After 5 years of coaching jobseekers, I find this question hard to answer.

My product is live! Try OfferBee

The tech job market has certainly not been better since the pandemic started. Layoffs become more frequent with some FAANGs even doing multiple layoffs in a year.

We can’t choose when we have to look for a job. If we need a job, we need it now. The bills can’t wait for when the market is good again.

However, 2026 has given us some positive signals. I’m seeing a lot more job openings pop up on my timeline. shared that on some job boards, PM, engineering, and recruiting openings are the highest in 3 years.

What do these market fluctuations mean for jobseekers?

1. Tech jobs have fallen off.

They are no longer the chill, fancy big money, “get hired if you learn to code” jobs as they appeared to be years ago. This is a good thing. Most tech jobs were never that chill or fancy to begin with. Understanding the reality of this industry helps people make informed decisions about their careers.

2. Tech jobs are high risk, high reward.

My dad was assigned a teaching job right after university in 1990, and he’s been in that same school for 36 years. He was shocked and worried when he heard how frequently layoffs happen in my field, yet it was just another Monday for me. Not to mention the overwork and 996 culture, Slack and Teams installed on personal phones making us reachable 24/7, and young people pushing themselves so hard to justify their 6-digit salaries.

I believe we as workers have power against companies which we can leverage collectively. But the pre-COVID nostalgia is not helping us land the job offer we need today.

3. If the market changes, your job search strategy needs to change.

Companies evolved so much in the way they make decisions in the past 10-20 years. Yet many still apply to jobs the same way as before: same CV format, same cover letter style, filling out the form then wait for a response, “spray and pray”.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Civil rights campaigner and feminist writer Rita Mae Brown said it best (indeed, this quote was often misattributed to Einstein).

Share

So what should we do instead?

Here’s 3 tips on adapting your strategy:

1. Don’t rely on 1 job site. LinkedIn in particular is the most expensive job board, putting a high barrier for the jobs that get displayed. This means lots of openings are on other platforms.

LinkedIn is also built to monetize the data of jobseekers. The Easy Apply button jacks up applicant numbers so they can charge hiring companies more. On the recruiting end, we often saw LinkedIn as the bad channel with the lowest ROI, where often more than 60% of the applications being completely irrelevant for our roles.

Other job boards will make money in similar ways. This is why it’s better to see them as one of the many tools in your job search toolbox.

Don’t mistake convenience for higher chances of success.

2. Experiment. If you notice a specific method (e.g. networking) worked out well for you, double down. If something is not working out, try a new approach. What worked for others might not always work for you, because we all have such different careers and skills.

Out of personal interest, I collect unconventional stories of how people landed jobs in tech. 3 examples came to mind:

• Marta made a super cool short film about her professional skills 2 years ago and got over 140k LinkedIn reactions. I’m pretty sure she was hired very soon!

• A former colleague of mine, now an engineering manager with about 10 years of experience, told me he never applied for a job, because while he was still studying in university, he wrote a script to connect with all the HR managers and recruiters in his city, then when he graduated, he simply posted on LinkedIn that he was available for jobs and was reached out to directly.

• An experienced product designer mentor I know, once hosted an event in his city about product design and invited all his favorite companies to attend. He presented his work and of course, happened to have mentioned he was open for hire at the end.

3. Understand hiring mindsets. If you had 1000 people wanting to fix your lightbulb, how do you decide who to hire? Are you going to interview every person? What are things outside the basic requirements you might take into consideration?

From an applicant’s point of view, it’s easy to think “I met every requirement written here, therefore I should get the job”. But the internet (and the spray and pray method) made it too easy to have hundreds of applicants per job, most of them decently qualified. And the employer wants to suss out the less suitable as much as they can.

Did I mention I built my own job search tool? 🤯

If you’ve been following me for a few years, you know I’ve been slowly building up to this point… As a recruiter, I was disappointed in most of the job search tools out there and the ineffective features they pretended would work.

This is why I built OfferBee, a smart job search tracker that not only helps you capture key information, focus on the big picture, but also provides personalized tips as you go through the journey. If you’re looking for jobs, I’d love for you to try it out and let me know what you think!

Fortunately, one thing remains relatively predictable and standard in the hiring process: the first stage interview. This interview is sometimes also called a screening call. It’s often conducted by an HR person or talent acquisition person at the company.

Typical tech interview process

A typical tech interview process can look like this:

1. A 30 mins first interview/screening call, usually with HR/TA.

2. A 30-60 mins hiring manager interview. The hiring manager is normally the head of the department/team that is hiring for this role. This could be a Head of Product, an Engineering Manager, a Director of Sales, or in smaller companies this can already be the CEO.

3. An in-depth case study or technical stage to assess the candidate’s expertise in the field. For engineering roles, this could be a live coding challenge or a take home test. For non-engineering roles, this could be a presentation stage where the candidate prepares in advance and presents in front of multiple interviewers.

4. A final stage interview. This could also be called a culture fit interview. Usually candidates are scheduled to speak to either potential teammates with similar seniority levels or adjacent job roles, or other leadership-level people who have veto power (C-levels, heads or directors).

Depending on the company and role, the actual interview process could have a few more or less stages. Some stages could be all scheduled in one day to make scheduling easier. For example, Amazon has 4 stages on paper but the last stage is the final interview loop that consists of another 4 separate interviews.

Share

Standard agenda and question list for the first interview

Let’s zoom in onto the first interview/screening call. Given that this is the first time the company is speaking to you, and that the interviewer is likely an HR or TA person that doesn’t have expertise in your field, the conversation will be less technical and more high level.

Here’s a typical agenda with example questions for the first interview:

1. Greetings and small talk

2. “Tell me about yourself”

3. Career experience overview

4. Follow-up questions about your relevant experiences

5. Behavioral questions

   1. “What was the biggest challenge in your career as a…?”

   2. “What was your biggest achievement?”

   3. “Tell me about a time that you displayed leadership skills.”

   4. “Tell me about a time that you facilitated great teamwork.”

6. Checking logistics such as location, visa, hours, salary expectations

7. Questions for the interviewer

30 mins is actually not a lot of time to go through all these agenda items. If your first interview is only scheduled for 20-25 mins, this likely means the interviewer won’t go so much in-depth and is only checking the basics.

A candidate that’s better than other candidates

You might say, I have answered all the questions above but I’m still not passing enough first interviews, what was wrong?

Well, answering the questions is one thing; answering the questions well is another thing. More importantly, the real decision for the interviewer is “Did this person impress me more than most other candidates?”. The goal is not to provide answers, the goal is to impress the interviewer.

In your answers, the interviewer will be looking for these things:

1. Motivation

2. Relevant skills and experiences that show you can do the job really well

3. A friendly future colleague

Motivation — specific to the company

This is beyond “I want this job”. The interviewer should see that you’re genuinely interested in the company, this position, that you’ve done research on the company, you read the company website or the blog, and you have a good understanding of the kinds of challenges. Obviously we all need a job to pay rent and this company might not even be our top choice. But does the interviewer need to know that? Absolutely not. All you need to do is act like they’re your favorite company in the world.

Sometimes the interviewer might ask “Why are you interested in this job with us?”. Provide an answer that is unique to the company. If you swap out the company name in your answer with a different company, say Google, and if that answer is still coherent, your answer might not be good enough.

Even if the interviewer didn’t ask the question, you should make sure to bring up how much you’re interested and how you’ve done your research. They won’t assume you tick the box if they didn’t ask and you didn’t say.

Relevant skills and experiences — Mirror company language and prepare a STAR story bank

The most common thing I see candidates do when asked about previous experiences and skills is to just list a number of things they did in the past, chronologically. This is not enough to show that you’re a better candidates than most.

For these questions, you should make sure to prepare and maybe rehearse your answers before. Choose the experiences and example projects most similar to what the job requires. If the job description mentioned certain tech stack, make sure to mention those same tech stack. Don’t worry if the HR person understands your industry jargon — they are often asked by the hiring manager to spot those jargon — flaunt your expertise in the field.

The behavioral questions like “What was your biggest achievement” are meant to invoke specific stories and examples from your relevant experiences. Simple answers like “I led this project” are not enough. Bring stories that are structured in the good ol’ STAR format: Situation, Task, Action, Result.

Here’s an example from Harvard Business Review on using the STAR method to answer “Tell me about a time you failed”:

Situation: As a sales representative, I was tasked with closing a major deal with a potential client. I had been working on this deal for several months and was confident that I had built a strong rapport with the client.

