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People First: Systematizing Go-to-Market for Your Role with Christy Honeycutt (1/2)

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Go-to-market strategy is something we often associate with a company or its products / services, but what if we could apply go-to-market to our job role?

Christy Honeycutt, a talent acquisition veteran and our guest this week in episode 352, has used this mindset as a personal differentiator starting with her first job in the banking industry. We’ll follow Christy as she describes early experience as a people manager, learn why she developed a people first mentality, and recount the events that kickstarted her career in recruitment.

This story helps us understand what is required to systematize the work we do and how difficult it can be for things that seem easy. Christy will also educate you on the importance of developing AI competence and the impact of recruitment process outsourcing on job candidate experience.

Original Recording Date: 09-30-2025

Topics – Meet Christy Honeycutt, A Go-to-Market Perspective, Beginnings in the Banking Industry, Learning to Systematize and Duplicate Yourself, A People First Approach, Getting into Recruitment

2:10 – Meet Christy Honeycutt

Christy Honeycutt has 20 years of talent acquisition experience, go-to-market experience, and some marketing experience sprinkled throughout.
Christy is also the host of two different podcasts:
- On Inside the C-Suite, Christy interviews executive leaders to gain insight from life in these roles.
- StrategicShift is focused on the future of work, innovation, and AI.

3:17 – A Go-to-Market Perspective

How would Christy define talent acquisition and recruitment and the differences between them?
- Recruitment should be thought about as more active. There is a job open with specific requirements which need to be filled based on time constraints.
- Talent acquisition is more strategic according to Christy. This would include understanding why a role is vacant, the succession plans, cultural initiatives, and workforce planning. Christy refers to this as “engaging passive pipelines for long-term goals.”
- Personnel in talent acquisition and recruitment are usually in those roles because they want to help people, but these roles may look slightly different across companies of various sizes and in different industries.
How would Christy define go-to-market? We hear this term quite often but are not confident that everyone truly understands what this means.
- For context, Christy talks about looking at this with a lens across many different departments / internal organizations – marketing, recruitment, and even sales.
- “Go-to-market is understanding what is the product and who is the end user…. Am I filling a job? Then I’m going to market for that candidate that fits that job. Am I working for a tech company (which I most recently did)? Then, yes, I need to understand what is our product, who is the end user, who is the buyer…and how can I get this to market for them…to see, to use to buy, and to be delighted in? The go-to-market is really kind of a Frankenstein effect in my opinion. It’s really understanding the value and how it translates and then how you can connect the dots…. Go-to-market for me has just kind of been at my core since I was a kid.” – Christy Honeycutt
- For recruitment, the go-to-market is usually set based on an organization’s vision, mission, values, and culture.
- Christy uses the example of negotiating with her father (a former Marine) to get what she wanted when she was younger to illustrate that go-to-market can mean understanding how to sell.

7:01 – Beginnings in the Banking Industry

Christy was a cheerleader in high school and got a fully paid scholarship to college, but at age 17, she was diagnosed with cancer.
- As a result of the diagnosis, she was not able to attend college. Christy always wanted to be a mom and did not want to ruin her chance to have children.
- Christy married her college sweetheart and became a stay-at-home mom of 2 children.
  - She is now heathy, happy, and thankful she was able to have children.
  - Christy’s father owned a nonprofit, and even while she was a stay-at-home mom, Christy was involved in marketing for nonprofits as a result.
  - Christy also was part of the boards of her children’s schools, did volunteer work, and even taught pre-school.
After moving to a new state, Christy needed to get a job to support her children. After applying at a bank, she landed a manager job.
- Within 6 months, the bank branch where she worked was the highest producing in the state of Texas.
- Christy came up with marketing initiatives to get customers to visit the bank. She gives the example of a yearly Halloween contest.
- At one point, the bank was robbed, and Christy learned to lead in stressful situations through this experience. She also learned that she has a photographic memory.
Christy tells us her career really began in banking and then transitioned into marketing. Listen to the story about one of her clients who was a mortgage broker.
- Christy had 2 boys in various sports and was wearing herself out between work at the bank and home life.
- This mortgage broker sent an e-mail to help Christy get interviews for a role at a different bank.
- Christy tells the story of interviewing in the mortgage division of another bank (Prime Lending) close to Halloween. She was dressed as Lucille Ball for an event at her employer and ended up going to the interview in costume. The people who interviewed Christy loved it, and she was offered the job on the spot.

