Carina Rampelt

It’s Getting Hot in Here: Tips For Hiring Tech Talent In An Overheated Market

Think of the tech job market like a queue at a busy taxi stand. That’s how MIT researchers described it in a 2015 article—they modeled applicants as people waiting their turn for a taxi and employers as the taxis themselves. The difficulty of…

How To Beat Writer’s Block (According To A Teenage Witch)

What does a 1989 movie about a teenage witch have to do with writer’s block? A lot actually. Hayao Miyazaki’s film Kiki’s Delivery Service tells the story of a young witch setting out on her own to begin her training. But from the moment she arrives…

Reopening vs. Remote-first: How Three Companies Are Handling Their Return To Office

In the post-pandemic remote work debate, Apple is taking a firm stance: its employees must return to the office, whether they want to or not. “We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Apple VP Deirdre…

Is Estonia the Next Silicon Valley?

Picture using your microchipped state ID card to register a business with your co-founder who lives some 5,000 miles away. In 30 minutes, it’s complete. This may seem like some futuristic vision of a digital, corporatized utopian state, but the…

How I learned to trust my writing instincts (and you can too)

Bad writing advice can turn up in unexpected places. For me, the worst writing advice I’ve ever received came from an English professor from Oxford (yes, really). It was the eve of my master’s thesis submission and the professor in question was, in…

Free Sales Tools Reps Can’t Live Without

Like the elusive Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster, free sales tools might seem like the stuff of folklore. Sure, everyone claims to have a sighting—but do they really exist? As intrepid salespeople, we wanted to investigate once and for all. What we…

Why You Should Avoid the Broetry Writing Trend

I know you’ve seen them. The posts that go like this. One single line after another. Like bizarre business-oriented free verse. People are calling it “broetry.” You’ve just read a broem. What is broetry? I spent three months researching the format to…

Dead Broets Society: The Story Behind the Strange and Bewildering Trend That’s Eating LinkedIn

I know you’ve seen them. The LinkedIn posts that go like this. One single line after another. It starts with a surprising personal story. An unexpected workplace anecdote. Struggle and triumph immortalized. In bizarre business-oriented free…

How to Become a Freelance Writer: Timeless Wisdom From a Bygone Novelist

Right now, freelancers are living in tumultuous times. One successful 18th-century writer understood the struggle better than most—and what was true in her time is still useful in learning how to become a freelance writer today. Charlotte Lennox (née…

The Complete Beginner’s Guide to TikTok for Business

“OK boomer.” VSCO girls. “Old Town Road.” Even if you’re not on TikTok, you’re probably familiar with some of its most pervasive memes. TikTok, or Douyin, as it’s known in China, is a social network where users share short videos, typically set to…

Fenwick's Name

It’s a little known fact that one of the most celebrated writers in the English language hardly ever wrote his own work. Instead, he composed his verses walking on a gravel path near his home, pounding out the meter to the timing of his footfalls.…

Your Writing Struggles Aren’t New—They’re Timeless

Journalism jobs are disappearing. Academia offers little refuge. B2B writing provides a world of opportunity—but this world also includes a million projects vying for your attention, as well as the pressure to work all hours of the day and night and…

How To Keep Multiple Writers Organized Over Many Concurrent Projects (Without Losing Your Mind)

The Mastery Project is a series where we dissect, study, and test a topic to produce rules for our writers and designers. When we learn something, we share. Emerging research indicates that digital clutter can be just as overwhelming as the physical…

Why Updating Old Content Should Be A Cornerstone Of Your Marketing Strategy

Have you ever seen a kaitenzushi (conveyor belt sushi) restaurant in action? Instead of a full team of waitstaff, they employ a conveyor system that parades a series of dishes past customers who grab whichever plates strike their fancy. Today’s…

An Unflinching Look At Our Old, Bad Writing And How It Got Better

Just about every novice writer faces what Ira Glass calls “the gap.” “Most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as…

The Definitive Guide to Instagram Video for Business

When Instagram entered the scene in 2010, it gave us a common aesthetic language. Suddenly, we were all citizen photographers and videographers, documenting every aspect of our lives from our coffee to our camping trips. Today, with a global…

How I Went From Cat Sitter to Freelance Content Strategist in 23 days

I knew the moment the interview finished that I didn’t get the job. This was starting to become a pattern. “I don’t mean to be cheeky,” another interviewer had told me, “but you’re Canadian. Why would you stay in the UK?” He had a point. Brexit was…

Reading Fiction Can Make You a Better Content Creator

William Faulkner once claimed that writers could improve their skills through osmosis alone: “Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!…

Reading Fiction Can Make You a Better Content Creator

William Faulkner once claimed that writers could improve their skills through osmosis alone: “Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!…

How to Engage Employees with Internal Communications Videos

You would think we’d be living in a golden age of internal communications. After all, today’s companies have more ways of communicating with their employees than ever before, from email newsletters to live meetings to Slack. Yet many employees are…