Taking Your Job Search Beyond AI and LinkedIn
Practical Tools Today’s Executive Can Use to Find the Next Opportunity

Tuesday, September 29, 2026 at 6:00 PM ET via Zoom

Taking Your Job Search Beyond AI and LinkedIn

AI can improve your résumé, help research a company, prepare you for an interview, and make your job search more efficient. LinkedIn can help you identify opportunities, research decision-makers, and expand your network.

But neither AI nor LinkedIn is a job-search strategy.

Too many executives spend their time polishing AI-generated language, scrolling through LinkedIn, collecting connections, checking profile views, and repeatedly clicking Easy Apply. These activities may feel productive, but they do not necessarily create relationships, conversations, or access to the people making hiring decisions.

Your next opportunity is far more likely to come from someone who understands your value, trusts your judgment, remembers your story, and is willing to open a door.

During this meeting, we will discuss practical ways to move beyond passive online activity and take greater control of your search, including:

How to use AI without losing your own voice

Why executives should search for jobs—but target companies

How to identify organizations that may need what you know how to do

How to use LinkedIn to find people, not merely accumulate connections

How to identify the likely hiring manager and the business problem behind the position

How to request conversations without asking people for jobs

Questions that create productive networking and hiring-manager conversations

How to follow up consistently and add value

Why meaningful conversations may be a better measure of progress than applications submitted

This will not be a presentation about abandoning AI or LinkedIn. Both belong in today’s executive job-search toolkit. The objective is to use them appropriately: AI to prepare, LinkedIn to research and connect, and real conversations to advance your search.

Whether you are actively pursuing your next opportunity, beginning to consider a change, hiring talent, or simply looking to strengthen your professional network, this meeting will offer practical strategies you can begin using immediately.

Alumni members are especially encouraged to attend. Your experience, perspective, and connections are invaluable to members navigating today’s job market—and the relationships you strengthen may prove valuable to you as well.

Please join us and remember:

Use AI to prepare. Use LinkedIn to move toward people. Use conversations to advance.

P.S. Know a finance executive who is not yet a FENG member? Invite them to join us. This meeting will be an excellent introduction to the practical value of the FENG community.

About Lew Bader

Lew Bader is Chair of both the Long Island Chapter of The FENG and The FENG Peer Resume Review Committee. At 60, after a 40-year career with Fortune 500 companies, Lew left Pearson and entered the job market for the first time. Over the next two years, he developed a practical job-search toolkit that ultimately led him to his current role as Chief Financial Officer of Counseling In Schools, a New York City-based nonprofit organization.

Lew has served as CFO of Counseling In Schools since joining the organization at age 62. He also takes pride in his long-standing relationship with Matt Bud, noting humorously that he was likely the last of Matt’s friends to join The FENG in 2014—a connection dating back to 1980.