11:40 – Learning to Systematize and Duplicate Yourself

“But the really interesting thing that happened is they said, ‘we want you to hire 3 of you…. What you’re doing is working, so what we’d like you to do is go have a think about how you can multiply that into other branches….’ Can you imagine sitting down and going, ‘what is it that I did today and how did I do it?’ …And, just really creating a job description, a profile, how they’re going to be successful…and then find the people and train the people? So that was my very first…experience with recruitment.” – Christy Honeycutt
After removing the shock of being told to multiply herself, Christy began a process that she would repeat over and over in her career – thinking outside the box to create something special that she could automate or systematize.
At that first bank, Christy managed people but had no prior training as a manager. How did she figure out how to manage people, and then how did that translate to the role in which she was asked to create job descriptions and multiply herself?
- We’ve heard from some guests that most first-time managers do not get training. Christy echoes this sentiment.
- Large banks will train you on laws and procedures, but Christy tells us she had to train herself on the people side. Mainly, she needed to learn how to manage the people, their schedules, and learn how to encourage them. Despite being the boss, Christy was still friends with the people who worked there.
In being asked to multiply herself, Christy had to systematize the job she was already doing. She tells us it was a daunting task.
“When you’re really good at things, what I’ve found is they seem natural to you, and they are not that hard.” – Christy Honeycutt
When asked to duplicate herself, Christy downplayed her contributions a little bit. She advises all of us to step back and really think about the work we have done because we might not immediately recognize it and may downplay it in a similar way.
- As humans, we might at first feel like it is bragging to share the factual things we have done.
- Christy had to think about what she did, simplify it, and figure out how to translate that to the people she needed to hire.
- Christy was working for the mortgage division at a bank, and they needed to get more loans. She first sought to understand the sentiment of the bank’s customer base and if they had any needs. Step 1 was hosting a customer appreciation event.
  - The customer appreciation event generated direct feedback on the bank’s processes and product offerings.
- Next, Christy sought to understand the bank’s target market, which was real estate agents. She thought about how to get real estate agents to use this specific mortgage broker. New real estate agents need help with marketing, so Christy got certified and began teaching marketing classes to real estate agents. All of the agents would eventually begin using the bank.
- “It’s just kind of understanding what’s in it for someone else…. I just…went step by step by step and built the framework….” – Christy Honeycutt
  - The framework Christy mentions above outlined where the opportunities were for the bank (i.e. who might need their services), allowed for dividing up the work across divisions, and provided insight into the key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring success.
  - In many ways, Christy acted as a liaison between the bank, the real estate agents, and end customers.
- When seeking to hire people to do the work, Christy looked for empathetic people who were interested in helping others.
- Another avenue for the bank to increase the number of loans was working with first-time home buyers who might have poor credit. This would help real estate agents who needed home buyers. The bank started doing credit repair seminars to generate new leads.
  - “I was bringing in buyers, delighting previous buyers, and then also going after the vendors that would help participate. Honestly, that model…has kind of been my two step my whole career.” – Christy Honeycutt
Nick thinks Christy’s process is actually a three-step with the third being supplementing the above with the type of education which will both Christy and the audience she seeks to serve. Nick thinks this pattern will probably be repeated somewhere in her story as well.
- Christy says it actually does repeat. She recounts getting an AI-focused certification when this technology wave started catching on.
- “In the next 12-18 months, over 80% of all organizations globally will have adopted AI if they haven’t already. So, if you’re looking for a job, and you don’t understand the basics…AI has a lot of different names. I want you guys to think about that. That’s usually marketing.” – Christy Honeycutt
- Christy tells us AI agents are mostly marketing and an attempt to make things more consumable and understandable rather than some flashy new invention.
- Christy recounts talking to executive leaders who have mentioned having AI in one’s toolkit even as a kid is important to be relevant in the future workforce. All of us need to have more than a bare minimum exposure to ChatGPT, for example. We need to play, create, and tinker with AI tooling to develop a point of view that is uniquely ours.
- Christy feels AI will take jobs but that they will be lower-level things that we probably wanted automated anyway. She gives the example of a communications outage impacting airports in Dallas / Fort Worth and the decision to go get information from an AI agent on the company website rather than call the help desk.
- For any job you go into, expect to get questions around AI.
- Christy mentions a recent visit to the HR Tech conference. Every booth was promoting some kind of AI, and Christy shared with executives at the conference that buyers don’t fully understand the difference between products because “everyone is saying the same thing.”
- Christy reminds us there are ways to get low cost or even free education on the topic of AI so we can develop competence and a point of view.
- Nick shares his perspective on what he calls the “double check mark,” which is looking to educate yourself or build skills in an area that can help you both at your current employer but also make you marketable and relevant in the greater job market.
  - Something that only helps you with your current role isn’t quite as attractive as something that can help you later as well. Ideally, you span into both categories, but it is not always possible.
  - Christy mentions this is a very tech answer and gives the example of making a suggestion to an executive leader while advising for a tech startup. She only brought suggestions that would be attractive to / helpful to many customers (not just a single customer).
When Christy did research on what was impacting customer sentiment and spoke about understanding product market fit, was that all natural at the time she did it while working at the bank?
- Christy says it was natural at the time. As a single mom, she needed to be scrappy.
- “It’s funny because as I sit back and I think…I realize everything was kind of predestined. And at the moment it just felt like I was reacting and I was doing it, but…as I do my own reflection, I’m realizing that these cycles I’ve been on have always been for a reason, guiding me to where I’m at.” – Christy Honeycutt
- Reflection is one way to uncover our strengths, and Christy reminds us that just because something is easy for us does not disqualify it from being a strength.
- John mentions that performing a skill really well is different than being able to teach other people how to do it. When something comes easily to you, it might be difficult to know how to teach someone else to do it. But it sounds like Christy had to learn how to systematize the things she did so she could train others (i.e. it was not natural).
  - Christy says it definitely was not natural. She remembers how she felt when asked to duplicate herself. It seemed like a crazy request at the time.
  - One thing that really helped Christy through this process was looking at job descriptions for roles similar to hers at other companies and analyzing both similarities and differences.
  - “Everything is a learning lesson. I don’t regret any place I’ve ever worked. I don’t regret any situation I’ve ever had because it was all opportunity for me to learn how to manage through a situation (good, bad, or indifferent) and reflect on it and how I would do it differently.” – Christy Honeycutt
Christy mentioned earlier that no one learns how to be a manager. She is a forthcoming author and was recently signed with Postal Publishing House, and the book will be about leadership.
- In the book Christy talks about how no one is trained to be a leader and how people often just kind of fall into it. She feels it is a big gap. Even as people get up to the director level and maybe even the VP level, they are still learning.
- “No one sits you down and says, ‘hey, these really crazy things are going to happen, and you’re going to have to respond to these humans in a particular way. And by the way, you’re human, and you might have a really bad response to what you have to respond to….’ There’s lots of things that you deal with that I don’t think anyone could prepare you to deal with. And so, you learn on the job.” – Christy Honeycutt
Did the need to create job descriptions and hire people to multiply herself make Christy enjoy management more or question whether she wanted to keep doing it?
- Christy tells us she questioned whether she wanted to keep doing it. Her responsibilities ended up expanding well beyond the go-to-market work she was doing, and things became more complex.
- Christy went from being in charge of 1 person to being in charge of 4 people trying to do everything using her methodology but with their own flair.
- “Frankly, I got kind of bored because I created something, I duplicated myself, multiplied myself…. Ok, I’m ready for the next thing. I can do this, and I’m ready for the next thing…. I’m constantly curious, and I always need something more just to kind of keep my attention. There’s a lot of people in the industry I think are that way, especially in tech…. And those are the people that employers are looking for. They are looking for the curious people. They are looking for the open-minded individuals that want to adapt and want to learn and do more because those are the ones that have the longevity.” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Once we master things as technical people, we often want to move onto what is next (something new to learn, a new certification to chase, etc.).

