't find yourself out of work, not making any income for the next 18 months. If there's one thing that I'd like to leave you with, again, after thousands of client experiences, I've digested, I've tried to understand what sets people apart, and what I've realized is it's not the skills that set you apart, it's the discipline and the habit to be continuously learning, to have that growth mindset for yourself. To continue to improve and make yourself better. Not to the point where you're not confident or you don't think you're good enough, but just know you'll always be learning. With how fast the market moves, if you take any time to be stagnant or relax, you're simply going to lose ground. And I know we like to use a lot of aggressive language about our competition and how hungry and how cutthroat it is, but it's true. I mean, in this market, somebody is going to replace you, and that's inevitable. And the only thing we can do to slow that down is to study, stay consistent, be humble, and continually learn and grow and develop over time. If you build that habit and that muscle— it doesn't mean you have to do it 10 hours a day. Maybe it's a 10-minute read of a podcast, or it's a writing in your journal, or putting down some ideas of what you learned, or setting a reminder in your calendar that every 3 months you revisit your resume to put a line in simply so you remember what you accomplished that you could share later. And then looking back at it and reflecting and saying, now that I know what I know today, what would I have done differently? And what could I learn in the future that's going to make all of this easier later? So remember, winners don't make excuses when the other side plays the game. And I hope the tips we talked about today helps level the playing field for you so that you can accelerate your career to the next level. Thank you for joining us.