Over a thousand questions came in from the audience. Six recruiters came back. And within the first few minutes, Tom Scott, said what a lot of people in the industry are quietly thinking: we talk about it every single day, and it would be really nice not to for an hour. And so the panel voted to ban AI from the conversation.

What followed was one of the most honest conversations this show has produced, about what the hiring market actually feels like right now, about money and how to talk about it, about nonlinear paths and how to make them work for you rather than against you, and about what it costs, personally and professionally, to do this job well. The panel is blunt, warm, occasionally funny, and very much on your side. Even when they're telling you something you might not want to hear.

Full panel: Laura Baker, Meg Rye, Erica Fortgang, Same Gale, Tom Scott and Toby Thwaites

If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them.

Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes.

Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com and book a call.

I’d genuinely love to hear from you.Want to support Awaiting Approval?

Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show.

And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp

Maria Nicholas grew up between continents, between cultures, and between disciplines, and has spent her career making that range work for her rather than against her. She came into UX from advertising and brand design, learned to code in a three-month bootcamp where she didn’t see the sun, and built her leadership philosophy around a simple idea: a good designer facilitates great decisions out of other people, they don’t arrive with all the answers. She is also, quietly and on her own time, the guardian of her father’s musical legacy, a project that took ten years and ended in a 508-page bilingual book she researched, designed, translated, and published entirely herself.

This is a conversation about what it means to be in genuine service to others, to your users, your team, your collaborators, and the people whose stories you carry forward when they are no longer here to tell them. We talk about the difference between starting from yes and starting from no, and why yes, though is the more honest and more useful place to live. We talk about what AI can and cannot touch, about the heart skills that remain stubbornly, beautifully human, and about what it means to draw your own lines rather than waiting for someone else to draw them for you. Maria’s mother said it best, and it is worth hearing directly.

If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes.

Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com and book a call.

I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

Want to support Awaiting Approval?

Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show.

And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp

Martina Hodges-Schell has spent thirty years moving through design, from advertising in Germany at the dawn of the web, through Amazon and Yahoo in their early mobile years, to pioneering UX consultancies and a six-year run helping organisations build genuinely collaborative product teams. She is also an equine coach, working with horses as unfiltered mirrors for how leaders actually show up, beneath whatever they intend to project. It is an unusual range, and it turns out to be exactly the point.

This conversation moves between the very grounded and the genuinely surprising. We talk about what a horse can teach a leader that a coaching conversation over coffee cannot, about the boulder you cannot see around until years later when the fog finally clears, and about what it actually means to be a recovering perfectionist when your entire career has rewarded exactly that instinct. Martina has a particular gift for naming the gap between what organisations say they want from uncertainty and what they actually do to squeeze it out of every process. By the end, you understand why she thinks of uncertainty not as a problem to solve but as the material she works with.

If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes.

Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com and book a call.

I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

Want to support Awaiting Approval?

Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show.

And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp