Redefined by Cynthia

New Stanford research raises troubling questions about automated hiring, overlooked talent, and who's being left behind. If this job market feels unprecedentedly difficult, you may be right. And the problem may not be your resume, your experience, or your interviewing skills. It may be the technology deciding whether you get an interview in the first place. For years, job seekers have been told to optimize their resumes, tailor their cover letters, and learn how to beat applicant tracking systems (ATS). But new Stanford research raises a question we should have been asking all along: What if the problem isn't the applicant? What if it's the hiring process itself? When I lost my job in January 2025, I entered the job market with decades of leadership experience, an extensive professional network, and a career I was proud of. I expected the search to be challenging. But after applying to 70 jobs and landing just one interview, I knew something wasn't right. I didn't e...

At some point in nearly every organization, someone will suggest that the best communications strategy is simply not to communicate. Maybe we should wait. We don’t have all the information yet. We don’t want to create unnecessary concern. It’s an internal matter. If we address it, we’ll only draw more attention to it. Or maybe it will just blow over. Sometimes waiting is appropriate. Facts may still be developing. Legal, regulatory, or personnel issues may limit what you can share. And some issues genuinely do not benefit from a public response. But silence is still a decision. And like any other leadership decision, it carries consequences. Too often, organizations evaluate silence only in terms of what they might avoid saying. They spend much less time considering what others will conclude in the absence of information. That matters because information vacuums do not stay empty. Employees talk. Customers ask questions. Screenshots get shared. People compare notes, notice inconsistenc...

For decades, communicators have written press releases with a fairly clear audience in mind: journalists. We thought about the headline, the lead, the quote, and the news value. We asked whether a reporter would understand the story, whether the announcement was compelling enough to cover, and whether we had made it easy for someone on deadline to find the important facts. Then search changed the equation. Suddenly, we also had to think about what people might type into Google and whether our content could actually be found. Now there is another layer to consider: AI. That doesn't mean an AI system is sitting somewhere waiting for your company's next press release to hit the wire. But people are increasingly using AI-powered search and research tools to ask questions about companies, industries, executives, products, and current events. Those systems can pull from information available across the public web, including the material organizations publish about themselves. And peo...

Your employees don’t need media training to become spokespeople for your company. They already are. They talk about work at dinner. They answer questions from friends and family. They post on LinkedIn, attend industry events, talk to recruiters and recommend—or don’t recommend—the company to others. And when something significant happens inside an organization, whether it is a layoff, leadership change, restructuring, or a new workplace policy, someone will eventually ask them a very simple question: “What’s really going on over there?” How they answer matters. Over the years, I have trained executives and others to prepare for media interviews, presentations and difficult questions. That work is important, but it has also taught me something broader: everyone is a spokesperson within their own circle of influence. Some people may speak to reporters. Most will not. But all of us talk to friends, family members, colleagues, clients, and people in our professional networks. Today, those ...

A decision gets made in a conference room. Finance is there. Legal is there. HR is there. Operations is there. Maybe the CEO is there too. The numbers are reviewed. The risks are weighed. The tradeoffs are discussed. Questions are raised, concerns are debated, and eventually a decision is made. Then someone says, “We should probably bring Communications in.” That sentence usually comes too late. Because by the time Communications is brought in, the team may know what was decided but not fully understand the discussion that led to it. What alternatives were considered? What concerns were raised? What tradeoffs were accepted? Why did leadership ultimately land where it did? That context matters. A final decision rarely captures the debate that produced it, and those details often reveal where employees, customers, reporters, or the public are most likely to have questions. It is difficult to explain the last page of the story if you were never given the first ten chapters. And yet Commun...

Last year, it took my husband telling me to stop for me to realize just how much the job search had changed. I had spent the day staring at yet another job portal. Same questions. Same boxes. Upload the resume. Then manually enter everything that was already on the resume. I finally closed my laptop and walked into the kitchen. I was burnt out. Done. Jeff listened to my frustrations as he topped off his coffee, then said something I did not particularly want to hear. “The way you’re going about this doesn’t work anymore. Stop it. Just stop it.” “What?!” I asked. Then he explained why. “The applications aren’t working. They’re not getting through. Everyone is using AI now. Candidates are using bots to apply, employers are using bots to screen, and companies are drowning in resumes. You’re trying to get through a system where the bots are talking to the bots before a person ever sees you.” He wasn’t rude. He was just being honest. This conversation became an A-HA moment for me and...