Why Clients Hire Someone Less Qualified Than You

Okay, I need you to do something for me, and I need you to actually do it, not just listen to me do it. For the next three minutes, you are not a consultant, you are not a coach or an advisor, you’re not looking for clients. You run a company with 60 people in it, and you have a problem that is costing you sleep. It is keeping you up at night, and the issue here is your best new hires keep quitting before they’ve hit their one-year mark. You’ve trained them, you’ve paid the recruiter, and then they go, and you have to start all over again. And you finally got budget approved to bring someone in, and you asked around, and two names came back. And I’m going to read you about both, and then you’re going to pick one, and I want you to notice how long it takes you.

This is Good Girls Get Rich. I’m Karen Yankovich, and we’re in the middle of a hiring decision. So let’s get back to it. Here’s your first name. First person is Diane. Diane’s worked 22 years. She’s got 22 years of experience. She was chief operating officer. Her profile says she works in operations and strategy and culture and leadership development and change management and executive coaching. And at the top, the line that sums it all up: “I help organizations reach their full potential.” And here’s your second name, Marisol. Marisol has been doing this for eight years. Her profile says one thing: “I fix first-year turnover at companies under 100 people.”

All right, pick one. I knew who you picked. I know who I picked. You picked Marisol. I know it took you about four seconds, and I bet you didn’t even feel a bit conflicted about it. So look what you just did. Diane has 14 more years’ experience than Marisol. Diane ran the whole operation. If I put their resume side by side and asked you who’s more qualified, you would say Diane without blinking, and you still didn’t hire her. You didn’t even put her on the short list.

I know, I know. Some of you are already arguing with me, “Karen, come on, you rigged that. You gave Marisol the exact problem I had.” Yes, I did. I rigged it the same way every single buyer is going to rig it because nobody goes looking for a consultant in general. She goes looking with one specific problem that’s keeping her up at night. Up at night. And she’s scanning for the person who’s obviously about that problem. This isn’t a trick I played on you. It’s how you hire. It’s how everyone hires. It’s how your clients hire too.

Okay, so I want you to think about how fast it was to decide Marisol over Diane because we’re going to come back to that. All right, round two, and this one’s even faster. It’s six months later. You hired Marisol and it went well, and you’ve half forgotten about the whole thing. And then a friend of yours, another founder, texts you on a Tuesday night, “Do you know anybody who’s good with retention? We are bleeding people. Who do you send her?”

Marisol. Obviously, you can type it with your thumbs in 10 seconds. “Yes, call Marisol. She fixes first-year turnover for companies our size.” And you hit send, and you go back and finish watching Grey’s Anatomy. But then, let’s say you met Diane too, and let’s say you like Diane and you had a great coffee with her and you thought she was the smartest person you talked to all month. Try to write the text that sends your friend to Diane. Go ahead.

“Well, there’s this Diane person. I had coffee with her. I love her. She does operations. She does strategy. She does some culture work. I think she does some coaching too.” You’d have to write a paragraph. And nobody writes a paragraph in a text on a Tuesday night, so Diane doesn’t get sent. Nobody decided against her. She just never came up, and this is the part that should bother you, because that’s where most of your business actually is coming from. It’s coming from somebody else’s mouth in a conversation that you’re not in.

I told you a story a few weeks back, and this is the episode about getting paid to speak. In 2019, I spoke at a conference for free, and that one free talk turned into four paid speaking gigs. None of the four came from the organizers; they came from women who had been sitting in the audience, and I can promise you, none of them called a colleague and recited my session title, or my bio, or where I used to work. They had a sentence about me that they could say out loud, and they said it to someone who had a budget.

Okay, so that’s two rounds of our game here. Marisol got hired, and Marisol got referred, and at no point did anybody check to see how many years she had. All right, round three. You can stop being the founder now, and I’m sorry because this is the round that might sting a little bit here. So take a deep breath and be ready. This is Jersey Karen coming out here with the flat honest truth to you.

Go look at your own LinkedIn headline if you’re driving. Just picture it. If you’re at your desk, open it and read it the way you just read Diane and Marisol, as a stranger with one problem and about four seconds. Are you a Diane, or are you a Marisol?

I’ll tell you what I see when I look at the profiles of accomplished women, and I look at a lot of them. I see Diane. I see 25 years and six specialties, and a line at the top about helping people reach their potential. And I want to be really, really clear about something because I don’t want you beating yourself up, especially if you’re in the car. Diane got there honestly. She earned every bit of that. Every item on that list is true, and she earned some of them the hard way, and leaving any of it off feels almost like lying about who she is.

So she puts it all in, and the more she’s done, the longer the list gets, and the longer the list gets, the harder she is to pick. The woman with the most experience ends up the hardest to hire. That is just the bizarre and completely unfair thing, but it’s also just how it works.

Here’s what I want you to hear, though: the list isn’t wrong; it’s just in the wrong place. All of that range is exactly what makes you great. Once you’re in the room, when that turnover problem turns out to be a management problem, which turns out to be a strategy problem, and you can handle all three because you’ve seen all three, that’s when your 22 years pay off. They can’t just be the thing you lead with because nobody can pick the list.

