A director-level candidate at one of my clients went through seven separate conversations with a major global manufacturer. Board members, operational leaders, finance, division heads, HR, C-suite. Each one tested something different. Each one had a different lens on the role, different priorities, different concerns.
Most people try to be seven different versions of themselves.
She didn't.
Instead, she showed up the same way every time. She asked about the same three things: What's the actual operational challenge you're trying to solve? What's the gap in your current team? What does success look like in year one? Then she listened harder than they talked.
Between interviews, she did something most people skip entirely. She went back to the company's public filings. She looked at their supply chain pressure points. She found an article from six months back about a competitor's move in their market, and she came prepared to reference it in the next conversation, not to show off, but to show she had done the homework.
The hiring market had her second-guessing herself the entire time. Everyone's confused about hiring right now. The process is broken, timelines drag, you can't read the room anymore. She felt it. But she kept showing up the same way: prepared, consistent, relentless on the questions that mattered.
By round five, something shifted. The interviewers stopped testing her and started talking to her like a peer. By round seven, she wasn't interviewing anymore. She was solving.
The offer came a few days later.
Here's what won: Not the chameleon act. Not seven different pitches. Not trying to read the room and become what she thought they wanted. It was consistency. It was pressing on the same pain points until someone finally acknowledged they were real. It was showing that she'd done the work, not just in the interview room, but before she ever sat down.
The people who hire for these roles see a hundred people who try to be a hundred different things. They notice the one who shows up and stays.
One question for your career this week:
If you're in the middle of a long interview process right now, what have you heard that’s been a “red flag” to you but it hasn’t been answered by them?
Before you leave…
I know. It's been 27 days since I've sent one of these. We’ve onboarded 4 new professionals to Conversations > Applications this month, navigated 3 offers ($~475k combined), and I also took time for personal travel back to Cleveland (my hometown)!
Summer hiring is happening. Companies are trying to close things out before the fall, and if you're still in a search, don’t listen to the noise out there.
If you need help navigating your own process, building your strategy, prepping for rounds, or negotiating an offer, let's chat.
For this week’s sponsor, I wanted to shout out Wispr Flow.
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