Productivi-Tree: The Human Side of Productivity

Summary

You are using AI to tailor every resume, and you are still hearing nothing back.

Carrie Christiano spent two decades recruiting at companies including IBM and LexisNexis before she started coaching the people whose applications she used to screen. Her position is that AI does not fix a weak job search; it scales it. Paste the posting, paste the resume, ask for a tailored version, and you have automated the least valuable step in the process.

In this episode, she shows what the valuable use looks like. Ask AI why the role is actually open at that company before you write a word. Use open questions instead of stacked constraints, because over-prompting turns the model into a compliant writer and gives you the same flat summary everyone else is submitting. Then use what you learn to get into the conversations that happen before a job is ever posted, which is where, as Carrie says, half the hires are decided.

You will leave with the one prompt she gives every job seeker, a five-step sequence for reaching decision makers cold, the two questions every recruiter is silently asking about you, and the numbers on how AI is reshaping the roles you are applying for.

If AI has made your search faster but not effective, start here.

Key Takeaways

- AI amplifies your strategy, good or bad, so the strategy has to come first
- Before tailoring a resume, ask AI to research the company and explain why the role is open
- Over-constrained prompts produce canned writing, open questions produce usable material
- Every AI-written resume summary sounds the same, which makes yours forgettable rather than disqualified
- Half the time the hiring decision is made before the job is posted, because a referral triggered the requisition
- Recruiters are asking two things: can we afford you, and will you leave
- 76% of employees now use AI at work, and AI-skilled workers command a 56% wage premium

Chapters

0:00 What being stuck in a job search actually looks like
2:13 Why sending more applications gets you fewer interviews
4:21 How ATS and AI screening really filter your resume
6:00 What a recruiter does with a stack of 100 applicants
7:26 The hidden job market, explained
8:43 Cold outreach versus warm introductions
10:40 What a strong pitch looks like next to a weak one
12:14 Where AI belongs in research and networking
13:37 The most dangerous way job seekers are using AI
15:46 Using AI without losing your own voice
17:30 The open question that beats an hour of prompt engineering
18:58 Does AI-sounding resume language work against you?
20:00 The two questions every recruiter asks themselves
21:57 The EMPOWER method, in Carrie's words
23:55 Do you need to become an AI expert to stay employable?
24:59 The numbers: 76% using AI at work, 170M new roles coming
27:26 How to prove you can contribute instead of claiming it
30:13 Confidence, humility and the imposter syndrome trap
31:17 Should you prepare before you get laid off?
33:54 Quickfire round
39:01 Where to find Carrie and her book

Guest Links

- Website: https://empowercareerstudio.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carriechristiano/
- Book: EMPOWER Your Job Search with AI — https://www.amazon.com/EMPOWER-Your-Job-Search-Future-Ready-ebook/dp/B0GYBKPJ8H
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
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Jason P. Carroll grew Champion National Security to 2,500 employees, sold it at the end of 2020, and then woke up with no role, no team, and no clear purpose. The same period brought a lockdown, the loss of a community he had belonged to for a decade, and the end of his first marriage. He used those two years to rebuild and then founded Aptive Index, a behavioral assessment company that measures conative traits: the innate drives that shape how you act at work.

In this episode, Jason explains why personality shifts with context and mood while your drives stay stable from your preteens onward. He shows how one drive, the need to shape outcomes, made him steamroll his own executive team, and why asking "why do I do this?" pushed him toward shame instead of change. He also explains the difference between sociability and prosocial behavior, why the loudest voice in a meeting is not the most productive one, and why people who stretch too far from their wiring for too long burn out faster.

You will leave with a better question to ask when a behavior is hurting your team, a way to think about role fit that doesn't end in firing anyone, and a clear view of when your strengths need to be turned down so others can contribute.

