You are accomplished, reliable, and respected, and somehow still not in the room when the decision gets made.
Read the Room is about closing that gap: the distance between the work you have done and how the people who decide your next move actually see it.
Each episode, Laurie J. Wetzel sits down with the recruiters, hiring leaders, operators, and senior professionals who have been in the rooms where scope, promotions, and offers get decided. They give the honest version of how those calls really happen, and what separates the people who get chosen from the equally qualified people who get passed over.
Laurie spent 25 years in leadership at companies like Adobe, Slack, and Salesforce before becoming a career strategist. Her core message is direct: your value is being misinterpreted, not missing. This is the show where she and her guests make it readable.
Follow the show so the next conversation finds you.
Changing careers: how to make your experience count with Mike Spaeth
Most people describe their careers as a list of roles. The useful version is the line running through them. Mike Spaeth has moved across industries more than once, and each time he has had to explain how his experience fits somewhere new. In this conversation, we get into how he does that: what he looks for when a background does not map cleanly onto a job description, why the thing you find easy can be the thing worth naming, and what to do when the gap in your experience is the first thing ...
17 Sept 2026
The experience is there. It just isn't readable.
A client spent months reading job descriptions asking for five years of experience in a function he wanted to move into, and thinking he did not have it. He had close to 18 years of it, under a different title, in his own business, and no line of his record said so. This episode is about the space between those two things, and the order you have to fix them in. Everything starts in the same place: https://www.lauriejwetzel.com/start 00:00 The client who had 18 years and could not see it ...
9 Sept 2026
The trap is not that you are underperforming
Some people are too useful to promote. Not because they are underperforming, but because work flows toward competence, and the safest pair of hands keeps receiving the same kind of problem. This episode is about what that does to you in the rooms where your next move gets decided, and why the first move to change it is smaller and less satisfying than the one most people reach for. Go to lauriejwetzel.com/start Chapters 0:00 The person you put on the hard account 0:31 Work flows t...
1 Sept 2026
Nobody ever looks back
A client once told me that nobody at her company would ever go back and look at what she had actually done. She said it the way you would say it is going to rain. She was right, and most career advice is built on pretending she is not. The story you have been told is that good work gets noticed, that if you deliver consistently at a high level the system eventually catches up to you. It is not a matter of time. It is a matter of whether there is a record, and whether that record is somewhere ...
23 Aug 2026
Why senior roles never get posted, with Mike Materasso
"I have never read a cover letter. Not once." Mike Materasso has spent more than 15 years deciding who gets hired at Amazon, Slack, Brex, and Alpine Investors. He is not being dismissive. He is describing arithmetic: 8,000 applicants filter down to about 700, and he has roughly 20 seconds per resume to decide whether to read further. Which is the thing worth sitting with. It is not whether you are good. It is whether what you are can be read quickly, by someone who is not going to work hard...
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