Task: My goal was to secure the deal, which would ensure that I met and exceeded my quarterly sales quota.

Action: I prepared a detailed proposal outlining the benefits of our product and tailored it to the client’s specific needs. Then, I met with the client’s decision-makers. During the meeting and presentation, the client raised several challenges that I didn’t anticipate and was unable to overcome.

Result: Despite my best efforts to follow up with the client after the meeting and provide answers to their challenges, I was unable to close the deal. It was a major setback, but I learned valuable lessons about negotiation and overcoming objections.

(Takeaways): I also learned that sales is a team effort. Since then, I have always presented my pitch to my colleagues and manager first and asked them to poke holes in it to help me anticipate and overcome any challenges. I hope to find the same level of collaboration on your team because I truly believe one person’s win is a team win.

In reality, I expect you as a candidate to be even more specific. For example, what was the size of the deal? What kind of customer was it? What was the quarterly sales quota? Why were you still unable to close the deal and what did the client say? Since the failure question is kinda negative, you’ll want to end on a high note to leave a good impression. If I were the candidate, I’d also add examples of later successes thanks to the lessons learned in this failure to show I’ve grown.

Sometimes you might get questions that you haven’t prepared for specifically. This is why a story bank is needed: recall multiple stories that could showcase your skills and structure them in the STAR format. You can even write them down in a story bank. This is important because many blank out in the middle of the interview. Or sometimes it’s just been so long that you can’t remember every single anecdote.

A friendly future colleague

Don’t underestimate the power of being really nice! At the end of the day, interviewing is a conversation between two people. There’s no way the interview can be absolutely objective, and in practice it often is down to whether the other person likes you or not. Of course, they could like or dislike us for reasons outside of our control, but presenting ourselves as nice and friendly will give them less reasons to say no.

Caution: using AI is still considered cheating

I know a lot of jobseekers use Gen AI tools in the interview process. It might be that English is not their first language or they’re not used to talking about themselves. However, I would strongly caution you against using Gen AI tools like ChatGPT.

Despite some companies having clear interview guidelines that allow candidates to use AI tools, if it’s not explicitly stated then it’s still considered cheating. I’ve heard plenty of nightmare stories where the candidate is caught using ChatGPT to generate answers live in the interview, and the interviewer catching on because they saw the reflection of the ChatGPT interface int he reflection of the candidate’s glasses (in case you’re wondering — that candidate was rejected).

Chance favors the prepared mind

Interviews are like exams. Prepare for them like you would for exams. Once you’re familiar with the typical structure, created your story bank, structure those answers, and even practice with family or friends beforehand.

If you want to see examples of what a good interview looks like, I strongly recommend checking out this mock interview video where the candidate answered behavioral questions well.

Additionally, check out Exponent’s YouTube channel. They interview people who currently work at Google, Amazon, LinkedIn and conduct mock interviews with them. This video is a good example to the “What is your proudest project” question with a software engineer.

Good luck and go nail those interviews!

Just last week, I heard 2 of these nightmare stories from my network. (If you’ve followed my writing for a while, you can probably count my top 3 worst nightmares: AI interviews, AI ATS, and LinkedIn EasyApply).

One of the stories went like this: A finance analyst candidate who’s a business school grad and interned multiple times in finance at different startups joined the interview call. The interviewer was excited about her promising profile.

As soon as the candidate started to give her answer to the first question, the interviewer could see the reflection of her glasses change to a familiar layout. She opened ChatGPT…

The interviewer was disappointed with the extremely unoriginal answers. She asked: “Let’s go with something simple. Tell me about some common elements on a P&L (profit and loss) sheet.” The candidate tried to use AI, but seemed like GPT didn’t load the answers right away. She visibly freaked out. And this on paper very experienced finance person who had to come up with her own answer, said:

“…Revenue?”

Needless to say, neither were called back for the next round.

Share

Why did they fail?

“Why were these answers so bad?” You may ask. “Aren’t interviewers looking for knowledge and structure?”

First of all, using AI to answer for you is like hiring someone to sit in the driving exam. Most companies consider this cheating.

If you had to rely on something else to give you the knowledge, to the hiring team this means you had no relevant knowledge in the field you’re interviewing for. If you did, you wouldn’t need AI. So why should companies hire you?

“But companies use AI internally too”, you might rebut.

To facilitate some of their work, perhaps. I know many companies that use AI to draft some content or image, or summarize meeting notes, or a little bit of Copilot for the code, or get ideas for a small task like what ice breaker questions to use for the retrospective.

But if they could just ask ChatGPT, then why are they opening a whole job position? Why don’t they just ask AI themselves? Try having ChatGPT interview for you for a job at Open.ai and I bet they would have chosen rejection too.

Why was I told AI is the new interview hack?

If you think passing interviews is about getting the answers right, sorry - you’re misled. You were very likely misled by AI companies making fake videos of AI passing interviews.

To prove this, I went down a YouTube rabbit hole and watched 20+ of the most viewed “AI interview hack”, “bro’s interviewer almost caught him using AI” videos and shorts. I was very certain all of them are fake. Even if one or two were real, the interview answers were so bad that they could only fool fresh grads.

An interviewer that appeared in the 10M views short “Bf showed me how to lock in interview without getting caught” was also in an Instagram reel of the company, where he asked a marketing interview question followed by saying “Because this is America.” Then proceeded to hold up his phone and play the song This is America by Childish Gambino and started dancing. He and the candidate are clearly friends shooting a goofy video.

Another character who’s supposed to be an “angry interviewer” somehow appeared in 14 videos for just one account, where he apparently has led both a “Deloitte consultant interview” and a “GE electrical engineer” interview.

Digging further, I found that the top 2 accounts that post the same style of fake AI interviews are LockedIn AI and Final Round AI. LockedIn AI’s founder is Kagehiro Mitsuyami, who also cofounded Final Round AI. Mitsuyami himself graduated from his Master’s in 2022, and only did 2 internships for less than 1 year before founding both companies. I highly doubt he has an hiring experience himself. LockedIn AI’s LinkedIn page was a feed of clearly AI-generated SEO articles with no reactions or comments. Even LockedIn AI’s Trustpilot reviews seemed AI-generated and I couldn’t find a genuine review video of their product.

Tools that actually help with your interview prep

Let me remind people what interviews are really looking for:

1. Highly relevant skills and experiences for the job;

2. A candidate who could show those above skills and experiences better than anyone else in the process;

3. A nice colleague the hiring team will enjoy working with;

4. An employee who’s interested in the company and will stay for the long run.

In today’s highly competitive market, most tech company could probably get plenty of people that have 1 and 2. However, the ones who are also good at showing 3 and 4 will be the ones that stand out and make an impression. That’s why companies like Amazon have the “bar raiser” interviewers to vet top contenders.

The one YouTube channel I will always recommend is Exponent. This is not an ad and their mock interview series actually helped me land my last job at an early stage startup. Exponent conducts mock interviews with real tech employees at well-known companies like FAANG, LinkedIn, Stripe, so you can see what good answers actually look like.

Once you’ve watched some good mock interviews, make sure to practice with a real person. You can either work with a coach, or simply have a family member or friend jump on a Zoom call. Even if your family member or friend cannot give you professional assessments, saying your answers out loud will make you realize what works and what doesn’t, or if you have any weaknesses in structuring your answers for a particular type of question.

Next time before you let AI take over your interview, ask yourself: do you really want this job? If the answer is yes, close ChatGPT right now.

Are tech layoffs happening more frequently? Certainly since the Covid pandemic started. Layoffs.fyi’s data shows that in the past 3 years, tech layoffs happened a lot more frequently compared to 2020-2021. At least multiple times more by both company and employee count.

Companies are normalizing layoffs as a new HR tool

Layoffs don’t happen because employees are actually underperforming; companies already use individual performance reviews and improvement plans (PIP) to handle those cases. At the same time, anyone who worked at tech companies will know, if a company wants you out, they don’t need any concrete proof of alleged “underperformance”.

Over-hired? Maybe. But hiring budgets and strategies are decided by management and leadership. So if they made the mistake, why aren’t they taking responsibility?

Moreover, companies conducting layoffs actually hire back some positions they eliminated. Even Elon admitted to rehiring after his big Twitter layoff in 2023, and I personally know people who were rehired by their former companies post-layoff.

One of the most likely reasons for layoffs is to increase company stock prices and be seen more favorably by investors (read: greed 🤑). Tech investors look at what’s called “revenue per employee”, which is calculated by dividing total revenue by employee count. This metric could tell investors how efficiently the company is operating. If revenue per employee decreases, investors move from a buy to a sell position. Between 2022 to 2024, after Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple announced layoffs, all but one company’s stock prices started to rise.