Jason is the founder and CEO of Aptive Index and trained under Dr. Brené Brown. Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonpcarroll/

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Key Takeaways

1. Personality changes with the room you are in, your sleep, and your season of Life. Conative drives stay stable, making them a better basis for decisions about roles and teams.
2. Knowing a bad behavior is only a data point. Jason changed when he saw its impact: his team felt he did not value their input.
3. Swap "why do I do this?" for "what is driving this behavior?" The first question tends to elicit identity statements such as "I am a bad leader." The second point points you to a need you can meet in a healthier way.
4. Sociability (warm, animated, outgoing) and prosociality (seeking consensus and the best ideas from the group) are separate traits. The loudest voice often wins the room without contributing more.
5. A team made only of people who want to be in charge cannot resolve conflict. Blended wiring brings more perspectives into every project.
6. People can succeed in roles that do not fit their wiring, but they burn out faster. The fix can be a change in position or simply resetting the leader's expectations.
7. Jason's message to his 30-year-old self: weakness was not derailing him. His strengths were cranked up too loud.

Chapters

0:00 Intro
0:12 Two years that rebuilt Jason's Life
3:58 Selling the company and losing his purpose
6:25 Why he bet on behavioral science
8:53 Why he didn't retire after the exit
10:45 What "conative" means and why it beats personality
13:16 How hardwired drives predict the way people work
15:15 What the data shows inside companies
18:27 Why asking "why" hurts self-awareness
22:12 Prosocial vs sociability and the myth of alpha teams
26:03 When your wiring doesn't match your role
29:10 How to find your conative profile
30:49 From a toxic first job to a culture that works
33:12 Quickfire round
38:07 How to connect with Jason
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
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Nearly all productivity advice assumes you get to keep what you build. Scherrie L. Prince spends her working Life proving that assumption wrong.
She is a trial attorney, a JD MBA, managing partner of Prince & Associates PLLC, and host of the Play Big Faster Podcast, now past 252 episodes. She got here the hard way: a probate fight after her mother died, a business built on a handshake that fell apart, and a mortgage brokerage wiped out in 2008. Those three losses sent her to law school and into asset protection.
In this episode, she gives Santi the framework she uses with entrepreneurs. Four questions to answer before you even think about an LLC or a corporation. Why your estate plan and your business plan cannot live in separate drawers. What "own nothing, control everything" really means, and why nobody is fully judgment-proof. Then the productivity half: how she runs a law firm, a coaching practice, and a twice-weekly podcast, all based on one rule she got from a commercial real estate broker: plan your fun first.
She also tells the story of the AI mistake that made it into her court filings and what she changed afterward. If you have been growing something without protecting it, this conversation is the audit you have been putting off.

Key takeaways
Answer four questions before you pick a structure: do you have a will-centered or trust-centered estate plan, is the business product, service, or hybrid, is it physical, virtual, or e-commerce, and do you need anonymity or are you public-facing? Structure comes after, not before.
An exit is not a failure. It can be a sale, a retirement, a handover to the next generation, or a reorganisation. Deciding which one you want changes what you build today.
A trust does not stop anyone suing you. It organises what you own and builds a moat around it. Nobody is 100 percent judgment proof, and any adviser who claims otherwise is selling something.
Insurance is not only about dying. Disability and incapacity are the more likely events. If the business stops when you stop, you are the bottleneck.
Plan your fun first. Family events, holidays and the things that light you up go on the calendar before the work does, and the work fills in around them.
Every major activity gets a system. Separate CRMs where privacy demands it, Dropbox as the common file layer, Zapier for the gaps, Asana for tasks, and SOPs that get updated by voice into an AI tool.
AI is a tool, not a solution. Her firm had an SOP and training and still filed fictitious legal precedent while she was out. The control is human review, not a ban.
Service businesses can scale, but only with scope clarity. Group coaching, masterminds and one-to-many delivery are how you duplicate yourself without a clone.

Chapters
00:00 The one document you are missing
00:47 Who is Scherrie L. Prince
01:49 Two failed businesses and a probate fight
03:15 Begin with the end in mind, even at day one
04:58 What playing big actually costs
06:15 The four questions to answer before you pick a structure
09:24 Estate plan and business plan, explained simply
10:32 Why founders avoid planning for disability and death
11:26 Own nothing, control everything 12:56 Plan your fun first
14:35 Court dates you cannot move
15:49 The system behind 252 podcast episodes
17:44 Mindset or structure, what separates the founders who scale
19:36 The calendar advice she would give her younger self
21:09 The AI mistake that reached her court filings
23:59 Using AI to do more instead of to work less
25:31 Can a service business detach income from time
27:24 The guest who impressed her most
29:12 Quickfire round
31:28 What Santi took away

Guest links
Scherrie L. Prince on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scherriespeaks/
Website: https://scherrieprince.com/
Prince & Associates PLLC: https://princelawassociates.com/
Play Big Faster Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/play-big-faster-podcast/id1635345946
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
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You build a strong case. You bring the data. You explain your reasoning. And the other person still says they need to think about it.

