Welcome to BeingReal

Last year, I stepped away from Talent Acquisition to pursue a few personal interests and found myself reflecting on the fact that I spent about thirty years trying to achieve one goal, thousands of times:

Hire the right person, for the right role, at the right time in their career.

How did that goal get measured?

On the surface, it seems simple. But underneath? The layers are infinite.

I wondered a lot about how anyone can achieve this right now and got stuck on a few things: most people do not know how to objectively score, measure, track, or assess fit. The trifecta of disruption affecting hiring from AI, economics, and a drastic shift in sentiment from both sides of the equation makes reading these signals almost impossible. And trust is at an all time low. So what can anyone do about it?

This led to trying to figure out what I could do with what I learned over three decades. Facilitating well over 10,000 interviews and thousands of candidate debrief conversations taught me a lot, and maybe I can apply some of that to help balance the hiring math a bit for candidates.

BeingReal is where I will be publishing content about how to interpret what is happening on the other side of the hiring process. Topics like how feedback works, what it includes, and how to interpret the unsaid things being communicated through employer actions. Hopefully this will provide some tools to objectively evaluate what is actually happening as you try to get through a really chaotic life event.

I welcome feedback, questions, and conversation, so please reach out if you want to talk about any of the topics I'm publishing. If there is a topic you would find helpful for me to weigh in on, please let me know that too.

Thanks for reading.

-Susan