26:23 – A People First Approach

Did Christy’s background in cheerleading help her in marketing?
- Actually, yes.
- Christy gives the illustration of high school cheerleading and pep squads. These are made up of people who love community and love to empower and cheer on other people.
- Christy reminds us that cheerleading is a sport. For those in cheer or pep squad, it’s not about wearing cute outfits. There is a commonality among the people who participate: an enjoyment of collaboration, a desire to win, and a belief that there is power in the energy they are giving.
- Christy likes to look at things from an energy lens.
- “In every industry you’ve got really good players, and you’ve got bad actors. So not all recruiters, not all talent acquisition people are really kindhearted, love what they are doing, and in it for you…. But the majority of the people in the HR and TA (talent acquisition) space generally joined that type of work because they love people, and they are fearful right now because they think AI is taking their job. And some of them it probably will, but you’re never going to get away from the EI and the EQ piece that is required in the age of AI. We need to be more human now than ever.” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Some people in these roles may hate their job. Some may love you as a candidate but be unable to get anything through.
At what point did Christy realize that for her it was more about the people?
- “It’s always been about the people for me. Everything I do has been about people. I’m people first just in everything I do.” – Christy Honeycutt
- After getting the job where she needed to duplicate herself, Christy wanted to talk to all of the company’s customers as her first task.
- Christy mentions the concept of go-to-market is the same regardless of the company where we work.
- “Your customers are your biggest resource because they will either be the loudest complainers or your biggest fans.” – Christy Honeycutt
- Customers with a positive sentiment toward a company (or its products and services) can offer free insight on how to serve them better. This may come in the form of suggestions for new features and capabilities or advice on overall direction, for example, and provides a perspective that a vendor cannot otherwise see.
- Christy has been told she is too “client advocate friendly.”
  - When selling a product or service to a customer, if users don’t adopt it, you are only as good as the contract. Christy calls this being a one trick pony.
  - On the other hand, we can sell a product or service and care enough to check in with customers and make pivots to make the product or service more valuable. This creates what Christy refers to as a “client for life.”
  - “And that’s, I think, where my specialty comes from is the human side, the people side. It’s just always remembering what’s in it for somebody else. Because we all have exchanges every day. What’s in it for the other person?” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Christy makes a hypothesis that we do this podcast to help people and because we care, and at some point in our career we probably needed what we are giving. What would you have said is the reason for the podcast based on being a listener?
- “People are my thing. I get the heart. I get the energy, and I think at the end of the day, we all put our shoes on the same way.” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Christy really enjoys hosting Inside the C-Suite because it demystifies what it is like to be an executive leader.
  - “It’s understanding how you navigate and how your priorities change…what’s now, what’s next, what’s urgent always evolves as you grow in your career.” – Christy Honeycutt

