Lizzie Jones — From recruiter to viral career coach

Lizzie Jones pivoted from a traditional recruiting career to launch her own career coaching company, Hey Lizzie Ann, which helps BIPOC women land and thrive in tech companies. Along the way she grew a loyal LinkedIn audience with 8M+ annual views of her practical career advice. Lizzie and I talk about how being a first-generation college student impacted her career journey and how, within minutes, she can tell who will succeed at their career pivot. 

Q&A

You started your career in recruiting, but then launched your own company that helps BIPOC women land and thrive in tech companies. How did your pivot story start?

It starts after college for me. When I was an undergrad I studied pre-occupational therapy. I planned to apply for occupational therapy grad school, but during the process realized it was not the right fit. I had to start over. I’m a first generation college student who grew up in a low income household. I didn’t have a lot of people in my personal network that worked at big corporations or even went to college. Job searching was very new to me. I had the mindset that you send your resume off, you find a company, and then you work there for a very long time. I was shocked to realize that’s just not how the modern job force works. I did a lot of research and discovered how fluid the job search process is. 

I was lucky enough to get a job at Amazon as an HR generalist. I did everything from recruiting to onboarding to employee engagement. I loved the recruiting part because I related based on my personal journey of finding a new opportunity and learning how to navigate my career. I loved the idea of helping other people along the same path. While I was at Amazon, I took a really good opportunity at Expedia so I could get a taste of a different company.

Throughout my experiences I was fascinated by the recruiting process, and honestly, all the flaws in it that I saw. Society has the notion that you have to go to college to get a job and to go to college you have to pay a lot of money, but when you graduate college you have trouble finding a job with no work experience. I saw a lot of early professionals struggling with this. They didn’t have the mindset to know how to build a resume or how to network because their parents didn’t have to do it that way.

That motivated me to start Hey Lizzie Ann. It started as a career coaching organization for younger professionals who were in the same boat that I was, and it was meant to be a side gig. But the more I posted free career advice, the more my following grew. It was really unexpected. I saw that there was definitely a need, so I leaned into it more. I began to take on more coaching clients and put more content on LinkedIn. And it quickly reached a point where I had enough momentum to do it full-time. 

Congrats on your success! It sounds like smooth sailing, but did you have any hesitations to leave a great, stable job?

Yes. Leaving the salary and the benefits was hard. I had the traditional mindset of wait, I need to survive! But I’ve learned that it’s good to have multiple streams of income, like a side hustle or another project to work on. 

And careers are so fluid that I knew I would probably switch again. That really unstuck me. I didn’t think about it like, If I make this move, that’s it. I’m signing my life away. It’s hard to make a commitment like that. Instead, I saw that my decision to go full-time with Hey Lizzie Ann didn’t mean that I was going to do it forever. I could go back to corporate if I wanted to. 

And, in fact, after running Hey Lizzie Ann full-time for a few years, you’re now returning to a full-time corporate role and running Hey Lizzie Ann part time again. What’s the biggest difference between full-time vs. part-time? 

The biggest difference is in the balance of creative agency and structured support. I appreciate how much autonomy and creative freedom I can have while managing Hey Lizzie Ann. Any idea I have, I can implement and test it without having to go through multiple approvals. It can get lonely at times, even with a team and having a network of other women entrepreneurs. That’s why running Hey Lizzie Ann part-time feels like the best move for me at this stage of life. There are so many resources, people, communities, and events that exist at established organizations, and I like being able to tap into those sources during the day -- and then get back to experimenting with Hey Lizzie Ann after work!

What else do you think helped you make the pivot?

It’s a good question, how to embrace change. I think having a solid network was very helpful. 

A challenge for me is my demographic – being young, a woman, and a person of color all at the same time. While 99% of the people that respond to my content are very positive, there is the 1% that is negative. These are usually people with years of experience who are out of a job but don’t want to adjust to the new way of job searching. They don’t want to spend time on LinkedIn or build a personal brand, they want to do it the old school way like submitting a resume or networking with other men in traditional ways. I get the brunt of that.

But I made a network of female small business owners who could really relate. They reminded me that there will always be people who don’t resonate with your message. If you can’t change someone’s mind, then just move on. Focus on the people that you can impact.  And I know that my messages are true. You have to change your mindset to be a successful job seeker. 

I’m motivated to have an impact in particular with women of color. I’ve never worked with anyone or seen anyone in a leadership position that I wanted who is a Black woman. The leaders in the positions that I want to be someday are most often men. I want to change that. 

Almost every female founder I speak to says finding a network of other female founders is critical. Was it easy for you to find that community of women?

I think it can be hard to find the right people. Because unless you’ve always been on the entrepreneur path, then most of your network probably works in a traditional corporate environment. When you make the jump to entrepreneurship, your peers will still be in corporations and you won’t have exposure to other founder leaders. 

But – once you find the right people, it’s really easy to make the connections. You’re connecting on a much deeper level. Especially for women and women of color. You’ve gone through the same struggles and so you embrace each other very quickly. 

In your coaching capacity, do you see a lot of women who want to pivot? What traits do successful pivoters have?

Yes, very often! I see the desire to pivot most often in associate-level or mid-career people. Maybe they’ve been in operations for 10 years and they really want to try marketing. I get people reaching out with that kind of message persistently. I think it’s most common at around the 10-year mark, because they probably didn’t go into their first jobs thinking they would make a drastic change. But over time they are exposed to other job functions and they also see that jobs are more flexible today. We have so many resources like online courses that can help anyone to make a pivot. Where people usually get stuck is on how to brand themselves to make the pivot. They know they want to do something different, but they don’t know how to tell their story and have it make sense. That’s where I can help.

Within the first few minutes of talking to someone, I can usually tell whether they will succeed. It’s all about whether they have a positive framework for their career change. When someone says, I’ve done sales for so long but now I want a hardcore marketing role. I don’t have the traditional qualifications, but I know I can do this and I’ll work twice as hard! When people start the conversation like that, typically they’re the ones who are able to successfully make the change. When people have a negative mindset, they fixate only on how hard it will be to overcome the challenges. They say things like: I’m really unhappy with my job. I know people will look at my resume and reject it. I’m so sad that I can’t get there. It’s hard to overcome that negative mindset because you have to believe in yourself. You have to have an unwavering core belief that you can do the next job. You need a growth mindset that says you can learn what you need to learn. If you don’t have that, it can be a tough barrier to get over.

Timing matters too. The experience of pivoting is a lot better if you’re running towards something, rather than running away from something. It’s easier to be a career changer who is doing alright where you are but you see something so much better for the future. It’s harder to be a career changer if you want to change just because you hate your job. It can be difficult to move away from that negativity.

Thank you, Lizzie, for sharing your story and for doing the critical work of advancing BIPOC women in tech!

You can learn more about Lizzie’s work as a career coach advancing BIPOC women in tech here.

*Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.