Share

In the time of layoffs, you are more powerful than you think

So what can you do as a jobseeker to protect yourself and stand your ground?

1. Don’t take lowball offers. Unless you really can’t afford it.

I noticed European tech companies lowballing offers a lot more this year, in one case mid-level software product managers being offered only 50k+ EUR in Berlin (the actual median for mid-level PMs in Berlin is probably 65-75k) and some senior product managers were even asked to work for free.

If you don’t have urgent financial needs, ask for the salary you know you deserve. If everyone rejects lowball offers when they can, we will collectively increase the market rate for us all. Check out this previous article for specific salary negotiation strategies.

2. Give honest feedback to poor hiring practices.

A working student candidate went through 4 stages of interviews. A female candidate I know got asked to go to the founder’s personal home for the final interview. Another candidate was told he was not professional because he showed up in a sweater not a shirt. Not to mention the countless cases of interviewers constantly rescheduling, showing up late with no apologies, patronizing candidates during the interview, discriminatory speech…

If you were rejected from these processes, email the recruiter and the hiring manager, give them professional yet honest feedback. Write a review on Glassdoor or Google. Don’t let them off the hook.

3. Choosing not to apply is exercising your power.

This advice might sound counterintuitive: if job searching is a numbers game, and I need to find a job, then shouldn’t I apply more?

Trust my tech recruiter experience when I say this: job searching is only a numbers game if your conversion rate is low, and if you have time to kill. A coaching client I worked with sent over 1,200 applications over 10 months before we started working together; after working out a clearer job search strategy with him and a few rounds of mock interviews, he landed an ideal job only after 30 applications within 3 months (the job offered over 50 days of annual paid leave!). The majority of my clients were able to land job offers after sending 40-60 applications, and in one case, the person landed a job after only 5 applications.

Not only does too many applications raise the bar for everyone (I elaborated on the process in “LinkedIn is not your friend”), but also if most jobs get hundreds or thousands of applications, companies can afford to be shitty and picky, and still make great hires. This is exactly what we’re seeing in a buyer’s market (employer’s market). If you see red flags, and you know this might not be a good fit, don’t apply and withdraw your application when you can.

Subscribe now

There are often 2 scenarios where you might need to consult what the so-called “market rate salaries” are:

1. When you’re looking for a new job and need to talk about the offer;

2. When you’re speaking to your employer about a potential pay raise.

In both of these scenarios, as employees and jobseekers we want to make sure we’re not underpaid, but also we don’t want to name a number too high that would deter the employers from giving us the offer.

Having worked for a compensation benchmarking tool Figures.hr as a product manager, I talked to companies every week about salary decisions and what fair compensation means. However, companies exist to make money, and most are only incentivized to pay employees well to use their talent.

Therefore I believe that the best way to ensure we’re paid fairly is for us individuals to be more educated on what compensation packages consist of, how they are often compared, and how to best challenge companies on their comp decisions in these negotiations.

What’s your goal?

We want to understand compensation because we want to be paid well. But this can mean very different things to different people. In my job search coaching experience, there are 2 types of goals when negotiating compensation:

1. I want to be paid as much as possible;

2. I want to be paid a reasonable salary that can help support my life and not be underpaid compared to my peers.

It helps to understand your personal goal before starting to research salary numbers, because this determines which numbers you need to look at. Want to get paid as high as possible? Look for salary numbers in those jobs, industries, companies and regions where people are most highly paid and see if you’d like to move to those roles. Want to be paid a reasonable amount in your job or field? Look for salary numbers in your specific field and region. Finding salary numbers in very high paying roles when you’re not interested in working those roles is not constructive to your potential salary negotiation conversation.

Salary benchmarking 101

Now you might have a rough idea of why it’s important to be intentional about your compensation research. So how do we understand what a fair compensation is? What are companies talking about when they say they offer “market rate salary” on their job descriptions?

HR teams usually see 4 factors having the biggest impact on compensation:

1. Job

2. Level

3. Location

4. Company industry

Job

As you know, the job itself has a big impact on its compensation. Companies attribute different values to different jobs, and the variation can be especially large in the tech industry. When an HR team decides how much they pay someone doing each job, they also often see how much the same job is paid in other companies to justify their decision. (Although why should an engineer that builds apps make 5x a primary school teacher does? Are they 5x more valuable to society? With companies like Feeld that pays everyone the same $80k I would like to imagine what a more equal world could look like.)

If an HR team cannot find salary numbers for your specific job, they might use benchmarks for a job that’s similar, e.g. using project manager benchmarks when your role is program manager. If your role is atypical or combines responsibilities from different jobs, they might get the data from multiple jobs.

Level

Generally, levels are attributed to people working the same job but have different scope of responsibilities, experience or knowledge that might differentiate the value they bring according to the company. It’s also a way to incentivize employees to stay in the company for longer when there’s a ladder to climb.

Job titles sometimes come with a hint to their level, e.g. prefixes like junior, mid-level, senior, head of, director, VP and so on. Larger companies might have more complicated leveling systems that use a letter-number combination, like IC1 (individual contributor level 1) or SDE3 (software development engineer level 3). This is an example of a leveling framework for a small to mid-sized tech company.

What’s important to know is that there is no universal leveling standard. Leveling frameworks can vary significantly depending on the company’s size, business model, organizational chart and just their general HR philosophy. Uber has a bigger software engineering team to cater to their millions of users, therefore needs a larger leveling framework, as opposed to a small web development agency that might just have a few levels.

This means levels don’t translate easily. A senior product designer at one company could be mid-level at another company (another reason why I don’t recommend writing “junior” on your CV — you could really be underselling yourself). A director of sales at one place could be VP of sales at another company.

Location

The same job at the same job in different countries can be paid very differently. Even within the same country but in different cities there could be a big gap, especially in countries where some cities have a significantly higher cost of living, e.g. Paris vs the rest of France, tier 1 US cities like San Francisco vs tier 3 cities like Phoenix, Arizona.

Typically, HR teams want to pay employees salaries that correspond to what’s more common in the company’s location. But as more and more companies employ a globally distributed workforce, they might use one of these 3 location strategies:

1. Pay same rates regardless of location (“location independent”) — this means that the company will pay everyone San Francisco salaries even if someone is based in Lima, Peru. Buffer is probably the most well-known example using this strategy and you can view all of their team’s salaries and how they were calculated here.

2. Pay everyone according to salaries in their country’s capital — if employees are based in a small city or town it’s often hard to get salary benchmarks for that city, so a company might choose to pay everyone the rates of the capital city. At Figures, we had employees based in Annecy and Marseille in France, they were paid Paris-rates; others based in Limerick, Ireland and Cambridge, UK were paid respectively Dublin and London rates.

3. Pay everyone according to salaries in their own cities — this option would mean salaries can best match local costs of living for employees, but not always easy to implement. If someone lives in a 1000 population town there could be little to no salary data for their type of job and level.

Share

Company industry

Take the same job, at same level, in same location, but at two different companies with different industries, their compensation could also vary. This could be due to the company’s business model, profits, sources of funding. This example from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that “producers and directors in advertising, public relations, and related services had a median annual wage nearly twice that of producers and directors in theater companies and dinner theaters, $90,690 a year compared with $49,280”.

Average? Median? Percentiles

Say that we’ve done our research or our company has presented us with some salary numbers in a negotiation, and we’re seeing some numbers. Would it make sense to take the average of the numbers to say that’s the market rate?

As you might have learned in math class, the average number might not be representative for the data set. If there are very low or very high numbers then the average could be skewed. Imagine 7 people are paid the following salaries as below, the average is 6k lower than the median.

The median might better represent the dataset, but it’s harder to expect the median to change unless the market shifts drastically or if we change jobs/level/location/industry. So how can we get paid better?

Compensation benchmarking typically works with percentiles, which is another way to compare where a number is compares to other numbers in the same dataset. In this context, companies typically use the 25th, 50th (same as median), and 75th percentiles. If a company says they pay “market rate”, I would expect them to pay at the 50th percentile. But if they say they pay “above market rate”, I would expect them to pay at the 60th, 70th percentiles or higher.

Sometimes, going up a level will give you a bigger salary increase than going up in percentiles. Charlie Franklin, founder of compensation benchmarking tool Compa, shows in his newsletter Peer Group:

“The difference between the P3 level at the 50th and 75th percentiles is $20k and the difference between P3 and P4 at the 50th percentile is $40k — twice as big.”

