Read the Room with Laurie J. Wetzel

Laurie J Wetzel

You are accomplished, reliable, and respected, and somehow still not in the room when the decision gets made. Read the Room is about closing that gap: the distance between the work you have done and how the people who decide your next move actually see it. Each episode, Laurie J. Wetzel sits down with the recruiters, hiring leaders, operators, and senior professionals who have been in the rooms where scope, promotions, and offers get decided. They give the honest version of how those calls really happen, and what separates the people who get chosen from the equally qualified people who get passed over. Laurie spent 25 years in leadership at companies like Adobe, Slack, and Salesforce before becoming a career strategist. Her core message is direct: your value is being misinterpreted, not missing. This is the show where she and her guests make it readable. Follow the show so the next conversation finds you.

Episodes

  1. 6d ago ·  Video

    Why senior roles never get posted, with Mike Materasso

    "I have never read a cover letter. Not once." Mike Materasso has spent more than 15 years deciding who gets hired at Amazon, Slack, Brex, and Alpine Investors. He is not being dismissive. He is describing arithmetic: 8,000 applicants filter down to about 700, and he has roughly 20 seconds per resume to decide whether to read further. Which is the thing worth sitting with. It is not whether you are good. It is whether what you are can be read quickly, by someone who is not going to work hard to understand you. In this conversation, Mike explains why most senior roles are never posted at all, what he is actually listening for in the first ten minutes of a call, why a short stint on your resume gets read the way it does, and what he tells candidates to do instead of applying. He also tells the story of an account executive hitting between 200 and 400 percent of quota, every quarter, for three years, who could not explain what he was doing differently. His method was real, repeatable, and had never once been put into words. Which is fine for the company and a problem for him. Mike's own line for what to do about it: don't find your next role, make yourself findable for that next role. I open the episode with my own version of this. Four months of interviews at Slack in 2018 with no read at all, calling my husband after every one certain I had not got it, and a reason for the delay I could not see from the outside. Mike runs AQ Recruiting. His LinkedIn and the firm are linked below. LinkedIn Website Read the Room is about one gap: the work you do, and how it gets read. Every episode brings on someone who has seen that gap up close, from one side or the other. The Read is a free email sequence, seven emails over ten days, that shows you which of the four places your read breaks down and what to do about it. Subscribe here More at lauriejwetzel.com

About

You are accomplished, reliable, and respected, and somehow still not in the room when the decision gets made. Read the Room is about closing that gap: the distance between the work you have done and how the people who decide your next move actually see it. Each episode, Laurie J. Wetzel sits down with the recruiters, hiring leaders, operators, and senior professionals who have been in the rooms where scope, promotions, and offers get decided. They give the honest version of how those calls really happen, and what separates the people who get chosen from the equally qualified people who get passed over. Laurie spent 25 years in leadership at companies like Adobe, Slack, and Salesforce before becoming a career strategist. Her core message is direct: your value is being misinterpreted, not missing. This is the show where she and her guests make it readable. Follow the show so the next conversation finds you.