Career Briefs: Your Best Differentiator

Lenny100, LinkedIn Privacy, Channeling Dolly, Guide to Supporting Women Returning to Work, Rise of the Chief of Staff Role... and more!

Author

Sarah Johnston
September 11, 2026

Dear Reader:

Since the passing of the iconic, inimitable Dolly Parton, I’ve seen companies host Dolly Days, a Dolly-themed cake from Duncan Hines, and social media hearts turn into butterflies on Threads. Dolly was near-universally liked because she was authentic. She had no time for being made to feel small. She stood up for people of diverse backgrounds. Her distinct brand never wavered.

Do we all need to be a little more Dolly in the career advancement space?

I say, yes.

The themes of job searching in 2026 are not all Dolly’s sparkles and joy. AI is impacting all sides of the recruitment process, frustrating employers and job seekers alike. Candidates are being ghosted, while bots can apply to jobs for you, meaning employers are flooded with resumes. On top of it all, the economy is tough and hiring is slow.

What helps a candidate stand out? Being unabashedly yourself in your career documents. I always say, “different is better than better.”

Channel Dolly. Staying true to you may be the best differentiator right now.

As always, I am rooting for you,

Sarah

Ps. Career Briefs usually hits inboxes on Wednesdays, but the holiday weekend threw off my week. I hope this one finds you at just the right time. Give it five minutes—you might find the career jolt you didn’t know you needed.

Table of Contents

The $400,000 Chief of Staff Is the CEO’s Secret Weapon in the AI Age

Around 2017 or 2018, I started hearing the job title “Chief of Staff,” and honestly, I thought it was just a rebrand of the executive assistant role designed to attract a different talent pool.

Fast-forward to today, and Chief of Staff is the second-most-popular resume target my team sees.

And I’m clearly not the only one who has noticed the rise. Job postings for Chief of Staff roles more than doubled last year, according to Revelio Labs, with compensation that can reach $400,000.

The role is attractive for good reason. Some people describe Chief of Staff as a career springboard: you work closely with senior leaders, get exposure to strategic decisions, and have the opportunity to influence leaders across the organization.

I’ve seen that firsthand.

But I’ve also seen the other side of it: Chief of Staff can be surprisingly difficult to transition out of.

One reason is structural. In many organizations, the Chief of Staff doesn’t own a P&L or directly manage a large team. You can have tremendous influence without having the traditional markers of organizational authority that make your next move obvious.

And if you don’t have a strong C-suite advocate who can articulate the value of what you actually did in the role, it can be difficult to translate that experience into your next leadership position.

That doesn’t mean Chief of Staff is a dead-end. Far from it.

It means you need to be intentional about what you are building while you are in the role—and how you will tell that story when you’re ready to leave it.

How to Reduce Workplace Conflicts

We like to remind clients that while we focus on results and achievements in a resume, hiring decisions often stem from who that person is at their core and how they show up for teams – in other words, their emotional intelligence plays a large role.

In a world where opinions have become more extreme and polarized, and people are facing real stresses around the cost of living, conflicts abroad, and expectations to either maximize or outperform AI, it’s no wonder that workplaces need leaders who can de-escalate conflict.

In the article referenced below, Human Resources Director’s Leah Mether shares her insights on how leaders can resolve employee conflicts.

While you may know how to reduce tension for others, are you taking care of you? This Inc. article encourages executives to breathe. Literally.

Further Reading:

Guide To Supporting Female Partner’s Return to Work

I'm in a season of life when many of my contemporaries are returning to work after a decade of staying home with their young children.

I've become a sounding board for many of these (mostly) women as they have been navigating their job search.

One common theme is that well-meaning spouses don't know how to help.

They want to be supportive. They want to fix things. They want to offer advice. But a job search after years away from the workforce is complicated, emotional, and often unfamiliar territory. What feels like helpful advice from a spouse can sometimes land as pressure, frustration, or one more thing the job seeker feels like she’s doing wrong.

My friend Claude and I created a guide to help the spouse of the woman returning to work. The content is mine; Claude did the graphic design.

Please don’t shoot the messenger. 😊 I have plenty of friends and clients who are stay-at-home dads or married to stay-at-home dads, and almost everything in my guide applies to a SAHD, too. However, I believe that content can't—and shouldn't—be all things to all people. I chose to focus on women because that's the audience I know particularly well and where I have the deepest expertise and perspective. I think there's value in being specific rather than trying to make every piece of content universally applicable.

Click the link below to download my free 13-page workbook.

Do LinkedIn Open To Work Posts Actually Work?

"Dear Sarah: I was recently laid off and have started using LinkedIn again for the first time in ages. I keep seeing Open to Work posts. Do these actually help people land jobs?"

Long answer short: Kind of.

I think many job seekers fantasize about writing a post that goes viral, gets thousands of views, and ends with a phone call with a job offer.

And yes, this happens.
But it’s really, really rare.

On the flip side, many job seekers have great anxiety about posting that they are looking for a job because they fear what other people will think. "They are going to assume I got fired" or "I was just job searching last year. Even though the company did a massive workforce reduction, my network will assume I can't maintain a job."

Job loss can feel incredibly personal, even when the circumstances have absolutely nothing to do with your performance.

But here’s the thing:
Give your network the benefit of the doubt.

The more realistic outcome of an "Open to Work" post is that it increases your profile visibility and gives you an opportunity to connect or reconnect with your network.

A good outcome from posting is having 5-6 people comment, "Let me know how I can help" or "Let's do coffee soon." TAKE ALL OF THESE PEOPLE UP ON THEIR OFFERS.

Your goal isn’t to go viral.

Your goal is to make it easy for the right people to understand what you do, what you’re looking for, and how they can help.

And honestly?
The best job-search post may only get 1,500 views—but if one of those 1,500 people happens to be the person who knows your next boss, that’s a pretty good post.

Article: Here’s my high-performing open-to-work post that you can put to work right away!

LinkedIn Privacy Settings are Yours to Control

Some of our clients want to search for jobs without alerting peers and managers to their intentions. Just recently, a client made changes to his LinkedIn only for his boss to ask why that same day. There are some workarounds here.

While you can’t fully silence your LinkedIn profile, this article shares privacy settings that can keep your job search on the down low and how to adjust them.

The Lenny 100

I love lists and I think they can be an absolute gold mine for job seekers looking to build out a target company list for their job search. Lenny Rachitsky, of the massively popular newsletter Lenny’s Newsletter, created a list of the top 100 companies that he would want to join if he were looking for a job today.

Take peek at the list—- it’s got some very cool up-and-coming companies on it along with some old favorites.

Article: Lenny’s 100

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