This is part of the reason why you hear people say that job changes can give you a bigger pay bump faster, because you might be re-evaluated to a higher level in the new company.

How often can I expect a raise?

Many companies have what’s called compensation review cycles. A cycle might take place twice a year, once a year, once every few years, or at each employee’s anniversary. This is where company-wide reviews would begin to see if some people would get a raise.

An employee could get a raise if:

• the company worries they might be paid below market (lower than the 50th percentile) and that the employee would be at risk of quitting;

• the employee is performing really well;

• the employee asked and the company agreed (this can happen even if the employee is already paid at a high percentile or performing at an expected level).

One thing to note: performance reviews are different from compensation reviews. Companies can have a performance review cycle without making compensation adjustments. Some companies might have 2 perf reviews a year but only 1 comp review.

If you do get a raise, how much should you expect? Matt, the CEO of Pave, showed that the median base salary increase is about 4% for those without a promotion, and 9-10% for those with a promotion.

Your compensation negotiation checklist

If you have questions about the compensation numbers that your company presented, use this as your checklist to ask them questions and challenge their findings. If you come across salary numbers in your own research, leverage this list to better understand your dataset:

• Job

  • What job title or titles were used in the dataset?

  • How close are they to my job?

• Levels

  • What are the levels used in the dataset?

  • How are they defined?

  • If I’m changing companies, would the company give me a different level? Would that give me higher or lower numbers?

• Locations

  • Which locations do the data come from?

  • What type of location policy does the company have? Are they location-independent, or do they benchmark to the capital of the employee’s country or their city? If this policy doesn’t exist, would it help me get a better number if I pitch to be benchmarked against a specific location?

• Industry

  • Which industries do the data come from?

  • What are some of the other companies that contributed to the dataset?

• Sample size

  • How many individual data points does this dataset consist of? (For reference, Figures considers less than 8 data points to be too low)

  • Do most data points come from just a few companies?

• Percentiles

  • Which percentile is my current salary at in this dataset?

  • Which percentile would be ideal for me?

  • Which percentiles is this company aiming for for my job or department?

• Data source

  • Is the data self-reported or does it come from a verified source, such as companies’ payroll/HR software/offers?

• Data recency

  • When was the data last collected/updated?

• Future compensation review

  • How frequent are compensation review cycles at this company?

  • If this number is not super ideal, how soon can I expect a raise?

• Total package

  • What’s the base salary in this package?

  • What’s the bonus salary? How frequently are they paid out?

    • If the bonus is attached to certain targets, what’s the typical target achievement rate like at the company?

  • What are the benefits in this package?

  • What about stock options? How likely and soon can I cash out on them?

  • If I can’t get a higher package, can I get a sign-off bonus from the company?

List of places to find tech salaries

Gehalt.de: a German language website that shows income levels in Germany by region and job function. It also comes with a tax calculator (Brutto Netto Rechner).

Comparably: a US-based company that offers salary insights by job function and company. It also offers a simple equity calculator but need to sign up.

Peer Group by Charlie Franklin: even though the newsletter is mainly for HR folks and leadership, it’s very insightful for individual employees who want to understand compensation.

Peer Group

Fresh insights, polls, and collaboration for compensation leaders navigating market volatility and the new era of pay transparency.

By Charlie Franklin

Matt Schulman’s LinkedIn: Same as Charlie, Matt builds a compensation benchmark tool and is frequently sharing salary insights such as the highest paying jobs in tech.

Levels.fyi: If you’re looking to work at big tech companies like FAANG, Levels is your site. Although Levels also focuses on US salaries, and have more data in software engineering jobs than other job functions.

Techpays: run by ex-Uber/Booking.com engineer Gergely Orosz, this is a very structured self-reported database focused on Europe.

RED SOFA salary survey: recruitment companies like RED SOFA sometimes publish salary surveys. It’s unclear what the data sources are, but if they were taken directly from the offers given out to candidates then it’s likely more representative than self-reported data.

Wellfound: formerly Angel List, offers a job board and a salary data explorer for the US.

Handpicked Berlin: self-reported salary data for Berlin, Germany. Their 2024 salary report has been making rounds in my social circle, but I find the results very skewed towards senior tech professionals, and for a lot of people it might not be helpful.

In the next issue, I’ll share my take on self-reported salary reports like Handpicked Berlin. See you then!

A few weeks ago, I received this LinkedIn message from a new connection. Let’s call them Alex.

“Of course”, I opened the Google Doc draft they sent me.

The cover letter was surprisingly long, one and a half pages. As I read on, I realized the content was incredibly generic. None of the paragraphs seem to have a clear point. Words keep getting repeated and the tone of voice was very rigid. I could barely even find any identifying information about Alex.

Yes, this cover letter was written by ChatGPT. An AI content detector showed that only 16% of it was written by a human.

Okay, AI wrote my cover letter, so what?

“Did you write the cover letter with ChatGPT?” After almost rage-tying out two dozen editing suggestions for how bad the cover letter was, I asked Alex.

“Took an idea,” they said, “I wrote most of it”.

I’m far from the only person receiving AI generated cover letters and struggling to see their value. This Product People applicant for example, forgot to delete AI’s kind reminder for them to edit AI’s output, revealing that they didn’t write their own application…

These 10+ applicants all had the same idea, and it’s pretty clear that the hiring team decided not to hire any of them due to them missing one of the most important traits: strong (and authentic) writing skills.

At this point you might wonder, job searching is so hard these days, I have to send out so many applications to get a response, and every company asks for a cover letter. Everybody knows it’s a numbers game, and I’m not a professional writer, why can’t I get a little help so I can pay rent?

As shown above, using AI cover letters might be more likely to kill your chances. Let me show you why your time and effort can be better spent elsewhere with much higher ROI.

Myth #1: Job searching is a numbers game

Most people only need 1 full-time job. Therefore the ideal scenario is to apply for 1 job and get it, as it maximizes your success rate. This means job searching looks something like this: Number of jobs applied x success rate = Number of jobs got. Because “number of jobs got” only needs to be 1, the ideal scenario is 1 x 100% = 1. You only need to apply to 1 job because you have a 100% success rate.

However, most people also know that reality is not ideal, success rate is almost always lower than 100%, therefore “number of jobs applied” needs to be bigger than 1, but no one knows what their success rate exactly is, thus applying to jobs becomes a lottery where you hope that the next one would be jackpot but end up trying again and again and again with no end in sight.

On top of that, companies like LinkedIn make applying to jobs too easy, because they make money from you viewing, clicking on job ads and applying to as many jobs as you can. And what’s wrong with having a lot of applicants for each job? The bar gets increasingly high and success rate for each person drastically decreases.

Job searching is only a numbers game, if you don’t know anything about your success rate. It’s not a science, so no one can accurately calculate their success rate, but there are many factors that will directly impact it.

When I first landed a job in a startup, I applied to 80 jobs. My success rate was 1.25%. When I landed my current product manager job, after having worked in talent acquisition for 3 years, I purposefully applied to less jobs to spend more effort on companies that would prefer my HR background, such as HR tech companies. I asked 18 people for referrals and received 13. I ended up only applying to 19 jobs, which was a 5% success rate — that’s 62 less applications and potential disappointments!

Myth #2: AI cover letters are better than my own

For recruiters and hiring managers who read hundreds or thousands of applications a year, it’s very easy to spot most AI cover letters. They are so incredibly generic and boring and often contain little to no personal information at all, which is completely against the original point of a cover letter: to demonstrate your unique motivation and highlight key reasons why you’d be good for this job. We WANT the personal stuff about you.

If you feel lost without ChatGPT, here’s a great cover letter template from career coach Jermaine, who’s helped hundreds of people land jobs in tech.

If what you’re concerned about is your English writing skills, the best way to practice is to write it yourself, and then have someone edit it (trust me, I’ve done a non-fiction writing fellowship to launch this newsletter and editing is life-changing). Your end reader is not a an AI; your end reader is a living human being who aren’t expert writers, and often are non-native English speakers. Find a family member, a friend, a mentor, and have them read your cover letter then give editing advice.

Myth #3: If I get rejected it’s because of my cover letter (not true, unless they were AI generated)

This is how my recruiter colleagues and I would read an application:

Usually we agree with the hiring manager in advance on selection criteria and proxies to look out for. Then we start with the CV or resume, scan it for 10 seconds, occasionally up to a minute. In vast majority of the cases, the decision is already made. The most important proxy we look out for is whether this person has done the job. If someone has no relevant experience at all or matches too few of our criteria, the cover letter doesn’t matter in the decision-making process.

