Build a Career That Speaks Before You Do

HEALTHCARE LEADERSHIP REVIEW™ | ISSUE NO. 002

By Julia Weingartner
Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Healthcare Leadership Review™

Not because I had stopped growing. Not because I had become complacent. And certainly not because résumés no longer mattered.

I simply did not need mine in the same way anymore.

Hear me out.

Early in my career, I always kept an updated résumé and LinkedIn profile. My first boss gave me a piece of advice that stayed with me: keep track of every project you complete. So I did. As I took on new assignments, learned new skills, and produced new results, I documented them. Each experience became another line on my résumé and another part of the story I could tell about my career.

Then, at some point, something shifted.

My track record began speaking before I entered the room. My network knew what I could do. Former colleagues, clients, and leaders could speak to the quality of my work. Opportunities increasingly came through relationships, referrals, and reputation rather than applications.

That did not happen because I found the perfect résumé template. It did not happen because I memorized the perfect answers to the most common interview questions. It happened because, early in my career, I said yes—a lot.

Early in your career, say yes to as many meaningful opportunities as you can.

Yes, I would love to cross-train with the sales department.

Yes, I am interested in learning about marketing and branding.

Yes, I will write a newsletter profiling a rising star.

Yes, I will take on the celebrity client, even though I am new and have no experience in the entertainment industry.

Yes, I will work with the global client that is struggling to find someone who understands the cultural nuances of the role.

Yes, I will present in front of new hires, even though I hate speaking in front of groups.

Most of these opportunities had little to do with my formal education or previous experience. That was precisely why they mattered.

Every yes stretched my range. Together, those experiences gave me capabilities I could not have predicted I would need: business development, sourcing, client management, market analysis, public speaking, cultural intelligence, writing, marketing, and personal branding.

Saying yes did not mean agreeing to everything without boundaries or discernment. It meant recognizing when an opportunity could expand me—and refusing to let inexperience make the decision on my behalf.

I did not always know how I would do the thing when I accepted it. I trusted that I could learn.

That trust became one of the most important forms of interview preparation I ever had.

Saying yes was only part of the strategy. I also learned to follow the market.

When the pandemic transformed recruiting, I knew the approaches that had worked when I entered the industry in 2014 would no longer be enough. The market had changed. Talent was harder to find, harder to reach, and often reconsidering what work meant altogether. I sharpened my sourcing skills because the moment required it.

When I stepped into a staffing role with heavy business-development and market-insight responsibilities, I responded by studying trends, following the data, and writing articles. I wanted to understand not only where the market was, but where it was going.

And when I realized how important marketing and branding were to recruiting, I became more intentional about how I showed up.

Recruiting is not only about identifying qualified people. It is also about trust. If you can build a reputation as someone people genuinely want to work with, it becomes much easier to recruit on behalf of the people and organizations you represent. You are no longer simply filling a position. You are inviting someone into a relationship, and your credibility becomes part of the offer.

Following the market taught me not to define myself too narrowly by a title. A job description tells you what the role requires today. The market gives you clues about what you will need tomorrow.

The opportunities mattered, but so did the way I entered them. I showed up to nearly every new challenge headfirst, carrying four qualities with me.

1. Authenticity and transparency

I never wanted to win an opportunity by pretending to be someone I was not.

If I lacked experience, I was honest about it. If I did not know something, I said so—and then explained how I would learn it. I trusted that the right employer, client, or leader would value self-awareness, integrity, and potential more than a perfectly polished performance.

Being myself closed nearly every interview I had.

I take enormous pride in that because authenticity is deeply important to me. I want to work in environments where I can be fully myself and where other people are given that same freedom. No one should have to flatten their personality, hide their perspective, or erase the nuances of who they are to be seen as capable.

Authenticity does not mean arriving unprepared. Transparency does not mean disclosing every detail of your life. It means that the person in the interview is the same person who will arrive to do the work.

2. Curiosity coupled with a hunger for challenges

I did not need to enter every opportunity already knowing exactly what to do. I needed to be willing to ask thoughtful questions, understand the real problem, and figure out what the situation required.

The assignments that interested me most were often the ones that made me wonder, Can I actually do this?

Curiosity helped me learn. Challenge gave that curiosity somewhere to go.

Over time, I stopped seeing a lack of familiarity as proof that I did not belong. I began to see it as an invitation to expand.

3. Sheer enthusiasm and positivity

I brought genuine enthusiasm to the possibility of doing meaningful work, learning something unfamiliar, and contributing wherever I could.

Not performative enthusiasm. Not the kind of positivity that denies difficulty or insists that every situation is perfect. I mean the kind of energy that says: this may be hard, but there is something here worth attempting—and I am excited to see what we can make of it.

4. The willingness to be taught

Being teachable requires a particular kind of confidence: enough self-awareness to know your weaker areas, enough conviction to know where you are strong, and enough humility to understand that neither is permanent.

I was never afraid to say, “I don’t know—but teach me. I want to know.”

That sentence did not make me less capable. It showed that I was honest about the limits of my knowledge and serious about expanding them. Pretending to know everything might protect your ego for a moment, but it prevents the very growth that could change your career.