So, what actually happened in those four seconds? Because if you understand it, you can stop taking it personally, and you can use it. Think about a casting room. Now, I’ve never personally been in a casting room, but I’ve watched enough television to know how this goes. The director’s not sitting there asking, “Who’s the finest actor in this city?” The part was written months ago. She already knows she needs a tired detective in her 50s who’s funny when she doesn’t mean to be. So, 40 talented people walk through that door, and she’s just asking one question about each of them: “Is this the part, or isn’t it?”

The woman with the Shakespeare training and the shelf of awards can be the best actor who walks in all day and still go home without the job because nobody could see her as the detective. Your buyer is that director. She wrote the part before she ever heard your name. The part is her problem, and she’s scanning for the person who plainly, obviously, is about that problem, and that means the order is category first and credentials second.

She decides what you’re all about, what you’re for, and only then does she go and look at your background, mostly to reassure herself that she chose well. Marisol’s eight years were plenty once you’ve already decided on Marisol. Diane’s 22 never even got looked at because she never got past the casting director.

If you were with me last week, we talked about the same thing about your rate, what you charge. One step earlier, your rate gets set before you even say the words, and this is a choice that gets made before anyone compares qualifications. They don’t hire the most qualified; they hire the easiest to cast.

Okay, so what do you do with this? You’re not going to get less experienced. I’m not going to tell you to do that. I’m not going to tell you to delete half of your career. I want you to lean into all those things you worked so hard for. What you are going to do is write one sentence.

Okay, the sentence answers a question that somebody is asking about you right now in a room you’re not in. What is she for? That’s a different question from what you’ve done, and it’s a very different question from what you could do if somebody asked nicely.

Marisol’s sentence was, “I fix first-year turnover at companies under 100 people.” So let me throw a couple more at you, so you can hear the shape of it. “I’m the fractional CFO for professional services firms that have outgrown their bookkeeper.” “I get family-owned manufacturers ready to sell.” Can you hear how those work? You know, in one breath, whether that’s you, whether that’s somebody you know.

And then once you’ve got a draft of your one sentence, I want you to run it through three checks.

• Check one: Does it name a person or company specific enough that somebody says, “Oh, that’s my sister-in-law?” Somebody knows exactly who they’re talking about.

• Check number two: Does it name the situation, the moment they’re in when they need you? “Outgrown their bookkeeper” is a situation. “Financial excellence” is a poster in a conference room. We don’t want that.

• All right, check number three, and this is the one that’s going to get you: Could the woman sitting next to you at a networking event say the exact same sentence about herself? If she could, it’s still a list wearing a nice outfit, and you need to go back to the drawing board.

Okay, now I already know what’s going to happen when you try this because it happens to every accomplished woman that I work with. You’re gonna write a paragraph. You’re gonna get three lines in and think, “But I can do this and I can’t leave that out.” When that happens, I don’t want you to decide you’re bad at this. The paragraph is the finding. You just located the exact reason you’re hard to cast, and anything you can locate, you can fix. So get it down to one sentence, even if it’s a messy, crappy one.

Okay, next week I’m going to show you how to go build that sentence properly out of what you already are and exactly where it goes. But for this week, clumsy, crappy is fine. All right. So here’s your homework, and it takes you less time than this episode took to listen to.

Before you rewrite a single word of your LinkedIn profile, find out what people are already saying. Pick three people who know your work, a past client, maybe a colleague, a friend who sent you business before, and text each of them this. And you can steal this word for word. It’s in the comments below as well, and the show notes:

“Quick question, no wrong answer. If someone asked you what I do, what would you tell them?”

And don’t help them. Don’t hint. Just read what comes back. You’re going to get one of three things. Maybe you’ll get your sentence or close to how you’d say it. In which case, woohoo! You’re closer than you thought. You might get three completely different answers, which tells you that you’re being cast in three completely different parts, and it’s all over the place. Or you’ll get the one I hear the most about: “Oh my gosh, you do so many things.” That one is meant as a compliment, and it’s Diane’s headline coming back to you in somebody else’s handwriting. But whatever you get, just keep it. Screenshot it. Write it down. Put it somewhere that you’ll find it.

The distance between what they said and the sentence you want them to say is your to-do list, and you’re going to want it in front of you when we come back to this next week. So let me pull this all together for you. You hired the woman with eight years over the woman with 22, and it took you four seconds. You referred her without thinking, and then you looked at your own headline and maybe recognized somebody. None of that means your experience doesn’t count. It means your experience has been doing a job that was never built for getting you picked. It’s very different than what your resume is telling about you. What’s going to get you picked?

And once you have that sentence, the next question is where to say it so it travels, and that’s the whole reason I teach Borrow the Stage. A clear sentence on your own profile is great, but a clear sentence said in front of an audience someone else has already built, on a podcast, or a panel, or a stage. This is how people who never heard of you start repeating it.

I walk you through exactly how that works in my free masterclass, and you can watch it whenever you want, whatever time works for you, it’s on demand. Go to karenyankovich.com/bts. That’s karenyankovich.com/bts. BTS is for behind the stage. karenyankovich.com/bts.

Remember what you learned in that chair today. They don’t hire the most qualified. They hire the easiest to cast. So this week, write the part down and then walk in like it was written for you. I’ll see you back here next week.