#193 - Nobody Saw It Happen What you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say. — Ralph Waldo Emerson A close friend, I'll call her Molly, built a tremendous career in public service. For over 20 years, she lived and worked around the world doing aid work for the US government. But last year, along with tens of thousands of others, she got caught in the grind of Elon Musk's DOGE cuts. Her job was gone, but so was the entire path she'd followed, and had planned to follow into retirement....
8 days ago • 4 min read
#192 - What Changed In You If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more. — General Eric Shinseki Two days into my first job as a recruiter, I sat on a big, open floor of connected desks, with phones buzzing nonstop. One of the partners at the firm came up to me, unprompted. He’d moved from New York to open the San Francisco office, and is probably the person I learned more about recruiting from than anyone. Without greeting or segue, he launched in: Aki, if you really...
15 days ago • 6 min read
#191 - I Ignored The Signs at Dropbox What the hell am I doin' here?I don't belong here.I don't belong here. — Radiohead, Creep In the fall of 2010, I was the director of recruiting for Dropbox, a fifty-person startup in San Francisco. The company was the talk of Silicon Valley; its product was growing like a weed, and it had just raised a huge round of funding. One day, an engineering candidate sat in our conference room. I stood outside, awaiting her interviewer: a designer who, as an early...
22 days ago • 6 min read
#190 - I Almost Never Left Google The hardest thing to listen to -- your instincts, your human personal intuition -- always whispers. It never shouts. Very hard to hear. So you have to be ready to hear what whispers in your ear. — Steven Spielberg Last year, a friend interviewed me for his newsletter. We spoke about portfolio careers and divergence and convergence: how alternating between exploration and intense focus can help tame career uncertainty. The conversation eventually spilled onto...
29 days ago • 6 min read
#189 - You Got Lucky Ask 10 recruiters how they got into recruiting, and 9 of them will tell you the same thing: "I fell into it." A firm they went to for help with their own job search turned the tables and offered them a job instead. Or they were a people person whose aunt worked in recruiting. It makes sense; it's not like you can major in "recruiting". There aren't many "recruiting internships" out there. It's a job function which finds people. Not me. At 22, fresh off a marketing job at...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
#188 - I Know This Tired Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life — Susan David A few weeks ago, a TalentStories community member reached out with a request. An AI startup was growing quickly and its founder was keen to explore the work I do: scaling culture, hiring, and performance. “Can I make an introduction?”, he wanted to know. It’s the kind of ask I’ve always reflexively said yes to. That’s what you do when you're building a business: you say yes. You take the meeting....
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
#187 - Stop Keeping Their Score A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play. — James Carse I spent twenty years thinking about other people’s careers for a living. My job was to sit across someone -- a software engineer in Shanghai, a finance leader in San Francisco, a CMO in Seoul -- and decode why they did what they did. Why they’d taken a job, left a company, thrived in a culture. It was thousands of conversations. And I got...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
#186 - Turn To Page 29 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein For years, as a kid on Long Island, New York, I had two groups of friends: school buddies I saw during the day, and two brothers, Bobby and Santí, who I hung out with after class. Bobby and Santí's mom was from Spain and they went to a nearby Catholic school, but they were my default afterschool option; right across the street, always around, always fun. Play on demand. When I turned nine...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
#185 - The End Of Pleasant Fictions What does it mean for us to live the truth? First, it means naming reality.We have a recognition of what's happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. — Mark Carney The stories we live inside Last weekend, I gave a talk at a high school career fair....
2 months ago • 5 min read