31:52 – Getting into Recruitment

How did Christy end up getting into talent acquisition and recruitment?
- Even with her hectic travel schedule hosting events for her employer, Christy never missed a little league baseball game in which her kids were playing. At a specific game, someone asked Christy what she did for a living and if she had ever thought about working in recruitment.
  - The person who made the suggestion helped Christy see the similarities between recruitment and marketing.
  - “Client needs a certain thing, and you go find the certain thing. And however you find it, you find it. That’s a lot like marketing. Exactly.” – Christy Honeycutt, describing an exchange with someone who encouraged her to pursue work as a recruiter
- Christy went to an interview for a recruiting role and got the job on the spot. The company was bought out by Kenexa(CEO was Rudy Karsan) which was later acquired by IBM (or “big blue” as Christy calls them).
  - Christy did recruitment process outsourcing for this company (or RPO for short) and specialized in this area for many years. She led this at IBM and later at Korn Ferry.
- She tells us there are so many layers to recruiting that people don’t know.
  - Staffing agencies, for example, often get a bad reputation. These agencies are predominantly focused on high-volume hourly roles or other short-term positions. Quality and candidate experience are not always the best. These recruiters have to move quickly because a successful placement is how they get paid.
  - “And when you do that really, really well the clients think that you’re their internal recruiter…. I think over my career, not me directly but within my teams, I’ve probably placed around 30,000 individuals.” – Christy Honeycutt, on specializing in RPO
  - Listen to Christy talk through an example of mapping through the workforce strategy for a client that wanted to outsource global recruitment on a tight timeline. She emphasizes that when we work with a recruiter, that recruiter might not work for the company where we are interviewing.
  - “When an RPO does a good job, not only does the candidate think that they’re an internal recruiter, but the clients think they are an internal recruiter.” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Christy talks about making a move from being a liaison manager for a client (focused on the client’s technology sales and marketing) to managing an internal team. The client thought she was their employee.
  - Don’t miss the part where Christy mentions she wanted to take a role as a recruiter so she could understand how to be a better manager.
  - “While your…audience is out there looking for jobs, just be mindful that…TA, recruitment, HR…depending on the size of the organization…you may be talking to an agency. You may be talking to an RPO. You may be talking to an internal recruiter. You can ask them. They don’t have to tell you.” – Christy Honeycutt
- Another challenge for the job seekers out there is the amount of fraud happening. On average, every US citizen has 7 points of fraud directed at them per day.
  - Christy mentions getting multiple text messages from companies claiming to be Randstad, Robert Half, or some other firm about jobs. It’s all fraud. Don’t fall for it!
  - When Christy worked for Korn Ferry and another tech startup, as part of the go-to-market strategy, she created a candidate application analysis tool which informed clients about the candidate’s experience.
    - Some clients didn’t realize, for example, that their site was down and was preventing people from even applying.
    - This tool also informed clients about how they showed up on sites like Glassdoor and what the biggest complaints are. The lowest scores 9 out of 10 times for a company are for leadership. Keep in mind rankings on Glassdoor are from job candidates and people who have worked at a specific company, and most do not take time to write glowing reviews of an employer.
    - “We have to give the employers the benefit of the doubt. So when you know where the sources are coming from and you’re honest with yourself on when you give feedback and how you give feedback…until we can all step up as humans and start giving 2-3 good feedbacks a day, we’re never going to balance out the negative.” – Christy Honeycutt

Mentioned in the Outro

Christy did a great job emphasizing that we understand what is it for the other people we work with (incentives, metrics, what success looks like for them), and that was part of executing a successful go-to-market strategy in banking and other areas. Here’s how Nick thinks a go-to-market might look for someone working internal IT:
- Understand the technology landscape at your company (hardware, software, cloud services and subscriptions – the overall vendor landscape)
- Understand the end user base you support and the capabilities you are providing to them. Think also about the value being delivered through these capabilities to both internal users and external users if applicable.
- Think about the capabilities you provide like products. Can your products be enhanced based on end user needs and feedback, and are we willing to take the feedback? Christy modeled the importance of understanding customer sentiment that can help us here.
  - Will an enhancement save time, decrease cost, decrease risk, or increase revenue? These are important impact metrics to understand (and document).
- If you change a hardware / software vendor (i.e. a tooling change), will it disrupt your customer base, or can you still provide the same capabilities? Make sure you understand this!
- Is there a new capability you could provide that delivers more capability? That’s part of the go-to-market.
- Are there members of the end user base who need education to get more value from the services and capabilities you’re offering?
Don’t forget to check out the podcasts Christy hosts –Inside the C-Suite and StrategicShift.
- Nick feels podcasts such as Inside the C-Suite are great sources to gain perspective on how executive leaders operate.

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People First: Systematizing Go-to-Market for Your Role with Christy Honeycutt (1/2)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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published 4d ago

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Fetch error

Hmmm there seems to be a problem fetching this series right now. Last successful fetch was on November 18, 2025 14:12 (4d ago)

Go-to-market strategy is something we often associate with a company or its products / services, but what if we could apply go-to-market to our job role?

