Photo by Andrej Lišakov for Unsplash+
Author’s Note
What follows is the letter I wish I could hand to every potential employer or collaborator before we begin. I wouldn’t classify it as a disclaimer, but as a map to something genuinely rare. I’m publishing it because the right people will immediately recognize themselves in it.
There’s a particular loss I want to name first. I used to be good at interviews. Genuinely good, in the way that comes from being present with another person and letting something real pass between you. That version of hiring still exists somewhere, but it’s become harder to find.
What’s replaced it, in too many places, is a process so abstracted from real relationships that it selects against exactly the qualities it claims to want. Five rounds. Structured rubrics. Panels of people with no brief to know you, only to assess you. The expectations for extractable facts keep rising while the space for genuine fit keeps shrinking.
I know this because I recently encountered the exception. A company was doing the relational work. There were five rounds that felt like something was building. They were moving toward hiring me, but a key person left, they had to pivot, and I was tabled for “at least a month.” I don’t fault them for it. But I sat with how that felt and made a decision: I'm no longer willing to keep sending resumes into algorithmic filters and spending myself on interviews that cost me something real and offer nothing guaranteed in return. I built my consulting practice instead. My website and this letter are both part of that.
This open letter is also for everyone who has felt the same loss and wondered whether something was wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with you. The process changed. You didn’t.
Dear Potential Employer,
I want to tell you something true before we spend another hour on credentials: I am exactly the kind of person you’ve been looking for, even as you quietly doubt such a person exists.
I’m not exceptional at just one thing. I’m exceptional in the way that actually moves organizations. I see systems clearly, connect what others keep separate, and speak honestly before issues become expensive. I lead with intelligence and stay grounded in wisdom. The first captures attention. The second sustains value.
Here’s what this looks like in practice: problems you’ve been circling for months start resolving. The concerns everyone privately carries but rarely voices are named — calmly, constructively, at the right moment. You find yourself trusting my judgment, and being right to. The work gets better. So does the room.
What makes this possible is specific.
My energy isn’t uniform. Some days I produce at a level that will surprise you — the volume, the quality, the speed. Other days are quieter, and those days are part of how the first kind happens. I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won’t let you mistake an exceptional week for a pace I can sustain indefinitely.
I’ll also need you to be honest with me about what this role actually holds: that it was scoped for one person working reasonable hours, not inherited from whoever burned out before me. If nobody knows what the job should actually entail, or the answer is “that’s just how it is here,” that’s a condition I won’t accept. I’ve stayed too long in rooms where I was the only one who understood the load, kept raising the concern, and was told it would get better. It didn’t. I’m not available for that ever again.
That experience is part of how I know my own capacity with the exactness I do now. I knew it before. I know it with painful precision now. If the work can be done by one person within a given timeframe, it will be done. It simply won’t arrive on the steady, clockable rhythm that most workplaces are built to expect.
I need the relational ground to be solid. I don’t need protection from hard feedback, high standards, or direct conversation. I need what’s said in the room to match what’s said outside it. I need expectations to be stated. I need to be evaluated by the rules I was actually given. When I trust the environment, a remarkable amount of my capacity becomes available for the work. When I don’t, I spend it reading the room instead, and you get only a fraction of what’s possible.
This is the offer: give me coherence, good faith, and the space to tell you what I see, and I will give you someone who shows up fully, thinks beyond the edges of her role, and cares about your outcomes as if they were her own.
That’s a rare thing. I know it, and I suspect you do too.
With honesty and genuine interest,
Chris Stephens, CPA
Where This Is Coming From
I lost my job nearly a year ago under circumstances beyond my control. At the time, I was the primary earner in my family and had benefits. We lost both at once. I have spent much of that time healing. I wasn’t able to search for work until a couple of months ago, and only a small fraction of my income has returned in that short time.
Refusing the algorithm feels right. What I can’t tell you yet is whether it will work — it’s only been a few weeks, and I’m writing this from inside the uncertainty, not from the other side of it.
My regular readers know most of this, but new people find their way here every day, and I wanted you to have the context. This letter wasn’t written from safety. It was written from clarity, which is different and, in some ways, harder to come by.
I’m trusting that the right people will find their way here. This is part of how I’m making it possible.
I read this in two parts. The part before the actual letter, and then I was distracted back to what I was actually supposed to be doing. And then I came back and picked up where I had left off. In the meantime, I’ve forgotten whose Substack I was actually reading and halfway through your letter, I said to myself follow this person immediately, and then realized I already am!
Did I recognize myself in it? This is exactly what I would’ve needed the last project management job employer I had to understand. But at that stage of my life, I didn’t know what I am and would never have had the nerve to push this forward. Now I’m an old crone 53 weeks from retirement and I don’t need to tell anybody this because I work remote and my employers are a board of directors who may be put five hours a week into the effort and have no idea whether I’m working right now or working in the middle of the night or whatever! And I am killin’ it, finally getting important projects, scoped, underway, and soon done!
That letter is beautifully written, and I hope that it is incorporated in some form in every proposal you do for a CPA client.
This is just the sort of letter I feel like my kids need to read along with me. I follow a couple of communities of job-seekers and the level of hopelessness and despair around incongruent expectations and corporate lip service is unreal.
I wish I would have had this letter 10 years ago, but I'm glad that you've written it now. There's so much that you bring to advocacy work for neurodivergent professionals.
Best of luck on your search. Perhaps, if you found one company that felt right, you'll find another, or they'll find you.