Cover letters are more closely looked at, either when a few candidates are close in competition but a decision has to be made; or when the hiring team is specifically looking for strong writing skills or motivation, both can be better exhibited in the cover letter. If it’s the former, companies that have much higher volume of applicants are more likely to encounter this problem. If it’s the latter, the company often makes these requirements explicit in the job ad or lead with a prompt (“Tell us about why you would like to join TechCompany?” or “What makes this job at TechCompany interesting to you?”).

Subscribe now

What should I do instead?

Instead of trying to speed run applications with AI, which might actually lower your success rate in many ways, here are 3 concrete things you could do to increase your success rate.

#1: Look for companies that value your unique background

Start with companies most similar to your past employers (maybe even their direct competitors). Then draw the circle bigger and include companies in the same industry. Even if you moved from another career to tech, you can look for companies whose target customers are doing your old jobs.

#2: Look for jobs on websites other than LinkedIn

LinkedIn as the biggest job site built its business model to get you to apply to as many jobs as possible, even to the detriment of your success rate. There are plenty of job sites that are less known but also gives you less competition, like Otta, Elpha for women, Arbeitnow, ProductHunt, WeLoveProduct, MindtheProduct, even the German job bureau Arbeitsargentur. Look out for niche communities and they’ll most likely have a job board somewhere.

#3: Networking to get more job opportunities and referrals

Even if LinkedIn’s algorithm didn’t recommend you the jobs, openings are often shared on social media. Therefore even just by being connected with hiring managers and HR folks, you might have a better chance of seeing the job ad first before it fills up.

As illustrated by my own experience, a surprising 72% of people I approached were willing to give me a referral, which often means your application will get read before your hundreds of competitors or that you’ll immediately land an interview round. Here are 4 real examples of networking messages that worked, and you can steal this referral message I used.

A better career is closer than you think. Good luck!

Share

However, if you’ve ever looked at any LinkedIn job ad, you’ll know the competition is fierce. I opened a random entry level product job ad, and LinkedIn tells me there are already 159 applicants, a week after the job was posted. And if the company is a bit more well-known like in the case of Klarna, there could be as many as 1171 applicants for a single job posted less than a week ago.

How can the average jobseeker even stand a chance when these numbers are so intimidating? Time and time again, I hear jobseekers tell me that they’ve applied anywhere between 50 to 100 jobs and never heard back for most of these companies. I once interviewed a jobseeker Tom, who told me “If it weren’t for LinkedIn Easy Apply, I wouldn’t have found my job.” Tom applied to 600 jobs over 15 days. He received 35 recruiter screens, 30 moved to the next stage, and he had to take 2 weeks off just to finish the remaining interviews. “That was the only reason why I landed a job.”

The vicious cycle of mass applications

Not only should no one have to go through what Tom did just to find a job, mass applying actually considerably hurts the chances of jobseekers. This is what happened when I was working as a recruiter:

In most companies, each job and its hiring process is handled by one recruiter. When my company received 500 applications in a week for a junior data analyst position, we realized one person would never be able to finish reading all the applications while still doing their other tasks. Meanwhile, this was just a junior data job, most of the 500 people could probably do the job well, but we had to select just one person. How can we make the selection process fairer and more efficient?

The team decided to add another selection stage — a cognitive test. Candidates who applied were asked to complete the test within 7 days. This wasn’t just to test the logic reasoning abilities of the candidates, but also to see which candidates were really interested in our company rather than just blindly applying to everything. Those who completed the test early enough, scored top 10%, and passed our CV screen, would be invited for a first interview.

When there were too many applications, hiring teams had to raise the bar and essentially made the hiring process more difficult for jobseekers. It’s like going to see a show — if someone stands up to get a better view, the people behind them would have to stand up too, and in the end no one has a good view (check out the fallacy of composition).

When there are 500 applicants for a job and when the selection criteria gets stricter, each jobseeker is more likely to be rejected even when they could have totally done the job. This then leads the jobseeker to apply to more jobs to increase their chances, which leads us to the start of the cycle again.

Subscribe now

LinkedIn Jobs are designed to make jobseekers fail

LinkedIn might charge the average jobseeker $29.99 per month for a Premium account, but it earns $8,999 per year from the pockets of companies for every Recruiter account (also called Talent Solutions), and each InMail a recruiter sends costs an additional $2. Out of all revenue streams, Talent Solutions brought in the most amount of money to LinkedIn in 2022. This means LinkedIn prioritizes the needs of companies over individual jobseekers.

LinkedIn Jobs don’t have a set price, but they work like advertisements: the company defines a budget, defines the demographic it wants to show the job ad to, e.g. Berlin, then it’ll show the ad campaign to LinkedIn users in Berlin, and charges per click until the budget runs out. The cost is around $1.20 to $1.50 per click. My company posted a LinkedIn Job back in 2020 with a budget of €500 to Berlin-based users, and the budget quickly ran out within a week yet didn’t bring us any relevant candidates.

For reference, this is a notoriously expensive job posting option. Many other job boards could cost anywhere between €90 to €500 for a month. If we had shown our job ad for the same price for a month, we could have spent the same amount and hired another recruiter!

Because it charges by number of clicks on the job ad, LinkedIn is incentivized to get as many people to click on and apply to jobs as possible. Jobseekers are not paying hundreds of dollars to apply, so of course LinkedIn can disregard candidate experience and doesn’t really need to care about the success rate of the applications.

Don’t rely on LinkedIn and use it to your advantage

Given what we now learned, let’s think about the right strategy instead:

1. Companies don’t want to paywall their jobs. They want to find the ideal candidate asap, and without knowing where that person could be, they need to show the job ad to as many as possible to increase their chances.

2. If job board ads like LinkedIn Jobs are expensive, this means companies might not always post jobs on LinkedIn. In fact, at any given point, LinkedIn probably only display a small portion of all the jobs that are really open out there. Companies will always post the job on their website under the career section because that’s one place they can post for free.

3. This means, the companies’ own websites will have the most up-to-date and complete list of open jobs. If you narrow down your search with a list of companies first, then go through their career websites, you’re much more likely to find jobs that suit you.

4. There are many other more niche job boards out there that are way cheaper and more targeted. I found my job on WeLoveProduct which is a board for product and design roles. My previous manager told me he hired his best people from Angel List which targets startup people. A former client told me he hired the best iOS developers by posting on iOS Dev Weekly.

Now you’re probably finding the jobs that weren’t flooded with applications. Want to increase your chances even more and reduce competition?

Might I suggest: apply to less jobs instead.

In turn, use the time and energy for 2 things: finding referrals, and company intel. At the end of the day, that’s what LinkedIn truly built for individual jobseekers — the world’s most powerful networking website. Networking when job searching is about getting referrals from people not normally accessible to you and getting information which are normally not accessible to you. With these templates, you can start networking today to get what you want.

By applying to less jobs, you save yourself from squeezing in applications that might only have a 0.1% chance of success, start sending customized applications that come highly recommended and have a 10-50% chance of landing an interview. Is it a good deal now?

Contrary to popular belief, burn outs are not just from simply overworking. In fact, I was a bit of a workaholic - I couldn’t help checking Slack multiple times after work, I would scroll through Twitter feed filled with product advice or recruiting tips, I took product courses in my free time - and I loved my work. But it all changed when my job became directionless as my manager stopped valuing my work, and started changing his mind about the product everyday.

I dreaded going to work. I hated that I’d open Twitter just to see product advice (“None of that stakeholder management stuff works, you lied!”). I would do the bare minimum amount of work knowing if I’d put any bit of passion in, it’d be immediately overturned the next day anyways. It’s as if I was a hamster trapped in a wheel: moving, but never forward.

So I thought, you know what? After 2 years of giving other people job search advice, it’s my time to put them to the test.

3 key hypotheses

From 2020 to 2022, I coached about 100+ jobseekers looking for jobs in tech startups. There were always 3 things I told my coachees:

1. Referrals are much more likely to be successful than direct applications.

2. Most people, including strangers, are willing to give referrals.

3. Quality over quantity. A more focused search leads to more success faster than mass applying.

Here’s how they turned out —

All the jobs I applied to

This is the job search tracker I used (recreated). Unfortunately the original was tied to an account I no longer have access to, but I’ve been tracking every single application since the very first one had gone out. You can use my template here.

I divided all the companies I applied for into 3 tiers. Tier 1 companies are the ones I’m most interested in and my profile was more relevant for. Tier 2 — slightly less so, etc. This is to not put all eggs in one basket.