Original Recording Date: 09-30-2025

Topics – Meet Christy Honeycutt, A Go-to-Market Perspective, Beginnings in the Banking Industry, Learning to Systematize and Duplicate Yourself, A People First Approach, Getting into Recruitment

2:10 – Meet Christy Honeycutt

Christy Honeycutt has 20 years of talent acquisition experience, go-to-market experience, and some marketing experience sprinkled throughout.
Christy is also the host of two different podcasts:
- On Inside the C-Suite, Christy interviews executive leaders to gain insight from life in these roles.
- StrategicShift is focused on the future of work, innovation, and AI.

3:17 – A Go-to-Market Perspective

How would Christy define talent acquisition and recruitment and the differences between them?
- Recruitment should be thought about as more active. There is a job open with specific requirements which need to be filled based on time constraints.
- Talent acquisition is more strategic according to Christy. This would include understanding why a role is vacant, the succession plans, cultural initiatives, and workforce planning. Christy refers to this as “engaging passive pipelines for long-term goals.”
- Personnel in talent acquisition and recruitment are usually in those roles because they want to help people, but these roles may look slightly different across companies of various sizes and in different industries.
How would Christy define go-to-market? We hear this term quite often but are not confident that everyone truly understands what this means.
- For context, Christy talks about looking at this with a lens across many different departments / internal organizations – marketing, recruitment, and even sales.
- “Go-to-market is understanding what is the product and who is the end user…. Am I filling a job? Then I’m going to market for that candidate that fits that job. Am I working for a tech company (which I most recently did)? Then, yes, I need to understand what is our product, who is the end user, who is the buyer…and how can I get this to market for them…to see, to use to buy, and to be delighted in? The go-to-market is really kind of a Frankenstein effect in my opinion. It’s really understanding the value and how it translates and then how you can connect the dots…. Go-to-market for me has just kind of been at my core since I was a kid.” – Christy Honeycutt
- For recruitment, the go-to-market is usually set based on an organization’s vision, mission, values, and culture.
- Christy uses the example of negotiating with her father (a former Marine) to get what she wanted when she was younger to illustrate that go-to-market can mean understanding how to sell.

7:01 – Beginnings in the Banking Industry

Christy was a cheerleader in high school and got a fully paid scholarship to college, but at age 17, she was diagnosed with cancer.
- As a result of the diagnosis, she was not able to attend college. Christy always wanted to be a mom and did not want to ruin her chance to have children.
- Christy married her college sweetheart and became a stay-at-home mom of 2 children.
  - She is now heathy, happy, and thankful she was able to have children.
  - Christy’s father owned a nonprofit, and even while she was a stay-at-home mom, Christy was involved in marketing for nonprofits as a result.
  - Christy also was part of the boards of her children’s schools, did volunteer work, and even taught pre-school.
After moving to a new state, Christy needed to get a job to support her children. After applying at a bank, she landed a manager job.
- Within 6 months, the bank branch where she worked was the highest producing in the state of Texas.
- Christy came up with marketing initiatives to get customers to visit the bank. She gives the example of a yearly Halloween contest.
- At one point, the bank was robbed, and Christy learned to lead in stressful situations through this experience. She also learned that she has a photographic memory.
Christy tells us her career really began in banking and then transitioned into marketing. Listen to the story about one of her clients who was a mortgage broker.
- Christy had 2 boys in various sports and was wearing herself out between work at the bank and home life.
- This mortgage broker sent an e-mail to help Christy get interviews for a role at a different bank.
- Christy tells the story of interviewing in the mortgage division of another bank (Prime Lending) close to Halloween. She was dressed as Lucille Ball for an event at her employer and ended up going to the interview in costume. The people who interviewed Christy loved it, and she was offered the job on the spot.