Patrick van der Burght has spent 25 years explaining why that happens. He is a founding member of the Cialdini Institute, one of the top ranked Cialdini Certified Trainers in the world, and a business partner of Dr. Robert Cialdini. His clients include Google, Apple, Canva and Cisco.

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In this episode he walks through the research on how people actually decide. Around 95% of decisions come from System 1, the fast intuitive part of the brain that runs on shortcuts. Yet when you sit down to write a pitch, an email or a proposal, you are consciously thinking, which means you are in System 2. So you produce logic and justification for a part of the brain that handles a fraction of the decisions. The result is not a no. It is an indecision, and Patrick argues those indecisions are where most of your lost yeses live.

He then walks through all seven universal principles of persuasion, with workplace examples for each: Reciprocity, Liking, Unity, Social Proof, Authority, Consistency and Scarcity. Santi pushes back on scarcity fatigue, brings a real case from a Swiss retailer that deleted 350,000 unverified reviews, and asks what happens to authority when people start trusting AI more than experts.

The through line is ethics. Manipulation removes choice. Persuasion surfaces the reasons a yes was already there. One holds when the boss leaves the room. The other does not.

- Around 95% of decisions are made by System 1, the fast, automatic, shortcut driven part of the brain. Attention spans have dropped from 20 minutes in the 1980s to about 7 seconds, which pushes that number higher every year.
- Most professional communication addresses System 2, the slow logical part, which handles roughly 5% of decisions. That mismatch creates uncertainty, and uncertain people postpone rather than refuse.
- Manipulation removes choice. Persuasion gives options and lets the yes surface on its own. When the decision comes from inside the other person, the behaviour holds without supervision.
- A gift with a condition attached is a reward, not a gift, and it does not trigger reciprocity. The downloadable ebook behind an email form is a lead magnet, not a favour.
- In a study on email negotiation, sharing personal information before talking business dropped deadlocked negotiations from 30% to 6%. The effect came from the number of similarities uncovered, not the volume of information shared.
- Do not introduce your own credentials. Have someone else do it, before you speak, so every sentence lands with the weight it deserves.
- The most persuasive average review score is 4.2 to 4.7. A perfect 5.0 reads as filtered or bought.
- The word "because" raised compliance in the photocopier queue study from roughly 64% to 93%, even when the reason that followed it carried no information.
- AI understands persuasion science but has no situational awareness. It does not know your relationship history, so it picks the wrong principle for the moment and invents supporting detail.

💬 Guest Links:
Patrick van der Burght LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-van-der-burght/
Ethical Persuasion Unlocked podcast - https://ethicalpersuasion.com.au/podcast/
Patrick on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@ethicalpersuasion
Patrick on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ethical_persuasion/

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
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Career strategist Sonal Bahl, who has screened 250,000 resumes as a former HR Director at GE and PwC, breaks down why high performers get passed over for promotions and shares the Candy, Vitamin, Painkiller framework for career positioning that actually gets you seen.

Key topics

Career transition from corporate to entrepreneurship
Common patterns in high performers who are stuck
Candy, Vitamin, Pain Killer positioning model
The importance of visibility in career advancement
Strategic approaches to job search and personal branding

💬 Guest Links:
Sonal Bahl, Website: https://www.superchargeyourself.com/
Sonal Bahl, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonalbahl/
Sonal Bahl, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/SuperChargeYourself

🤫 How Productive are you Really? Take the Free Productivity Test - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
🎁 More Free Productivity Tools and Templates - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/free-productivity-resources
📩 Join my Productivity Newsletter - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Newsletter

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.