So let’s check the hypotheses.

Referrals are much more likely to be successful

There are 3 ways to apply to a job - let’s call them application channels: direct application, referral, and getting sourced by a recruiter. No matter the channel, our goal is to get an interview to move forward.

I asked 18 people for referrals, ranging from close friends to complete strangers on LinkedIn. Out of the 18 people, only 2 directly said no and most of the remaining 16 people were willing to refer me. In the end, 8 referrals actually went through. Out of the 8 referrals, 2 moved to the interview stage.

However, comparing the interview rate of the 3 channels, referral didn’t come on top as I expected. This could be because I was purposefully looking for referrals at companies I think I had less chances with. Based on the small-ish sample size, my hypothesis didn’t really stand as expected. But if the remaining 9 referrals had gone through and assuming a consistent interview rate, I would have at least 2 more interviews.

Most people, including strangers, are willing to give referrals

Out of the 18 people I asked for referrals from, 8 are complete strangers, and 3 are people I’ve never met in real life. Nevertheless, a surprising 13 were willing to help me with finding my next job.

However, one factor I didn’t take into account was the fact that 5 of the referrals came a bit too late. By the time they said yes, the job ad was already taken down from the career site. I don’t blame them — you never know how long a job has been open for by the time you saw it!

50% of all strangers I reached out to said yes to giving me a referral, and this is the message I used (please steal it and use it):

Hi FirstName, nice to meet you!

My name is Annie, I'd like to apply for the Product Manager role at CompanyName, and was wondering if you'd be open to giving me a referral? Please let me know if this is too much to ask. I'd also love to share my CV if you need.

Thank you in advance!

Annie

Conclusion: referrals aren’t always more successful than direct applications, but they should definitely be leveraged to increase overall success. Would I ask strangers for referrals again? Absolutely.

Quality over quantity

This one is difficult to validate. However, compared to my last job search of sending about 80 applications with most of them going nowhere, it only took me 19 applications (not counting the sourced ones ‘cus I didn’t need to do anything). It also took me roughly 1.5 months of serious job search work to get to one offer, which became my current job. This felt a lot shorter than the countless months my coachees had to go through, especially during a year with the craziest layoffs.

I learned the hard way that job searching without a clear view on your progress or when it’ll end kills any confidence you had at the start. I usually consider myself a confident person, but even the jobs I thought I had a good chance at rejected me.

I will never forget the day before I got an offer — completely worn out, directionless, thinking I might be stuck in a job that sucked out all my passion, and passion was all I had. It was a cool summer’s day and I had to close the laptop and go to the park, or else I might just bury my face in a pillow and cry.

The new year is just around the corner. If you’re looking for a new job, take these lessons I learned to help with your journey:

1. Start with a clear plan of attack or a strategy. I focused on HR tech startups knowing my recruiter background would be an advantage.

2. Track your applications. Knowing which companies and jobs I was selected for or rejected allowed me to improve my CV, personal pitch, and application channels each step of the way.

3. Ask for help. Whether it was messaging strangers for referrals or speaking to mentors (shoutout to my mentor Livio, who gave me crucial job search tips), don’t underestimate how people are willing to help.

Good luck and happy new year!

PS: If you’re interested, I made these nerdy little tables for further analysis 👇

The start of a new year is often the peak time of job searching. January 2022 saw a record number of searches for Indeed, the job ad site, higher than any period in the past 5 years in the UK. If you’re job searching, make sure to prepare yourself with as much knowledge as you can.

I’ve not been able to post in the past year due to my own career progression, but I’d love to open up this space for you to ask me any questions regarding your job search!

To join our chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app, now available for both iOS and Android. Chats are sent via the app, not email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens.

How to get started

1. Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Substack Chat is now available on both iOS and Android.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Join chat

Pragnya taught me so much in my work, I cannot be more proud and excited to introduce this collab! What questions do you have for her on negotiation? She’ll share her tips in an upcoming newsletter ✍️

Using my job to help the other side

In 2020 when the pandemic hit, I, a recruiter with not so many years of experience (1 to be exact) started getting a lot of messages asking for job search help. As so many people’s lives were impacted by the layoffs, I wanted to help them as much as I could. I opened up my Calendly link to anyone on the internet so they could book a 30 mins call with me for free job search advice.

In the following month, I had almost one call with a jobseeker every single day. It turns out everyone faced the exact same challenge — everyone applied to way too many LinkedIn job ads and with little to no success (here’s why it doesn’t work). Little did I know, what I did back then was essentially user research, an important part of product work.

Forward and honest career conversations

Working in the field of recruitment and HR, we always have a finger on the pulse of people trends in the startup business, and that includes countless horror stories of how startups can fail their employees. Needless to say the pandemic revealed even further their reluctance towards change. I heard stories of rampant sexism, racism, abuse, lying, belittlement, gaslighting, you name it. Many talented people were extremely hurt or burnt out and even forced out of jobs they used to love.

It shouldn’t have to be that way. These stories made me furious, and I thought to myself: if these are the companies that end up raising millions, then I can do it too, and do it much better.

I wanted to found my own startup.

Luckily, my CEO is a very down-to-earth and easygoing boss, and my manager was a very empathetic and supportive person too. They created a very open and safe space for me to be open in our 1-on-1 conversations. Don’t remember when exactly but I started telling them, “A few years into the future, I want to found my own startup.” Pretty sure I said this again and again and again in every single subsequent 1-on-1s whenever I was asked about my career plans.

A trigger for action

In the mean time, I kept myself busy on the side. I built my own website to offer more focused and structured job search coaching on a weekly basis. I spoke at three different online career events in the course of a few months. I started writing the first edition of my newsletter. Whenever I had a chat with my CEO, I’d casually bring up these activities.

One day in August 2020, I finished a free coaching call with someone that booked me via my public Calendly. A few hours later I glanced at my phone and saw a Paypal notification: “You received €15 from [Person I just coached].”

People actually thought my advice were valuable! My efforts meant something! €15 was not a big amount but I was over the moon. I posted a screenshot on social media and my CEO reacted to it.

A few days later, my CEO brought this up in our conversation. “Really cool to see what you’re doing with coaching.” He said. “You know, we’ve been thinking about building our own product in the company and I’d like you to be involved.”

Changing paths within the same company is the easiest

A year and a bit later, my job title is now Product Manager. Of course, the change was not overnight. At first I was asked to try and give feedback to our MVP. Then a few months later I negotiated for an informal quarter-time (10 hours per week) role working on the product. In January 2022, I finally signed a new full-time contract as Product Manager.

And trust me, the new role was extremely difficult at the start. I had no Head of Product above me telling me what to do. I had no in-house engineering or design teams. My schedule went from an extremely structured calendar with interviews and hiring manager meetings to a blank canvas that my busy recruiter brain was very uncomfortable with.

I also had no idea how to be a product manager at all and had to carve my own path. I found 10 product articles to read every day, started Udemy courses, spoke to 4 mentors, watched YouTube videos, read tons of Tweets from Lenny Rachitsky and Shreyas Doshi. I’ve dreaded going to work many times and even cried after video meetings. But 3 months later the hard work did pay off. I no longer feel flustered and know what’s coming up every single week for our product.

For those of you reading and are thinking about a career shift from one discipline to another, consider shifting within your current company before looking for a new job. I’ve coached 100+ jobseekers and seen the competition from the recruiter side, and job searching is very difficult — especially for career changers. Most bootcamp graduates do not land their ideal jobs within 3 months (source: my partner went through a bootcamp + my friend worked at another bootcamp + I coached 5+ bootcamp grads). Here’s what you can use as a plan instead:

• Think very, very clearly about what you really want to do. I didn’t do this enough, but speak to people who work in your ideal job to understand what that job actually looks like beyond buzzwords.

• Put out some feelers in your current company. If they have an open attitude towards their employees’ careers, share with them your plan. It doesn’t have to be detailed, simply “I’m interested in X and want to pursue X in 3-5 years”. This is a far enough timeframe to offer so they don’t feel rushed.

• Your company doesn’t have to have this role yet. My company didn’t even have anything closely related to product, but it was forming at the back of the strategy.

Filling a position from an internal move is also hugely beneficial for the company: someone like you already know the company inside out, built solid work relationships with important stakeholders, and it saves lots of money and time that would have otherwise been spent on hiring from outside.

I’m not the only one who made a change within my company. My colleague Aidos went from a client-side Talent Partner to being our inhouse Recruiter, Angela became our first Talent Manager building learning and development programs, and Ludo moved to sales and became our first Business Development Lead.

