Knowing your value and being able to articulate it are two different skills. Most people have the first one. The second one is what gets you the offer, the promotion, and the paycheck you've earned.

Three things to take from this issue:

You already know what you're worth. Stop letting other people set the price.

Here's what seven months of "stronger fit" actually means…

It means you keep earning the room. It does not mean you keep losing it for the reasons you think.

You are making it to final rounds and that part alone tells you that your resume is doing its job and you are interviewing well enough to be considered seriously.

Something is happening in the final stretch that has nothing to do with your experience and everything to do with your story.

This is what I call the Impact Gap — the distance between what you actually contribute and what you can articulate about it under pressure, in real time, in front of people who are about to make a decision.

Most people who are qualified for a job have the same competencies. The ones who get the offer are the ones who can speak to what changed because of their work. Not what they managed. Not what they were responsible for. What changed.

Here's what I'd do.

1. Stop asking yourself what went wrong. Start asking what story you told.

After your next final round interview, write down how you answered these two questions: Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your greatest professional accomplishment. Read what you wrote back to yourself out loud. Count how many times you described an activity versus describing an outcome. That ratio is your diagnostic.

2. Find where you buried the result.

Most people lead with what they did and mention what happened as an afterthought, if at all.

"I led the implementation of a new HRIS system" is an activity.

"Cut HR administrative time by 40% by leading a full HRIS overhaul — the first the company had done in a decade" is an impact.

The experience is identical. The impression is not.

3. Build three proof stories before your next interview.

Not a list of accomplishments. Stories. Each one follows the same arc: here was the problem, here is what I specifically did, here is what changed because of it.

Practice out loud until they come out clean and confident, not like you're reading from notes.

That is not bragging. That is speaking to impact. There is a difference, and most of us were never taught it.

4. Ask for the real feedback.

Most people don't do this because they're afraid of what they'll hear or they don’t want to appear desperate to the interviewer.

Do it anyway. Send a brief, gracious note to the hiring manager or recruiter within a week of the decision. Keep it short.

You will not always get a response. When you do, treat it as information, not as a judgment.

5. Protect your confidence like it's a business asset. Because it is.

Seven months is a long time to hear no. It accumulates. And when confidence erodes, it shows — not on your resume, but in the room. In the slight hesitation before you answer.

In the way you qualify statements that don't need qualifying. In the energy that says I'm not sure I'm the one right when the panel is deciding if you are.

You are not fundamentally broken. You are unarticulated and depleted, and both of those things are fixable.

Go find your proof stories. Practice them out loud. Let yourself take up space when you walk into that room.

The offer is coming. Make sure you sound like you believe that too.

In my house, Steely Dan is practically a life philosophy.

If you ask my husband, most of what you need to know about life, love, work, and worth, comes from Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

If you're under 40 and just squinted at that sentence, stay with me. There's something in here for you. If you're over 40, you already know the vibe.

"Dirty Work" is a song about someone who knows they're being used and does the job anyway.

Sound familiar?

Here's how I think about employer-employee relationships at the most basic level:

Companies have problems. People get paid to solve them. The more precisely you can solve a specific problem, the more you're worth to that organization.

Markets set a "rate" for your skills, your credentials, your experience, the problems you can solve, and how many other people can solve similar problems for less money. That rate is not your value. It's a data point.

One exercise I do with leaders I coach: put an hourly advisory rate on your time. Not to quote it to people, but to remind yourself what it costs the organization when you're in a meeting that doesn't use you well, when you're doing work three levels below your expertise, or when someone asks you to do the work for free "for the exposure."

If you're not sure where to start, plug this prompt into your AI of choice:

I want to understand the market value for my role. Here's my context:

Job title: [current or target title] Years of experience: [X] Industry: [e.g., healthcare, tech, financial services] Location: [city and state, or remote] Company size: [startup / mid-size / enterprise] Key responsibilities: [2-3 sentences on what you actually do and the problems you solve]

Using publicly available compensation data from sources like Glassdoor, Payscale, LinkedIn Salary, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Levels.fyi give me: 1. A realistic salary range for this role in this market 2. The midpoint of that range, and what 80% and 120% of that midpoint look like in dollars 3. What factors would push me toward the top of that range 4. What factors would pull me toward the bottom 5. Any related titles I should also be researching

Find the range for your role, your responsibilities, the problems you solve. Then hold that number as a baseline, not a ceiling.

Don't undercut yourself to win the business. Don't do the work for free because someone is counting on your insecurity to say yes. Other people choosing to undersell themselves doesn't change what you bring. It just changes what they're charging for it.

This one starts before you accept the offer.

During the interview process, you are also evaluating them.

Those questions matter more than the title and the office.

Once you're in: pay attention to the signals.

The castle in the corner knows trouble is coming. It stays anyway.

Most of us do this too. We rationalize the signals. We tell ourselves it'll shift after the next quarter, the next reorg, the next manager. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn't.

Notice what the organization is actually telling you about how it values what you do. Not what it says in a town hall. What it does in practice.

Sometimes the dirty work is work that is no longer yours. You've grown past it. It no longer challenges you. Or the environment it comes packaged in is doing real damage to your wellbeing.

Tony Soprano understood this.

If I had a dollar for every client who started a sentence with "Well, I'm just a [title] — a lot of people can do what I do way better than me," I would be writing this from a beach instead of spending another single minute on LinkedIn.

That sentence is almost never true. And it's almost always what keeps people in jobs that stopped serving them a long time ago.

When the work no longer fits, when the environment is telling you it's time, when you've learned past the room you're sitting in… moving on is not betrayal. It's not disloyalty. It is the right use of what you've built.

Don't feel guilty for it.

Note: As a white, cisgender woman, I recognize that I write from a place of my own bias and privilege. I hold space, respect, and advocacy for those who face systemic racism, discrimination, inequitable pay, and bias on a daily basis. When the corporate system is rooted in practices that don't value contributions from those outside the cis white male identity, it’s all dirty work.

The weather is warming up again which means Walk & Talks are back! 🌞

Somewhere between what you do every day and how you talk about it, something gets lost.

That's what we're exploring this month.

This is a 30-minute walk — with a little company, a little music, a little perspective, and two questions that will stay with you long after you're back inside.

The 3-2-1 Format:

3 ideas about why the gap between your work and your language for it exists in the first place

2 questions to sit with while you move

1 small nudge to take with you before the week is out

🎧 Grab your phone, your earbuds, and whatever you're drinking. Get outside if you can. We'll do the rest together.

This one is for you if you've ever known you did good work and still couldn't find the words for it when it mattered most. Best of all, it’s free!

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