For those job seekers with disabilities, what's your best piece of advice for them to become employable and marketable, my friend? What are your thoughts then?

Yeah, it's an ongoing challenge that we deal with, with discrimination and disabilities.

I don't know what it's been like for you with cerebral palsy.

My own personal experience as a woman and as a mature business professional is I've hit some brick walls in terms of how people perceive me, that have been challenging to work around.

So I'll go back to what I said earlier, because there's only so much within our control in terms of how people treat us and how we, you know, how we treat other people we have control over.

So coming from the candidate side, I would say, if you focus on putting your best face forward and you are truly committed prepared to address how you can contribute and add value to an organization in a way that's compelling to the person you're speaking with.

If you focus on that, understanding their needs, wants, goals, and you speak to those and how you can help people get there, people are more inclined to listen than when you're just presenting yourself the way you think you like to present yourself or whatever.

My friend, I'm also curious to ask you, for someone that's been an accomplished professional and looking to make a career pivot or get back into the job market entirely, I'm curious if someone's been an experienced professional before but needs to enter the job market? What pieces of advice would you have for them about how to use AI to their advantage and how the job market has changed? What are your thoughts there, my friend?

People are, are people." But you're also not saying you need to dive in and be super up to date on every single version of Fable that comes out in order to get a job.

job.Right. And, and if you're not a tech person, that doesn't mean you can't figure out how to use AI and become very accomplished in terms of how you interact with it and, and use it to get something done, or to gather information and help you make decisions, informed decisions with more information and insight than we've ever had before much faster, right? You don't have to be a tech person.

You just need to know how to ask the right questions and guide a conversation, and, and just keep your eyes out for things that you question, right, and challenge, because sometimes AI goes off on its own tangents.

So learning how to control that and really know, uh, you know, when to verify something that may not be true that's been given to you just because AI hallucinated it.

You know, some of those things, yeah, people are really afraid of.

Um, and so we need to be responsible and conscious, and we're all just, you know, kind of stumbling our way through that right now, and that's okay.

There's still a lot of benefit that we can get out of it.

Yeah.

Can AI help a person do that?

Yes, absolutely.

It can teach you how to develop an accomplishment-based resume and prepare for behavioral-based interviewing, where you're asked questions like, "Tell me about a time when," or, "Give me an example of a situation where." So I know what I've done when starting from scratch and trying to teach people how to do this.

I remember I had an accounts payable specialist I was working with, and I was in a workshop, and I asked ChatGPT, "Tell me what an accounts payable professional does, and give me an example of the types of accomplishments that they might put on their resume." So essentially, I asked for a sample resume, but with a lot of details, her specific situation, her industry space, a little bit about her career goals, and it, it fleshed out like 10 bullets, stories of accomplishment, and she looked at them.

She goes, "You know, a lot of those are spot on." I said, "Well, let's break it down.

Let's look at these," because it's much easier.

I was always better at multiple choice on a test than essay.

Yeah

And so when you look back across your entire career, from recruiting to coaching and everything you do today, what were those moments that fundamentally changed how you think about career and career success?

So I actually stumbled into career coaching because I was laid off from a recruiting position, a corporate recruiter position, when there was an economic downturn and everybody was getting laid off.

Well, what's a recruiter to do when nobody's hiring? There are no open positions.

So I had to reinvent myself and came into career coaching.

And even after, I think at the time I had been at IBM on contract, I had 75 open positions on my desk.

And I thought I knew everything there was to know about resumes and advising candidates, the best way to get a job.

And then I got involved with outplacement services.

How do I connect that with what the market needs today? And so my other question for you in your experience, what's the difference between someone who manages their career strategically versus somebody who is reacting just like you described?