If we can do it, you can do it too! Your dream job could be much closer than you think.

Do recruiters like when candidates message them on LinkedIn?

Jess is finishing up an internship and looking for her next full-time job. Jess messaged me one day:

“Hey Annie, if I want to apply to Company A and message their talent acquisition person on LinkedIn, do you think they’ll like when the candidate contacts them directly?”

First of all, why are you messaging them?

Let’s start with your goal. Why do you want to message their talent acquisition person? Is it to:

1. Ask clarifying questions about the position;

2. Ask clarifying questions about the hiring process;

3. Just to show your face and leave a good first impression

Turns out, Jess wanted none of the above. She wanted to know if the recruiter thinks she’s a good fit for the position. That’s the million dollar question right there…

This is a question I suggest you avoid asking, unless you are looking for senior leadership or executive roles where the potential talent pool is small so the recruiters need to build more personal relationships with the candidates. More importantly, the recruiters most likely won’t have an accurate answer to your question. Consider the following:

• The recruiter barely knows you. Your CV and other application materials can only give an overview to your past experiences, and past experiences are only one of many aspects that are evaluated (others include technical skills, interpersonal skills, and motivation). If your past experiences look relevant enough, the recruiter will move you forward once you’ve applied. It’s double work for the recruiter if they have to tell you the decision separately on LinkedIn.

• The recruiter doesn’t make the final hiring decision, the hiring manager does. The recruiter could think you’re a good fit, move you forward, and then the hiring manager could still think the opposite and reject you.

The hiring manager is the future boss of the role you’re applying to (if this is a marketing manager role, the hiring manager could be the Head of Marketing or CMO). The recruiter’s role is to make recommendations, and facilitate fair and open decision making processes around hiring. Think referees (or let me know if you have a better analogy)!

I get it, but what if I still want to know my chances before getting rejected?

Luckily, it is possible! Connect with a future peer (someone who will work closely with your role) or the hiring manager directly instead. If you’re applying to a Content Marketing Manager role, your peer could be the Performance Marketing Manager or Senior Content Marketing Manager. Your peer is incentivized to find great candidates by the hefty referral bonus (2000-6000 EUR at least), and your hiring manager of course wants to fill the position as soon as possible.

Still, this doesn’t mean you should throw out the million dollar question. Many jobseekers also go to the other extreme of being extremely vague to a point where the recipient has no idea what they want (“I’m a xx, I’d love to speak to you” and that’s it).

When connecting with a future peer or hiring manager, always make sure you’re friendly and clear. You could either ask to exchange via LinkedIn messages, email, or a Zoom call, and make sure to offer different options to accommodate the other person. Remember, networking is still a form of socializing, and a good way to proof your messages is to imagine you’re speaking to them face to face in person. Is it something you’d say to them in a real life conversation? If it’s not, you might want to scratch that. For example, things like “I’d like to add you to my professional network” or “I’d like to speak to you about this job at your company” would be strange to say because there’s not a specific action the other person can immediately respond to. Check out these four real emails that worked for inspiration.

Good luck on your journey 🍀

Day 24: Create a networking plan for 2022

The holidays are right around the corner, and word on the street is that companies will put a pause on their work until January.

Not 100%. Startups are known for their hustling culture, and I personally know a handful of startups that will be working between Christmas and new year. A few people have also reached out to me to book calls for the first week of January.

When January comes, everyone will be applying to jobs as well as networking, so if you can create a plan now to get ahead of the curve.

Write those message drafts now

Based on these connection request templates and these cold email templates, you can already create a series of drafts for the messages you’d like to send when networking in the new year. This is also a great opportunity to polish your social media bio as well as creating a personal elevator pitch.

When you reach out, you can already ask people for a virtual coffee in 2022 to have it in their calendar.

Prepare to connect with people

You can also start creating an ongoing list of people you’d like to connect with, or a list of mentors you’d like to meet with. Think of the career goals you’d like to accomplish next year and use that to prepare for your mentoring sessions.

Don’t forget to join and check out what’s happening in your professional communities. You also have an existing network that you can tap into.

Do good work, and share it continuously

If there was a secret formula for becoming known, I would give it to you. But there’s only one not-so-secret formula that I know: Do good work and share it with people. — Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist

Build a habit of continuously sharing your achievements, personal projects, even just your learnings along the way. I’ve gotten more job opportunities for my projects than for my Coursera certificates.

I hope you’ve enjoyed exercising your networking muscle with this Networking Advent Calendar! If you’ve been following the Networking Advent Calendar and completed more than 10 tasks, let me know and I’ll give you a shout on Twitter!

Is there anything else you’d like to hear from me? What are the biggest challenges in your job search? I can’t wait to share more insights and tips in 2022 🙌

Day 23: Create a plan with your mentor, as a mentee

I have been thinking about looking for a mentor but my problem hast been a little that my interests are still so wide and vague… I don’t know who to ask.

I’m really excited to speak to my mentor, but I don’t know what to ask or talk about so that I don’t waste their time.

Mentoring can be extremely powerful in your career. But it’s not easy to be a mentee. These are real quotes from jobseekers I’ve spoken to. You’re asking for the mentor’s time on a regular basis, and the mentor holds a senior leadership position of a well-known startup. How can you make the best out of a mentoring relationship?

This is a question I also had in my mentoring journey. If you’ve found a mentor from our past newsletter issues, the task today is to create a plan for your mentoring. From my research (and personal experiences), these are some tips that worked best.

Set goals

Your main goal could be that you want to land a job in their field, and that can be broken down into smaller and more specific goals:

• Understand what it’s like to work in their field

• Understand the skills needed for their field

• Get to know interesting companies in their field

• Find out about the biggest challenges in their field

Write the “job description” of your ideal mentor

Harvard Business Review offered a great tip: think of the type of person that can help you achieve the goals you wrote down.

Perhaps you need someone that can help you accomplish a project, make introductions to people at a certain level within a specific industry, or coach you through a tough negotiation. In your job description, make sure to also include the “why” – just like companies want potential hires to understand the bigger purpose of their firm, explain why mentoring you will tap into something bigger.

This relationship is not a therapy session

NPR’s post on mentoring offered two brilliant tips.

Remember to make and keep boundaries. We are human, and often personal issues will come into play during your sessions, especially if you have a pre-existing relationship or are talking about work-life balance. It's okay to vent. But make sure not to monopolize the session with personal issues or make it only about venting.

Consider establishing a board of mentors

Mentors also have their fields of expertise and their unique way of mentoring. There won’t be a single person that can help answer all of your career questions. I currently speak to one mentor on a biweekly basis but have been speaking to 3 other mentors here and there. One of them is highly empathetic and has been through the same challenges as me. The other is working at a well-established company leading a large team. One person can better sympathize with my needs but the other can give me more reference points of potential career paths.

Even if a formal mentorship period ends, keep these mentors in your life and updated of your achievements and pitfalls. They can be a guide when you're unsure and will feel appreciated that they helped you get to the place you're at in your career. Win-win!

Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!

Day 22: Write your elevator pitch

On Day 5, we talked about (re)writing your bio, which is a specific form of introducing yourself for social media. While we get ready for January, the hottest hiring/networking month of the entire year, let’s sit down and create a more detailed elevator pitch. Here’s a 3-step process on how to do that.

Start with a laundry list

Before you try to write a pitch that’s perfect in one go, start by just listing out everything you’ve done. Don’t worry about writing full sentences either, try to cover as much ground as you can with keywords. An example from my own experiences:

• Event organizer. Team of 6. Design, social media, planning, project management, public speaking. 50-300 guests. Student of the Year Award.

• Management consultant trainee. PwC Academy, data analysis, business planning, conflict mediation & team leadership. Best Fellow Award.

• Startup recruiter. Hired for 5 companies. Sales, marketing, engineering, data, finance, people, machine learning. Average 2 hires per month, 24.5% conversion rate to final stage. 5 ATS. Processes, training, employer branding.

I avoided using the exact job titles I held because they weren’t very intuitive to outsiders, and I used the easier to understand versions instead. This advice is echoed by big tech recruiters that you should adapt your past job titles to the companies you’re applying to.

Find a story

One issue with most self-introductions or pitches I hear is that they are basically a verbal version of the CV. So where’s the pitch part?

Based on the laundry list from before, add another section on what you’re motivated by and what you’d like to do in the future. Our past doesn’t have to define us, and someone who is constantly seeking to grow and evolve themselves is a candidate that hiring companies want to speak to.