11:40 – Learning to Systematize and Duplicate Yourself

“But the really interesting thing that happened is they said, ‘we want you to hire 3 of you…. What you’re doing is working, so what we’d like you to do is go have a think about how you can multiply that into other branches….’ Can you imagine sitting down and going, ‘what is it that I did today and how did I do it?’ …And, just really creating a job description, a profile, how they’re going to be successful…and then find the people and train the people? So that was my very first…experience with recruitment.” – Christy Honeycutt
After removing the shock of being told to multiply herself, Christy began a process that she would repeat over and over in her career – thinking outside the box to create something special that she could automate or systematize.
At that first bank, Christy managed people but had no prior training as a manager. How did she figure out how to manage people, and then how did that translate to the role in which she was asked to create job descriptions and multiply herself?
- We’ve heard from some guests that most first-time managers do not get training. Christy echoes this sentiment.
- Large banks will train you on laws and procedures, but Christy tells us she had to train herself on the people side. Mainly, she needed to learn how to manage the people, their schedules, and learn how to encourage them. Despite being the boss, Christy was still friends with the people who worked there.
In being asked to multiply herself, Christy had to systematize the job she was already doing. She tells us it was a daunting task.
“When you’re really good at things, what I’ve found is they seem natural to you, and they are not that hard.” – Christy Honeycutt
When asked to duplicate herself, Christy downplayed her contributions a little bit. She advises all of us to step back and really think about the work we have done because we might not immediately recognize it and may downplay it in a similar way.
- As humans, we might at first feel like it is bragging to share the factual things we have done.
- Christy had to think about what she did, simplify it, and figure out how to translate that to the people she needed to hire.
- Christy was working for the mortgage division at a bank, and they needed to get more loans. She first sought to understand the sentiment of the bank’s customer base and if they had any needs. Step 1 was hosting a customer appreciation event.
  - The customer appreciation event generated direct feedback on the bank’s processes and product offerings.
- Next, Christy sought to understand the bank’s target market, which was real estate agents. She thought about how to get real estate agents to use this specific mortgage broker. New real estate agents need help with marketing, so Christy got certified and began teaching marketing classes to real estate agents. All of the agents would eventually begin using the bank.
- “It’s just kind of understanding what’s in it for someone else…. I just…went step by step by step and built the framework….” – Christy Honeycutt
  - The framework Christy mentions above outlined where the opportunities were for the bank (i.e. who might need their services), allowed for dividing up the work across divisions, and provided insight into the key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring success.
  - In many ways, Christy acted as a liaison between the bank, the real estate agents, and end customers.
- When seeking to hire people to do the work, Christy looked for empathetic people who were interested in helping others.
- Another avenue for the bank to increase the number of loans was working with first-time home buyers who might have poor credit. This would help real estate agents who needed home buyers. The bank started doing credit repair seminars to generate new leads.
  - “I was bringing in buyers, delighting previous buyers, and then also going after the vendors that would help participate. Honestly, that model…has kind of been my two step my whole career.” – Christy Honeycutt
Nick thinks Christy’s process is actually a three-step with the third being supplementing the above with the type of education which will both Christy and the audience she seeks to serve. Nick thinks this pattern will probably be repeated somewhere in her story as well.
- Christy says it actually does repeat. She recounts getting an AI-focused certification when this technology wave started catching on.
- “In the next 12-18 months, over 80% of all organizations globally will have adopted AI if they haven’t already. So, if you’re looking for a job, and you don’t understand the basics…AI has a lot of different names. I want you guys to think about that. That’s usually marketing.” – Christy Honeycutt
- Christy tells us AI agents are mostly marketing and an attempt to make things more consumable and understandable rather than some flashy new invention.
- Christy recounts talking to executive leaders who have mentioned having AI in one’s toolkit even as a kid is important to be relevant in the future workforce. All of us need to have more than a bare minimum exposure to ChatGPT, for example. We need to play, create, and tinker with AI tooling to develop a point of view that is uniquely ours.
- Christy feels AI will take jobs but that they will be lower-level things that we probably wanted automated anyway. She gives the example of a communications outage impacting airports in Dallas / Fort Worth and the decision to go get information from an AI agent on the company website rather than call the help desk.
- For any job you go into, expect to get questions around AI.
- Christy mentions a recent visit to the HR Tech conference. Every booth was promoting some kind of AI, and Christy shared with executives at the conference that buyers don’t fully understand the difference between products because “everyone is saying the same thing.”
- Christy reminds us there are ways to get low cost or even free education on the topic of AI so we can develop competence and a point of view.
- Nick shares his perspective on what he calls the “double check mark,” which is looking to educate yourself or build skills in an area that can help you both at your current employer but also make you marketable and relevant in the greater job market.
  - Something that only helps you with your current role isn’t quite as attractive as something that can help you later as well. Ideally, you span into both categories, but it is not always possible.
  - Christy mentions this is a very tech answer and gives the example of making a suggestion to an executive leader while advising for a tech startup. She only brought suggestions that would be attractive to / helpful to many customers (not just a single customer).
When Christy did research on what was impacting customer sentiment and spoke about understanding product market fit, was that all natural at the time she did it while working at the bank?
- Christy says it was natural at the time. As a single mom, she needed to be scrappy.
- “It’s funny because as I sit back and I think…I realize everything was kind of predestined. And at the moment it just felt like I was reacting and I was doing it, but…as I do my own reflection, I’m realizing that these cycles I’ve been on have always been for a reason, guiding me to where I’m at.” – Christy Honeycutt
- Reflection is one way to uncover our strengths, and Christy reminds us that just because something is easy for us does not disqualify it from being a strength.
- John mentions that performing a skill really well is different than being able to teach other people how to do it. When something comes easily to you, it might be difficult to know how to teach someone else to do it. But it sounds like Christy had to learn how to systematize the things she did so she could train others (i.e. it was not natural).
  - Christy says it definitely was not natural. She remembers how she felt when asked to duplicate herself. It seemed like a crazy request at the time.
  - One thing that really helped Christy through this process was looking at job descriptions for roles similar to hers at other companies and analyzing both similarities and differences.
  - “Everything is a learning lesson. I don’t regret any place I’ve ever worked. I don’t regret any situation I’ve ever had because it was all opportunity for me to learn how to manage through a situation (good, bad, or indifferent) and reflect on it and how I would do it differently.” – Christy Honeycutt
Christy mentioned earlier that no one learns how to be a manager. She is a forthcoming author and was recently signed with Postal Publishing House, and the book will be about leadership.
- In the book Christy talks about how no one is trained to be a leader and how people often just kind of fall into it. She feels it is a big gap. Even as people get up to the director level and maybe even the VP level, they are still learning.
- “No one sits you down and says, ‘hey, these really crazy things are going to happen, and you’re going to have to respond to these humans in a particular way. And by the way, you’re human, and you might have a really bad response to what you have to respond to….’ There’s lots of things that you deal with that I don’t think anyone could prepare you to deal with. And so, you learn on the job.” – Christy Honeycutt
Did the need to create job descriptions and hire people to multiply herself make Christy enjoy management more or question whether she wanted to keep doing it?
- Christy tells us she questioned whether she wanted to keep doing it. Her responsibilities ended up expanding well beyond the go-to-market work she was doing, and things became more complex.
- Christy went from being in charge of 1 person to being in charge of 4 people trying to do everything using her methodology but with their own flair.
- “Frankly, I got kind of bored because I created something, I duplicated myself, multiplied myself…. Ok, I’m ready for the next thing. I can do this, and I’m ready for the next thing…. I’m constantly curious, and I always need something more just to kind of keep my attention. There’s a lot of people in the industry I think are that way, especially in tech…. And those are the people that employers are looking for. They are looking for the curious people. They are looking for the open-minded individuals that want to adapt and want to learn and do more because those are the ones that have the longevity.” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Once we master things as technical people, we often want to move onto what is next (something new to learn, a new certification to chase, etc.).

