Kate Sargent once managed 300 people across retail stores and was told she lacked the skills for an entry-level corporate job. The problem was never her experience; it was her language. Field retail, corporate retail, and the executive suite each speak a different dialect, and no amount of competence survives translation failure. Two decades later, she coaches C-suite executives through the same problem at higher stakes, and her diagnosis of the current market should reorganize how every marketing leader thinks about their own career.

Kate, an executive coach and recruiter who runs KJS Coaching and Consulting, joined Peter Farago, a high-tech marketing executive in the Bay Area, on a recent episode of Misadventures in Marketing, the AMA San Francisco podcast. After 23 years in talent, 16 of them in recruiting, she called this the strangest market she has ever seen, and she has the receipts: her team has worked with 1,600 job seekers over the past two years, including a free resume workshop that drew more than a hundred laid-off Block employees.

Career positioning is a language problem

Kate’s core insight applies equally to products and people, which is why marketers should take it personally. “If you don’t have the language to talk about it, it doesn’t matter how good you are at something,” she said. “You’re not going to get the chance.” Career positioning, in her practice, is a translation exercise: taking real capability and rendering it in the dialect the buyer, in this case a hiring manager, actually speaks. She learned it the hard way at Macy’s and Steve Madden, and she now teaches it through a framework she calls I to We to Company. Talk about what you did, how you enabled a team, and what impact the company saw. Miss the first and you look weak, miss the second and you look arrogant, miss the third and you look like you never understood the business.

Peter drew the parallel out loud: recruiting is the intersection of sales and marketing for people. Employer brand, ideal customer profiles, positioning, and the pitch all transfer. The difference is that most marketers, brilliant at positioning products, go mute when the product is themselves. Kate’s straightforward explanation is that nobody perceives themselves objectively, which is why she insists everyone needs a coach, paid or not, to reflect their own story back at them.

This market really is different

Previous downturns meant competing against more people for fewer jobs. This one adds an existential layer on top. Candidates now ask whether their role will exist next quarter, and whether the AI they’re asked to master will eventually absorb the job entirely. Meanwhile a structural squeeze is underway that Kate sees across her searches: companies are cutting expensive executives, automating junior work with AI, and compressing strategy, execution, and technology management into single director-level roles held by people who never received foundational leadership training. They’re failing, predictably, and fractional leaders are being hired to backfill the gap.

Her forecast is specific enough to plan around. “The future is AI plus part-time work.” In her view, the winners will be operators who can deliver high-level strategic work in 20 hours instead of 40 while managing both technology and people. Her corollary advice lands hardest for anyone below the director level: start building a consulting or advisory practice on the side now, even if you never activate it, because it’s the only real layoff insurance left.

For marketers specifically, Kate’s advice was ruthless. At one point last year she was coaching eight marketing VPs and CMOs simultaneously, all tripping over the same four openings, and she began telling them to take the words brand marketing off their profiles entirely. Lead with go-to-market, performance, and revenue generation. A marketer who reads as a cost center gets cut in every downturn, and a candidate who reads as a cost center never gets the interview.

The math of being known

The episode’s most practical material was networking arithmetic. Kate cites the figure that roughly 81 percent of jobs are landed through networking, and she has restructured her advice around where those wins actually come from. Segment your connections into three groups: the A-team who already love you, the gatekeepers who hold the jobs, and the casual crew of loose connections from years past. Then spend 25 percent of your effort on the first group, 25 on the second, and a full 50 percent on the loose ties, because the people who don’t yet know you’re looking are the ones who convert. Peter connected the practice to Mark Granovetter’s 1973 research on the strength of weak ties, one of the founding pillars of network science. The tactic isn’t folk wisdom, it’s fifty years of evidence.

For the networking-averse, her playbook is mercifully concrete. Find a partner and go in groups. Run every call through a structure: trade two-minute stories, share what you’re each working on, ask how you can help before asking for anything, and leave with an introduction to someone new. Reciprocity dissolves the shame that makes senior people avoid asking for help at exactly the moment they need it most.

Kate built her business on what she calls aggressive kindness, being direct now so the person doesn’t get hurt later. The market is currently administering the aggressive part on its own, without the kindness. Professionals who come through it well will be the ones who did for their careers what they’ve always done for their products: chose an audience, learned its language, and made themselves impossible to misread.

Listen to the full podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Check out summaries from other episodes:

• The Marketing Playbook Is Dead. The Job Is the Playbook Now
• GEO, Dark Funnel, Prompt Slop: An AI Marketing Fluency Check
• What AI can’t replace on a marketing team and what should you outsource to AI

Misadventures in Marketing is a weekly podcast by the AMA San Francisco chapter. Veteran Silicon Valley marketing execs Peter Farago and Steve Haney explore the messy, rewarding, and occasionally absurd world of high-tech marketing  –  especially in early-stage startups. Each episode covers real-world challenges, trends, and lessons from the front lines.