About Jen Shryock and her methods

Why capable professionals still get missed

Most of the professionals I work with are not starting from scratch.

• They have experience.
• They have judgment.
• They have done meaningful work.
• They have solved hard problems, led through complexity, built teams, improved systems, grown revenue, protected organizations, served clients, created structure, or carried responsibility that was not always visible from the outside.

And still, the job market may not be responding the way their background should warrant.

This can look like:

• Getting considered for roles below their level.
• Applying steadily but not getting the right interviews.
• Recruiter conversations that start and then go quiet.
• A network that is willing to help, but the conversations do not turn into real opportunity.
• Being underpaid, under-leveled, undervalued, overworked, or successful in a role that no longer fits the life they are trying to build.

It almost never means they need more experience.

More often, their experience is not being interpreted clearly enough.

At a higher level, hiring teams are not only asking whether you can perform a list of duties. They are trying to understand your judgment, scope, leadership, business relevance, strategic fit, and the problems they can trust you to own.

At your level, a job search has to do more.

• Your resume may be accurate and still not be clear enough.
• Your LinkedIn profile may be polished and still not show the level at which you operate.
• Your conversations may feel encouraging and still not help the right opportunity take shape.
• Your interview answers may be honest and still not carry the weight of the responsibility behind them.

Sending more resumes is not always the answer, and applying to a larger variety of roles never is.

The stronger move is to:

• Clarify what you are aiming for.
• Sharpen how your value is understood.
• Focus your effort where it is most likely to create meaningful movement.

What 17 years of coaching and positioning work taught me

I started Rainmaker Resumes in 2008, right in the middle of the Great Recession.

A strong executive resume made my clients highly competitive for the few roles that were actually posted. But a document cannot manufacture job openings.

I saw very quickly that companies are always hiring — even in a frozen market — if a candidate’s value is clear and the return on investment is secure.

But proving that value took more than a polished work history.

It took strategy.

Within the first year, the conversation stopped being only about documents. I was coaching clients through interviews, career decisions, compensation conversations, and the larger question underneath many career transitions:

What do you actually want this next move to make possible?

Over time, the same deeper questions kept showing up:

• What direction actually fits now?
• How is this person’s experience being interpreted?
• What level makes sense?
• What is getting lost in translation?
• What conversations would create better information, access, or opportunity?
• What decisions are being made from strategy — and which are being made from fear, fatigue, or too much conflicting advice?

The resume mattered.

But it was rarely the whole problem.

A resume is only one piece of a job search — and a job is only one piece of a life.

What I kept seeing was a fuller picture: direction, positioning, conversations, interviews, compensation, fit, confidence, and decision-making were all connected.

The Job Search Six, aka The Six, was built to bring those pieces into one coherent strategy.

It brings together the strategic precision of executive resume writing, the judgment and steadiness of coaching, and a practical framework for moving through the job market with more clarity, focus, and leverage.

Today, I am a Master Certified Coach and Executive Resume Writer, with 17+ years in career advancement and 850+ professionals supported through strategic career transitions.

What The Six brings together

The Six sits at the intersection of coaching, positioning, and practical job search strategy.

That means we look at the whole picture.

• Not just the resume.
• Not just the job postings.
• Not just the interview.
• Not just the offer.
• Not just the emotions that come with making a high-stakes move.

All of those things matter.

• Your direction shapes your materials.
• Your materials shape how people read your background.
• Your positioning shapes which conversations are easier to start — and how much weight they carry once they happen.
• Your interviews shape trust.
• Your offers shape your choices.
• Your choices shape the life you are building.

When they work together, you have a clearer way to move.

When those pieces are disconnected, the process feels heavier than it has to.

The Six is designed to make it lighter.

My clients include established individual contributors, senior managers, directors, heads, VPs, executives, and other experienced professionals moving through significant career decisions.

They have made stronger-fit moves across corporate, nonprofit, government, technology, finance, operations, healthcare, communications, strategy, leadership, and more.

What I believe about better career moves

Direction gives every part of a career move a clear center.

The clearer the direction, the easier it becomes for your resume, LinkedIn profile, conversations, interviews, and decisions to work together.

Positioning is strategy, not packaging.

Your materials and messaging are not there to decorate your background. Their job is to help decision-makers understand your relevance, level, leadership value, and fit quickly and accurately.

A busy job search is not the same as an effective one.

Common advice says to treat your job search like a full-time job. But treating the search like a volume game — applying to hundreds of postings, customizing your resume for every role, refreshing job boards until you are overwhelmed — feels productive.

But it is just churn.

Motion without traction is exhaustion. A strategic search is about knowing what you are looking for so you can ignore the noise, step out of the competition everyone else is playing, and focus on the few conversations that actually lead to decisions.

Compensation is part of fit.

At this stage, compensation is not a vanity metric. It is one signal of whether a role reflects your level, contribution, responsibility, and life stage.

Work-life balance is a skill, not a lottery ticket.

When you are exhausted by your current role — or by the search itself — finding a position that doesn’t consume your life looks like luck.

It isn’t.

It is the result of knowing what you actually want, building the strategy to find the right-fit opportunities, asking the right people the hard questions to validate the culture, and holding the boundaries required to protect your time.

The right next move is not only about title or salary. It also needs to account for energy, flexibility, family logistics, workload, and the kind of contribution you want to make next.

You don’t just stumble into a role that supports your life. You design it first, and then you build a search that demands it.

What clearer direction and stronger positioning can make possible

The details are different for every client.

For some, this process untangles the overwhelm of trying to keep every option open, and replaces it with a focused strategy that actually increases their leverage in the roles they want most.

For some, it translates a complex, non-linear career so a hiring team immediately sees their strategic value, rather than getting confused by their timeline and the multiple executive hats they’ve worn.

For some, it changes the caliber of the response — turning polite networking into active referrals, and ensuring that when they do interview, the conversation is about the leadership they bring, not just the tasks they’ve managed.

For some, it provides the clarity to stop compromising out of search fatigue, and start evaluating offers based on what will actually support the life they are trying to build.

For many clients, this work leads to better compensation, stronger scope, a more aligned role, or more than one viable path forward.

Those are different stories, but the underlying pattern is the same:

• Clearer direction.
• Stronger positioning.
• Better conversations.
• Stronger decisions.

Not because the job seeker became someone else.

Because the value was already there — and the work helped make it easier for the right people to understand and act on.