Let me lead with the punchline: after thirty years of showing up for other people’s brands, my own network turned out to be the best campaign I ever built. I just forgot to check the metrics.
It was month four of unemployment. In a thirty-year career, this is the first time I’ve ever been “downsized.” Honestly? I never saw it coming.
Our business unit hit 104% of the sales target. We had momentum, 3 x growth projected into 2026, and a team that believed in what we were building. Then leadership decided our division no longer fit the long-term plan. That’s it. No scandal, no underperformance – just a strategy shift that made my job disappear like a rounding error. It was that simple. And that was jarring.
What followed felt like grief with a side of anxiety, because I hadn’t been unemployed since I was fifteen. And somewhere in there, ageism started rattling around in my head – a topic every one of my peers is suddenly whispering about. Which, frankly, I find absurd. Experience isn’t a liability; it’s a cheat code. You make faster decisions, you skip the rookie mistakes, and you don’t need a six-month onboarding deck to understand why the warehouse is on fire.
I’m Gen X, and I mean that as a diagnosis, not a vibe. Latchkey-kid independent. Allergic to micromanagement. I work to live, not the other way around, and I’d rather get blunt feedback than a gold star. We were raised to solve problems without calling for backup – which, it turns out, is exactly the skill set nobody bothered to put on a job description.
So, I updated my resume. I highlighted launching Red Bull in the U.S., co-founding and scaling LEKKCO into a national CPG brand, and building The Melting Pot’s retail marketing division from scratch. Brand strategy, product innovation, omnichannel retail expansion, digital marketing, the whole executive greatest-hits album. Surely someone wants to talk to me.
Thirty applications. Eight recruiter calls. Zero nibbles. Not one.
Everyone had the same theory: it’s the AI bots. They scan resumes before a human ever does, and if you don’t feed them the right keywords, you simply don’t exist.
That’s when the doubt really moved in and got comfortable. Was my resume not keyword-loaded enough? Was my experience too broad, too senior, too much? I avoided the “Open to Work” banner on LinkedIn like it was a neon sign that said DESPERATE, until eventually I put it on anyway, because pride doesn’t pay the mortgage.
At my breaking point, out of pure spite, I uploaded a twelve-page, keyword-crammed executive summary to one application, muttering “screw you, AI bots” the entire time. Reader: it did not work. The bots remained unimpressed. The bots do not care about your feelings.
Then I went to a wedding in serene, soul-recharging Crested Butte, Colorado, and did something revolutionary – I put my phone down. No LinkedIn, no doom-scrolling job boards. Just mountain air and a journal, sitting with the actual question: what do I want the next chapter to look like, and what’s actually in my backpack of skills?
I came back to Chicago with a new theory; one every recruiter had already told me and I’d stubbornly ignored: nobody’s hiring off a job board. They’re hiring off a phone call. So, I stopped applying into the void and started reaching out to actual humans: former colleagues, old clients, great contacts from The Room. Not asking for a job. Just saying: I’m available, here’s what I do best, keep me in mind.
The response floored me. Warm intros to hiring managers. And, more than once, some version of: “You’re a badass. Don’t forget that.” Which is an annoyingly effective thing to hear when you’ve spent three weeks convincing yourself the doubt was winning.
So, here’s the moral, Gen X-style, no fluff: the algorithm doesn’t remember you. People do. I shifted 80–90% of my time from applying to actually talking to people, and that’s where the real conversations started happening.
And I’m happy to say it worked. I signed an offer. I started my new role in September. Powered by real conversations with actual humans who know actual me – not a keyword-stuffed PDF that a bot skimmed for six seconds before rejecting it.