Knowing your strengths matters because you should understand the value you already bring. Knowing your weaker areas matters because self-awareness keeps you from confusing confidence with completeness. Being teachable connects the two. It allows you to contribute from where you are strong while remaining open to what someone else can show you.

The people who taught me did more than help me complete an assignment. They expanded the way I thought, and their lessons became resources I carried into every role that followed.

Those four qualities became my interview strategy long before I realized I had one.

I did not enter interviews trying to deliver a flawless performance. I entered ready to have an honest conversation about what I had done, what I was still learning, what energized me, and how I could help.

I never aced interviews by becoming the person I thought they wanted. I aced them by becoming more confident in the value of who I already was.

Of course, authenticity may help close an interview, but it cannot do the work for you. Once I had the job, four things mattered most.

1. Solving problems no one thought to solve

I did not want to wait for someone to identify every problem and hand me a set of instructions. I learned to look beneath the obvious assignment and ask better questions.

What are we missing? Where are people getting stuck? What have we accepted as normal simply because no one has stopped to challenge it?

I genuinely enjoyed difficult assignments. Challenges gave me an opportunity to think differently, test my abilities, and create value beyond the boundaries of my job description. Some of my most important contributions came from recognizing a problem before anyone formally asked me to solve it.

2. Cross-collaborating like my career depended on it

Because, in many ways, it did.

The best results rarely belonged to one person or one department. They came from people across recruiting, sales, marketing, operations, leadership, and client services sharing information and working toward a unified mission.

Cross-collaboration taught me that protecting your small piece of the work can limit the larger result. When people understand the mission, share what they know, and see how their responsibilities connect, the work becomes more cohesive—and far more effective.

For me, collaboration was never networking for the sake of visibility. It was about building enough trust to solve problems together.

3. Being resourceful

Resourcefulness became one of the most valuable abilities I carried from role to role.

Sometimes it meant drawing on knowledge, relationships, or experiences I had developed in previous jobs. Sometimes it meant knowing exactly who to call. Other times, there was no ready-made answer and no expert waiting in my back pocket. All I had was the determination to investigate, experiment, and figure it out.

I learned that not having the answer is rarely the real limitation. The greater limitation is believing you cannot move forward until someone gives it to you.

Resourcefulness is the ability to look at what you have—even when it seems insufficient—and create momentum from it.

4. Celebrating the small wins

This may sound less consequential than solving a major problem or landing a major client, but celebrating small wins had an impact far greater than most people realize.

A difficult market can make even talented teams question whether their work is making a difference. Recognizing progress—a promising conversation, a creative solution, a breakthrough with a client, or simply a teammate who refused to give up—reminded everyone that we were still moving.

Celebration was not about lowering the standard or pretending the larger challenge had disappeared. It was about protecting the team’s energy long enough to meet that challenge.

There is an important difference between a team fighting itself and a team fighting the problem together.

During the hardest seasons, I wanted the dynamic to be us against the market, not me against you. Celebrating small wins reinforced that unity. It reminded us that we shared the challenge, the mission, and ultimately the result.

By the time I entered an interview, I was not searching for adjectives to describe myself. I had experiences that demonstrated who I was.

I could talk about the problems I had solved, the teams I had brought together, the resources I had found, the markets I had adapted to, and the momentum I had helped create when conditions were working against us.

That is the difference between telling someone you are capable and giving them evidence they can believe.

Yes, prepare for the interview. Research the company. Understand the role. Know your numbers, your projects, and your results. Practice explaining your experiences clearly. Keep track of what you accomplish—my first boss was absolutely right about that.

But do not confuse rehearsing with becoming.

The strongest interview answers are not manufactured the night before. They are collected over the course of a career. They are built every time you accept an opportunity that stretches you, learn a skill the market is beginning to demand, solve a problem that was not neatly assigned to you, collaborate across a boundary, use what you have to create what you need, or help a team remember that progress still counts.

Your résumé should document that story. Your interview should bring it to life. Your reputation should confirm it after you leave the room.

There may come a point when your track record and network begin doing much of the talking for you. That is a privilege, but it is not an accident. It is the compounded result of your work, your relationships, your willingness to evolve, and the way you made people feel while doing difficult things together.

The goal is not to become someone who never needs a résumé.

The goal is to build a career too rich to be contained by one.

The Takeaway

You begin preparing for your next interview long before you know it has been scheduled. Every meaningful opportunity you accept, unfamiliar skill you learn, difficult problem you solve, relationship you nurture, and small win you celebrate becomes part of the evidence you will one day bring into the room.

Say yes before you feel completely ready. Follow the market beyond the boundaries of your job description. Know your strengths, be honest about your weaker areas, and remain teachable enough to say, “I don’t know—but teach me. I want to know.” Lead with authenticity, curiosity, enthusiasm, and the willingness to figure things out.

Then let your work support your words.

The goal of an interview is not to perform the version of yourself you believe someone else wants. It is to communicate, with clarity and evidence, the value of the person and professional you have already worked to become.