Client: Lisa Pooley was director of marketing for a small cybersecurity software company.
Industry: Cybersecurity, Software, Supply Chain
Function: Marketing
Challenge: After losing two jobs within a year due to corporate reorganizations, Lisa worried that employers might think twice about hiring her. She wanted help putting her best foot forward in finding a new role – and quickly.
Process: Lisa reflected on her career goals and her value proposition, then leveraged the power of LinkedIn and her own social capital to land a great job with a promising future.
Landing: After four months, Lisa landed a position as director of marketing at a Mexican supply chain company hoping to use Lisa’s talents to break into the American market.
Study: Lisa Pooley had been director of marketing for a small, cybersecurity software company for seven months when the organization got a new president – with a new vision. He decided to hire an outside ad agency and let his entire in-house marketing team go.
The timing was incredible because Lisa had just been laid off earlier in the year from another company also in the throes of a corporate reorganization. After the first job loss, Lisa had hit the job boards and worked tirelessly to find another position, sending out hundreds of applications in the process. She landed a new role within four months of job hunting and felt fortunate to be able to choose from among three job offers. What bad luck, then, to have chosen a company that laid her off again within months! Worse, how would she look to prospective employers as she started job searching again?
“How many people at my level lose jobs twice in one year? I knew it would look terrible on paper. I needed someone to help me make warm handshakes. That’s when I reached out to The Barrett Group,” said Lisa.
Lisa began doing The Barrett Group (TBG) Clarity program, and she loved it. She enjoyed that her Clarity coach, Mike Stromberg, challenged her to assess her career and her personal life – especially her family life – from a fresh perspective to determine what makes sense for her now. She also found great value in learning more about her communication style and how best to interact with people who have different communication styles.
“Going through Clarity with Mike was a great experience. He got me thinking about my ideal work-life balance, what I want to achieve, and my goals in three, five, and ten years. I hadn’t done that in a long time, and it was extremely beneficial because a lot has changed since I started my career.”
Lisa had done marketing her entire career and had worked at the director level for most of that time. She hoped that obtaining a VP position might be in her future – at a minimum, she wanted a position that was comparable to what she had been doing. Still, she was cognizant that her age was becoming a liability.
“I’m older, and sometimes people would rather mold a younger person to a role than pay for someone with a lot of experience. I needed to re-brand myself. Being a marketing person, you’d think I’d be on top of how to do that, but I wasn’t. Things have evolved and changed, and I knew I couldn’t count on doing things the way I had always done them.”
With that in mind, one of the first things Lisa did when she transitioned to the next stage of TBG’s program was to get new, professional photos taken. She also started reworking her resume and her LinkedIn profile with her career consultant, Rob Wicker.
“Rob is great and very engaging. Going through the whole TBG process with him was very enlightening, starting with my resume. My resume had been professionally revised not long ago, but it needed fluffing up. The new resume we created with the TBG writing team did well when I sent them out.”
When it came to LinkedIn, Lisa realized how much more she could – and should – be doing to leverage the platform for job seeking – and for career management, in general.
“I was active on LinkedIn, but not like I should be. I probably have 1,800 contacts on LinkedIn, but I never paid attention to the value of that. I just got caught up in my own world,” said Lisa. “I should be reaching out to people. I should be posting and creating my own content. I’ve made it a goal to do that regularly now. I’ve learned a lot of new ways to use it, too, like identifying people with connections to job leads or exploring possible new industries that could use my marketing skills.”
Lisa appreciated the way Rob kept her focused on the job seeking process – especially when it came to elements of the program that were new to her.
“Social capital building was difficult for me because I hadn’t done it before, but Rob explained why it was important. I had done networking before, but social capital building is different. It involves offering your services to people. I didn’t want to do it, at first, but I started with my close network and got some good responses, which was great. I found it to be refreshing to connect with old friends – and rewarding! At one company I applied to, I realized that I knew someone who worked there. Rob told me to ask him to put in a good word for me. I would not have thought to do that before. My contact did as I asked, and I ended up getting selected for the next round of interviews!”
Lisa didn’t land that job, but the experience gave her confidence that the process works, and it helped her grasp the value of social capital. With a deepening sense of her own professional value, too, she kept up her efforts, reaching out to others in her network and offering to pay-it-forward.
One of those individuals was Lisa’s former boss, herself a veteran of the pay-it-forward methodology. Lisa’s boss commended Lisa’s gesture and encouraged her to keep up such activities throughout her career. Then, instead of accepting any services from Lisa, she turned around and helped Lisa land a position that was perfect for her.
“My boss from my former company was connected through a professional organization to someone who was recruiting for a director of marketing position. She told that person that she knew me and recommended that she interview me. The woman did, after which I went on to have six more interviews at the company.”
Lisa got the job – and within four months of beginning the TBG program.
The role is at a mid-sized, supply chain and logistics company based in Mexico City with plans to relocate their headquarters to the U.S. Lisa’s assignment is to create the company’s brand in the U.S. Even more exciting is that there is potential for her job to turn into a chief marketing officer position, which would fulfill her longer-term career goal.
“I love my new position! I’ve been here a month now, and it’s the perfect role for me. I’m leading all the marketing in the US and am enjoying being able to make significant decisions. This organization is small enough that I know I will wear lots of hats and will learn a lot.”
Lisa is grateful to have learned TBG’s job search methodology because she is convinced of the career benefits it can yield. She has even taken to coaching people in her own life on all she has learned.
“I found so much value in The Barrett Group program – from Clarity to career management best practices. Going through the TBG program helped me understand what I truly want to do and how to attain it. The value of leveraging your social network is powerful. I am now sharing everything I know with my family and friends about the importance of building and maintaining social ties, because those ties really help uncover new positions and new opportunities!”
