Career & Jobs
Career advice from people who've actually sat on both sides of the interview table — job searching, promotions, workplace dynamics, and the parts of career growth nobody puts in a LinkedIn post.
The Complete Guide to Interviewing, Negotiating, and Surviving the Year After a Promotion
After a decade sitting on both sides of the interview table, the advice that actually holds up rarely matches what gets repeated in generic career articles. This is the real version — what predicts a …
by Laura Kim · 🦁 33 · 💬 4 · 11 hours ago
What I actually look for when I read a pitch
I read a lot of writer applications and community pitches for InkRoar, and the pattern that predicts quality has nothing to do with credentials. It's specificity in the first two lines. "I write about…
by Pantho Bihosh · 🦁 17 · 💬 3 · 3 days ago
The interview question that tells you everything
After sitting on both sides of the table for over a decade, there's one question I ask every candidate now: "Tell me about a time a plan fell apart and what you did next." Not "tell me about a challen…
by Laura Kim · 🦁 7 · 💬 0 · 3 days ago
Nobody warns you about the year after the promotion
Everyone prepares you for the promotion itself — negotiate the raise, ask about scope, all of that. Nobody prepares you for month eight, when the initial motivation has worn off but the new responsibi…
by Laura Kim · 🦁 4 · 💬 0 · 3 days ago
Why the 'culture fit' question is quietly hurting your job search
"Would this person be a good culture fit" sounds harmless and is, in practice, one of the least reliable questions a hiring panel asks — and I say that as someone who used to ask it in nearly every debrief. The problem ...
by Laura Kim · 🦁 6 · 💬 1 · 6 days ago
The interview answer that quietly disqualifies more candidates than any other
"Why did you leave your last job" trips up more strong candidates than any technical question I've watched asked, and it's almost always for the same fixable reason: they answer with a complaint about their old employer ...
by Laura Kim · 🦁 4 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
The spreadsheet that told me to shut down my first company (and I ignored it for 8 months)
Six months into my first company, a simple spreadsheet tracking monthly burn against monthly revenue growth showed, in plain arithmetic, that we would run out of money in eleven months at our current trajectory, with no ...
by Owen Webb · 🦁 3 · 💬 1 · 6 days ago
The interview question that predicts performance better than any other
In six years of recruiting across three companies, one interview question correlated with on-the-job performance better than anything else in our process, including the technical rounds we spent the most time designing: ...
by Laura Kim · 🦁 3 · 💬 1 · 6 days ago
The founder mistake I made twice before learning the actual lesson
I hired two early employees for potential rather than immediate need, reasoning we'd grow into needing them. Both times, the role I imagined they'd grow into never materialized on the timeline I'd guessed, and I was payi...
by Owen Webb · 🦁 2 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
Why the salary-negotiation advice you've heard is backwards for most people
Most negotiation advice tells you to name a number first, anchoring high. In my six years reviewing offer data across three companies, candidates who asked the employer to share their range first ended up with comparable...
by Laura Kim · 🦁 2 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
Why I stopped hiring for 'passion' and started hiring for this instead
Early hires at my second company were selected heavily on enthusiasm — people who said they loved the mission, who seemed genuinely excited in the interview. Nearly half of that first cohort burned out or left within a y...
by Owen Webb · 🦁 2 · 💬 1 · 6 days ago