About Us

Mission

To develop more enthusiastic staff members and lower turnover by improving the engagement and productivity of company leaders, managers, and employees. To empower individual professionals to advance in their careers with agency, purpose, and direction.

Vision

To provide curious, engaging, and dynamic trainers and coaches with uncompromising focus on people, needs, and adding value.

Values

Practicing our work with authenticity, respect, curiosity, and collaboration. We believe that people have reasons for their actions, which are based on their needs and motivations. Therefore, the better they truly understand their needs and motivations, the better actions they will take.

History

Not one of Tad’s job searches has been “traditional.” When he graduated from college, none of the companies he wanted to work for came to campus. When Tad graduated from business school, again, none of the companies he wanted to work with came to campus. When he made a change mid-career, there was no campus to come to. The typical approach—pinpoint company, schedule informational interviews, have a job interview, get hired—didn’t work. (Tad earned a BS in Communication Studies from Northwestern University and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.)

When Tad joined the world of conflict resolution as a mediator and negotiation coach and trainer, he realized that he had used collaborative negotiation techniques to find and land jobs. He had successes as a media planner for DDB advertising in Chicago, a yield management and pricing manager at Northwest Airlines (now Delta) in St. Paul, a partner marketing director at Starwood Hotels (now Marriott), a mediator and commercial programs director at MWI in Boston, and an adjunct professor of negotiation at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University, as well as a negotiation coach for last-minute consulting with TalkSupport. (FYI, Tad has also been a landscaper, a stagehand for a ballet company, a recycling operations intern — he sorted trash while learning the business, an intern at Citibank, and an entrepreneur and artist with kinetic sculptures.)

Two colleagues, Justin Wright and Carly Inkpen, had had the same realization as they looked at their past and emerging careers. Together, they developed an approach to job seeking and career development based on the research and practice of interest-based negotiation out of the Harvard Negotiation Project (which published Getting to Yes). They’ve also written a book (Own the Job Hunt – renamed from End the Job Hunt) and are aggressively using their negotiation skills to collaborate with publishing companies and get it into the world. (They’re close!)

After building their practices working with individuals, they decided to adapt their approach to help companies improve employee engagement. They focus on employees’ motivations and drivers to understand and address what is important to them to fully engage in their roles, and dedicate themselves to the company and its goals.

In 2015, Ron joined Career Negotiations as Operations Manager. As Tad coaches and trains, Ron runs the back office, making sure projects get done, the business moves forward, and reliability is upheld.

Ron is the Operations Manager responsible for all of the back office operations.

Resources