Human Workplace

Too many people involved in the recruiting process, both hiring managers and recruiters, have the mistaken idea that recruiting means weeding people out & finding excuses not to hire them.

Recruiting is selling. Every sales process involves an element of qualification – making sure the customer is a good fit for your product or service – but it’s still selling.

If you think recruiting is all about making candidates prove they’re worthy to work in your amazing, perfect company you are missing the boat.

You will never attract the team you want by using fear to keep candidates off guard and desperate to please you.

Anyone with normal self-esteem will simply drop out of your process and go work for an organization that deserves their talents more than you do.

P.S. I didn’t buy these geraniums at the farm stand this morning but now I think I should have. Suggestions welcome!

AI-generated comments on LinkedIn have that distinctive “I’m using words to say nothing” vibe

Performance reviews are time-wasting, insulting nonsense

(link to story in comments)

One evening in the nineteen-seventies, my dad hosted a fancy business event on behalf of his company at one of the university clubs in Manhattan.

He was a magazine publisher. The event was an annual bash for his team and their most important advertisers and clients.

The event was going wonderfully when my dad got an urgent call from the lobby imploring him to come down and deal with a situation right away.

He took the elevator down to learn that the ground floor staff had prohibited a guest bearing an invitation (a client) from entering the elevator to join the party.

Why did they do that?

Because she was a woman, and she arrived alone.

At that time, the club did not allow women beyond the lobby unless they were accompanied by a man.

The club concierge and ground floor staff had told the woman she could not enter, so she laid on the floor on her back and waited for something to happen.

What a badass!

My dad came downstairs, told the club staff they were being ridiculous, his company had not agreed to the no-unaccompanied-women rule, and my dad and his client went upstairs.

He came home very embarrassed.

He said, this nonsense will be over by the time you grow up.

But it isn’t over.

All-male panels make decisions about women’s health.

When my dad threw that party where a woman had to lie on the floor in protest, we had control over our bodies.

Now, we don’t.

Around the same time my dad threw that party, a constitutional amendment was drafted to give women in the US the same rights as men.

That amendment is not in force today.

My rights and every woman’s rights begin and end at each state line.

Can you imagine?

Can we call ourselves a civilized country?

We should be moving ahead but instead, we are hurtling backwards.

I talk with frustrated job candidates every day.

99% of them have the same problem:

They are smart and talented.

They have a solid or even wonderful career history.

However, one massive roadblock is keeping them from getting the job they deserve.

They are following - through no fault of their own – an outdated and useless playbook.

They are doing what they were taught to do.

They have a standard, boring, jargon-heavy résumé that doesn’t allow them to stand out.

Their job search strategy is to apply for as many jobs as possible and hope someone responds.

Their interviewing approach is the traditional one – sit in the chair, wait for the next question, answer the question succinctly and fall silent, waiting for the next question.

These techniques worked in the 80s and 90s, but they can only hurt you now.

My course Get Your Dream Job 2026 is open for registration from today through Monday, May 25.

I’ll show you a totally different way – a modern, empowered and dramatically more effective way – to get your next job.

The link for more information is in the comments!

Here’s a new puzzle.

Your goal is to arrange the 16 words into four groups of four words that are somehow connected to one another. They might be the four seasons, or four words that commonly precede the word “mother.”

It might take a little while to see how the words are connected. When you solve the puzzle, leave a comment, but don’t give away the answer.

 Have fun and don’t forget, you are amazing!

One job ad on LinkedIn got 16,000 applications. (Why did the job ad stay up so long? Did the employer forget about it)? Recruiting is 100% broken.

When you're sick of trying to navigate a broken recruiting process, you can step out of the traditional box and take charge of your job search. Here's how:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-you-get-mad-enough-youll-do-liz-ryan-lqjke/?trackingId=wQfDyUTekfe%2FLWKtZarn5g%3D%3D

The truth about leverage

It’s wild to see people scandalized by the idea of an employee working more than one full-time job at the same time.

If you can do two jobs satisfactorily and simultaneously, more power to you!

We are living in a time and a country where employees have virtually no rights.

These person-with-multiple-jobs stories bring up an essential question: in a salaried position, does your employer buy your time or your output?

Most CEOs would say, both.

Most CEOs would say, we essentially own you. Everything you create belongs to us.

When I started consulting, I said to my husband, I love this, it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a tremendous amount of work.

Then leverage started to creep in.

Organizations contacted me about issues I had already helped other clients solve.

My recent experience solving new clients’ pain points was beneficial to them in that I already had models, structures and vehicles developed and ready for customization.

That preparation saved them time and money. It was good for everybody involved.

My clients paid much less for those models and structures than it would have cost for me to develop them from the ground up, but I still earned much more per hour of time expended than I would have if I hadn’t done that development work up front.

Leverage!

Not one of my clients would have preferred that I came to them knowing nothing about their problems and having to learn everything from scratch.

Don’t we all deserve to monetize our experience and talents in the highest-leverage way?

Isn’t the outrage about smart and capable people working two jobs at once really an indictment of the institution of employment?

Last week I heard from a fellow who got in trouble for using an AI tool to simplify his job, just three weeks after he and his teammates attended a mandatory AI training where he learned the offending productivity hack.

His manager did not understand the contradiction.

Leverage is what allows a manufacturing firm to pay once to develop a product and then sell that product millions of times, earning tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

The reason employers are horrified at their employees’ accumulation and use of leverage is that they believe any leverage created at work belongs to them, and not the people who work for them.

Leverage and profit are two sides of the same coin.

This is why no-moonlighting policies exist.

(If you have spare time to work for someone else, you should be working those extra hours for me!)

This is why I encourage - and more and more every day, I implore – every working person to have a side business.

It’s not just for extra cash. It’s control over your income. It’s something you plan and manage that your employer has nothing to say about.

It’s leverage.

EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED ABOUT JOB HUNTING IS WRONG

Everything we were taught about how to get a job is wrong - and not just wrong, but disempowering too. We were taught that a job search is a numbers game and that we just have to blast out applications and eventually somebody will hire us.

THIS IS FALSE.

I know it is false because my teammates and I hired 10,000 people and I've helped hundreds of people get the jobs they deserve by ignoring the traditional job search (from how to write your resume to how to interview).

If you've been following the standard playbook without much success then you already know that what we were taught is outdated and ineffective.

I'm about to teach my Human-Voiced Job Search approach in the course Get Your Dream Job 2026. You can join the early interest list at the link in the comments. Registration opens this Wednesday, May 20, and the class size is limited!