26:23 – A People First Approach

Did Christy’s background in cheerleading help her in marketing?
- Actually, yes.
- Christy gives the illustration of high school cheerleading and pep squads. These are made up of people who love community and love to empower and cheer on other people.
- Christy reminds us that cheerleading is a sport. For those in cheer or pep squad, it’s not about wearing cute outfits. There is a commonality among the people who participate: an enjoyment of collaboration, a desire to win, and a belief that there is power in the energy they are giving.
- Christy likes to look at things from an energy lens.
- “In every industry you’ve got really good players, and you’ve got bad actors. So not all recruiters, not all talent acquisition people are really kindhearted, love what they are doing, and in it for you…. But the majority of the people in the HR and TA (talent acquisition) space generally joined that type of work because they love people, and they are fearful right now because they think AI is taking their job. And some of them it probably will, but you’re never going to get away from the EI and the EQ piece that is required in the age of AI. We need to be more human now than ever.” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Some people in these roles may hate their job. Some may love you as a candidate but be unable to get anything through.
At what point did Christy realize that for her it was more about the people?
- “It’s always been about the people for me. Everything I do has been about people. I’m people first just in everything I do.” – Christy Honeycutt
- After getting the job where she needed to duplicate herself, Christy wanted to talk to all of the company’s customers as her first task.
- Christy mentions the concept of go-to-market is the same regardless of the company where we work.
- “Your customers are your biggest resource because they will either be the loudest complainers or your biggest fans.” – Christy Honeycutt
- Customers with a positive sentiment toward a company (or its products and services) can offer free insight on how to serve them better. This may come in the form of suggestions for new features and capabilities or advice on overall direction, for example, and provides a perspective that a vendor cannot otherwise see.
- Christy has been told she is too “client advocate friendly.”
  - When selling a product or service to a customer, if users don’t adopt it, you are only as good as the contract. Christy calls this being a one trick pony.
  - On the other hand, we can sell a product or service and care enough to check in with customers and make pivots to make the product or service more valuable. This creates what Christy refers to as a “client for life.”
  - “And that’s, I think, where my specialty comes from is the human side, the people side. It’s just always remembering what’s in it for somebody else. Because we all have exchanges every day. What’s in it for the other person?” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Christy makes a hypothesis that we do this podcast to help people and because we care, and at some point in our career we probably needed what we are giving. What would you have said is the reason for the podcast based on being a listener?
- “People are my thing. I get the heart. I get the energy, and I think at the end of the day, we all put our shoes on the same way.” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Christy really enjoys hosting Inside the C-Suite because it demystifies what it is like to be an executive leader.
  - “It’s understanding how you navigate and how your priorities change…what’s now, what’s next, what’s urgent always evolves as you grow in your career.” – Christy Honeycutt

