About
My name is Nadia Prewitt. I spent nine years in operations roles at three mid-sized companies, four of them running a team, and then five years doing internal recruiting — first as a coordinator, latterly running hiring for a two-hundred-person organisation that grew to five hundred and then, abruptly, did not.
That last part is the reason this letter exists. I sat in the room for both halves: the offers going out, and then the same spreadsheet used in reverse. Very little of what I learned in those years is secret, but almost none of it is written down anywhere a candidate can find it, and a great deal of what is written down for candidates is written by people selling something.
So: no lists of interview questions, no résumé templates, no affirmations. Mechanics. How the decision gets made, who makes it, what it costs them, and where in that machinery you have room to move.
I get things wrong, and employment practice varies enormously by state and by sector, so I try to say when something is a description of what I have seen rather than a rule. When a reader corrects me I say so in the next issue with the correction in full. Three issues so far have carried one.
Nothing here is legal advice and I am not a lawyer. If a question turns on a contract you have signed, the contract and an employment attorney in your state beat anything I can tell you.
One email, most Thursdays, sometimes not. Your address is stored in the mailing software and nowhere else, it is never rented, sold or shared, and I do not run open-tracking or click-tracking on the sends. Unsubscribing removes the address outright rather than flagging it. If you want to know whether I still have your details, ask and I will tell you.
There is no advertising in the letter and there are no affiliate links. If that ever changes it will be announced in the letter before it happens, not discovered by a reader.
I do occasional workshops for career-services teams at community colleges in New England, generally unpaid, generally on the same material. If that is useful to you, reply to any issue.
Nine to Five Notes is written in Providence, Rhode Island. Reply to any issue and it reaches me directly. Back to the archive.