31:52 – Getting into Recruitment

How did Christy end up getting into talent acquisition and recruitment?
- Even with her hectic travel schedule hosting events for her employer, Christy never missed a little league baseball game in which her kids were playing. At a specific game, someone asked Christy what she did for a living and if she had ever thought about working in recruitment.
  - The person who made the suggestion helped Christy see the similarities between recruitment and marketing.
  - “Client needs a certain thing, and you go find the certain thing. And however you find it, you find it. That’s a lot like marketing. Exactly.” – Christy Honeycutt, describing an exchange with someone who encouraged her to pursue work as a recruiter
- Christy went to an interview for a recruiting role and got the job on the spot. The company was bought out by Kenexa(CEO was Rudy Karsan) which was later acquired by IBM (or “big blue” as Christy calls them).
  - Christy did recruitment process outsourcing for this company (or RPO for short) and specialized in this area for many years. She led this at IBM and later at Korn Ferry.
- She tells us there are so many layers to recruiting that people don’t know.
  - Staffing agencies, for example, often get a bad reputation. These agencies are predominantly focused on high-volume hourly roles or other short-term positions. Quality and candidate experience are not always the best. These recruiters have to move quickly because a successful placement is how they get paid.
  - “And when you do that really, really well the clients think that you’re their internal recruiter…. I think over my career, not me directly but within my teams, I’ve probably placed around 30,000 individuals.” – Christy Honeycutt, on specializing in RPO
  - Listen to Christy talk through an example of mapping through the workforce strategy for a client that wanted to outsource global recruitment on a tight timeline. She emphasizes that when we work with a recruiter, that recruiter might not work for the company where we are interviewing.
  - “When an RPO does a good job, not only does the candidate think that they’re an internal recruiter, but the clients think they are an internal recruiter.” – Christy Honeycutt
  - Christy talks about making a move from being a liaison manager for a client (focused on the client’s technology sales and marketing) to managing an internal team. The client thought she was their employee.
  - Don’t miss the part where Christy mentions she wanted to take a role as a recruiter so she could understand how to be a better manager.
  - “While your…audience is out there looking for jobs, just be mindful that…TA, recruitment, HR…depending on the size of the organization…you may be talking to an agency. You may be talking to an RPO. You may be talking to an internal recruiter. You can ask them. They don’t have to tell you.” – Christy Honeycutt
- Another challenge for the job seekers out there is the amount of fraud happening. On average, every US citizen has 7 points of fraud directed at them per day.
  - Christy mentions getting multiple text messages from companies claiming to be Randstad, Robert Half, or some other firm about jobs. It’s all fraud. Don’t fall for it!
  - When Christy worked for Korn Ferry and another tech startup, as part of the go-to-market strategy, she created a candidate application analysis tool which informed clients about the candidate’s experience.
    - Some clients didn’t realize, for example, that their site was down and was preventing people from even applying.
    - This tool also informed clients about how they showed up on sites like Glassdoor and what the biggest complaints are. The lowest scores 9 out of 10 times for a company are for leadership. Keep in mind rankings on Glassdoor are from job candidates and people who have worked at a specific company, and most do not take time to write glowing reviews of an employer.
    - “We have to give the employers the benefit of the doubt. So when you know where the sources are coming from and you’re honest with yourself on when you give feedback and how you give feedback…until we can all step up as humans and start giving 2-3 good feedbacks a day, we’re never going to balance out the negative.” – Christy Honeycutt

Mentioned in the Outro

Christy did a great job emphasizing that we understand what is it for the other people we work with (incentives, metrics, what success looks like for them), and that was part of executing a successful go-to-market strategy in banking and other areas. Here’s how Nick thinks a go-to-market might look for someone working internal IT:
- Understand the technology landscape at your company (hardware, software, cloud services and subscriptions – the overall vendor landscape)
- Understand the end user base you support and the capabilities you are providing to them. Think also about the value being delivered through these capabilities to both internal users and external users if applicable.
- Think about the capabilities you provide like products. Can your products be enhanced based on end user needs and feedback, and are we willing to take the feedback? Christy modeled the importance of understanding customer sentiment that can help us here.
  - Will an enhancement save time, decrease cost, decrease risk, or increase revenue? These are important impact metrics to understand (and document).
- If you change a hardware / software vendor (i.e. a tooling change), will it disrupt your customer base, or can you still provide the same capabilities? Make sure you understand this!
- Is there a new capability you could provide that delivers more capability? That’s part of the go-to-market.
- Are there members of the end user base who need education to get more value from the services and capabilities you’re offering?
Don’t forget to check out the podcasts Christy hosts –Inside the C-Suite and StrategicShift.
- Nick feels podcasts such as Inside the C-Suite are great sources to gain perspective on how executive leaders operate.

Contact the Hosts

The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte.
- E-mail: [email protected]
- DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney
- Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman
- Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_
- Leave a Comment on Your Favorite Episode on YouTube
If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page.
If uncertainty is getting to you, check out or Career Uncertainty Action Guide with a checklist of actions to take control during uncertain periods and AI prompts to help you think through topics like navigating a recent layoff, financial planning, or managing your mindset and being overwhelmed.

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Topics – Meet Christy Honeycutt, A Go-to-Market Perspective, Beginnings in the Banking Industry, Learning to Systematize and Duplicate Yourself, A People First Approach, Getting into Recruitment

2:10 – Meet Christy Honeycutt

3:17 – A Go-to-Market Perspective

7:01 – Beginnings in the Banking Industry

11:40 – Learning to Systematize and Duplicate Yourself

26:23 – A People First Approach

31:52 – Getting into Recruitment

Mentioned in the Outro

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People First: Systematizing Go-to-Market for Your Role with Christy Honeycutt (1/2)

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Topics – Meet Christy Honeycutt, A Go-to-Market Perspective, Beginnings in the Banking Industry, Learning to Systematize and Duplicate Yourself, A People First Approach, Getting into Recruitment

2:10 – Meet Christy Honeycutt

3:17 – A Go-to-Market Perspective

7:01 – Beginnings in the Banking Industry

11:40 – Learning to Systematize and Duplicate Yourself

26:23 – A People First Approach

31:52 – Getting into Recruitment

Mentioned in the Outro

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