Same tip applies here: don’t use hyper-specific job titles to define what you want to do. You can even use mission statements like “I want to help more women gain financial knowledge and make informed decisions by creating accessible software” rather than “I want to be a junior UX designer in fintech”.

Revise, rehearse, repeat

Finally, it’s not a pitch unless you can say it. Stitch the first two parts together through your story, make some revisions as you see fit, and start rehearsing. Record yourself saying it until you’re comfortable with how these words flow out of your mouth. If words don’t sound right, keep tweaking them and changing them.

Rehearse this in front of your family and friends, and ask for their advice. This could be a great exercise to do during holiday times, and is even better when your family and friends don’t work in the same industry as you do; they will force you to take out all the jargon and make it make sense.

January is when companies finalize their hiring budget for the new year and when they’ll be on the hunt for great future employees. Prepare yourself for January and have fun pitching!

Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!

Day 21: Connect with 2 people who are currently in your dream job

As the holidays approach, it’ll be harder to do synchronous networking (I made this phrase up, basically face-to-face conversations) like virtual coffees, online or in-person events, or mentoring sessions until the new year. But many will probably still check their social media while relaxing at home.

Having seen the insane competition for every position, I firmly believe in being laser-focused in your job search. If you’re looking for a job, I invite you to think of your dream job and dream company, then find 2 people who are currently in those jobs and those companies, and connect with them.

Write a genuine, human, and clear message, and once you’re connected, ask them about how their careers progressed to today. Feel free to schedule a call with them after the holidays (make sure your Calendly link is up-to-date and readily available). And while you wait for that conversation to happen, you can start writing down a list of concrete questions you’d like to ask them.

Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!

Day 20: Create a profile on Polywork

As LinkedIn’s becoming the new Facebook, more and more professional networks are popping up to offer alternatives. Polywork is one that I particularly enjoy. They raised $3.5 million earlier this year to build a more fun and meaningful professional network.

Polywork believes that our professional profile is more than just our full-time job title. It’s also our side gigs, podcasts, videos, blogs, speaking engagements and volunteering experiences. Polywork lets you showcase all these cool things you’re doing alongside your full-time job, and connect with others to help each other with their careers.

I find Polywork’s connection feature much more purpose-driven than LinkedIn, and not having a clear reason or goal to connect is often why LinkedIn or Xing are harder to network on. Once you set up your Polywork profile, you can go to Space Station and explore interesting people by the opportunities they’re open to or the “badges” (job titles, skills, past experiences) they have.

One small downside: Polywork is invite-only, so you need a VIP code to sign up. Although no company would be dumb enough to block their users, so you can follow their Twitter account which releases VIP codes on a regular basis (find some codes dropped on Dec 20, 2021). You can also try Googling to see if anyone’s giving out codes. While you wait for VIP codes, you can also check out these other professional communities to join.

Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!

Day 19: Share your learnings

Having worked a few years in his old job, Carl realized he wanted to be a software engineer instead. Carl took a software development bootcamp to pick up basic knowledge and landed a job quickly after. When speaking about his successful job search, Carl said:

The company that first offered me a junior position never asked about my bootcamp experience during the interview process. They asked me what I did after the bootcamp, so I showed them all these Github repos and interesting coding projects I did.

When many companies hire for junior or less experienced roles, they don’t expect the candidates to come with lots of technical knowledge. Rather, they expect the candidates to learn fast and be highly motivated. So why not start documenting and share your learnings publicly before you need a job?

On Day 17, you asked for help in your professional community. For today’s task, I invite you to share what you learned receiving help from Day 17 and beyond. If you’re taking an online course or learning a new thing by yourself, don’t learn in silence! Turn your learning into a project, a case study, a blog, or just a Twitter thread. That way, when you’re interviewed for your learning ability, you actually have things to show.

After all, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!

Day 18: Meet someone new on Lunchclub

The holidays are getting closer, and as many start traveling, it’ll become difficult to network until after Christmas. But there’s still time to meet someone new!

If you haven’t heard of Lunchclub, it’s an online platform that makes personalized introductions for people to meet one-on-one to have career-advancing conversations. Lunchclub was started to encourage people to meet in-person in 2017, but had to pivot quickly when the pandemic started.

When you sign up to Lunchclub, you can indicate your interest and objectives, such as starting a company or finding a cofounder (yes, there’s a bit more a focus on founders, but I still found many interesting people who are not founders).

Then you can choose what times every week you’d like to be scheduled a meeting, and every week Lunchclub will pair you up with someone new and send you calendar invites. You can meet people in your region or from other parts of the world.

The 15-people team behind Lunchclub has managed to raise $30 million. If you want to meet new people and not have to worry about where to find them, Lunchclub is a great tool that takes this task off your hands. Although I find it that if you have a specific type of person you’d like to meet, it’s harder to meet them by chance on Lunchclub.

Go ahead and schedule the last networking call before the new year!

Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!

Day 17: Ask for help in your professional communities

On Day 15, we talked about helping others in their career. On Day 4, we talked about scheduling a mentoring call through the Mentoring Club. Both of these tasks focus on connecting with people that you already know or know of.

Today’s task will allow you to connect with experts that might be out of your network. Have you encountered any challenges at work? Is there a technical issue or perhaps a career related question? I encourage you to ask for help in your communities and connect with those that offer help.

Which communities?

If you’ve been following this newsletter, you’ll know this is the third time we talk about communities. I hope by now you’ve established a bit of a routine engaging in your professional communities, because communities are truly one of the easiest and best ways to grow your career. If not, it’s never too late! Linking my recommended list below, and let me know if you know of more!

LinkedIn Alternatives

LinkedIn is becoming the new Facebook, thus many newer professional networking communities have popped up aiming to create more meaningful connections.

• Polywork: a global professional social network that allows people to share their career highlights like projects or speaking engagements. Website.

• Read.cv: similar to Polywork, you can showcase your own projects or view others’ professional projects to collaborate with them. Website.

• Blind: a global anonymous professional network where people ask and answer questions about company and career insights. Also has a job board. Website.

For Women

• WomenTechMakers: a global community for women in tech by Google. Its Berlin chapter is genuinely one of the most helpful and active communities I’ve been in. Slack and MeetUp groups.

• Elpha: a global professional network for women. They embrace the inclusive definition for women and welcome trans women as well as genderqueer and non-binary people who identify as women or femme. Web forum.

• PyLadies: a global community for women who code with Python, has local communities in different countries. Slack or MeetUp groups.

• WomenWhoGo: a global community for women who code with Golang, has local communities in different countries. Slack or MeetUp groups.

• The Mom Project: a global community for women in their working motherhood journey. The employers they work with are pre-vetted companies that are family-friendly. I’ve not signed up so I’m not sure what platform the community is hosted on.

For People of Color

• BlackInTech Berlin: a Berlin-based community that supports black people who work in tech. Founded by Kave Bulambo, Director of Talent Acquisition and Diversity & Inclusion EMEA at SmartRecruiters. The community is also open to allies. Slack and MeetUp group.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been in any other active tech community for people of color in Berlin. Luckily, DiversifyTech also compiled a huge list that includes communities for people of color around the world and people with disabilities.

Software Engineering

Most of the engineering communities are organized by programming languages.

• DEV: a global community of 660k developers. Web forum.

• Gophers: a global community for people who code with Golang. Slack group.

• BerlinJS: a Berlin-based community for people who code with Javascript. Slack group.

• Android Developer Group: a Berlin-based community for Android developers. Slack group.

• Lead Dev: a global community for current and future leaders in software engineering. MeetUp group.

• Ruby Developers: a global community for people who code with Ruby. Slack group.

• Hackernews: a global community created by Y Combinator. Also has a monthly “Who is hiring” thread where companies post their job openings, and it gets posted around the first day of each month. I highly recommend checking these threads especially if you are looking for remote jobs. A lot of recruiters see this as a source of highly qualified candidates. Web forum.

Product & Design

• UIUX Berlin: a Berlin-based community for people interested in UI/UX. Slack group.

• Human Robot Creative Community: A global community led by my friend, Austin Keeble, a former Google designer and part of the distinguished faculty of design at General Assembly. He also hosts a 30 Day Creative Career Lab (I had the pleasure to be a part of its version 1 — it was pretty amazing).

• Mind the product: a global community of 20k product people. Slack group.

• Product People: a Berlin-focused community organized by a team of product managers who offer their service to companies on an interim basis. Their LinkedIn page is constantly posting job openings, so I strong recommend following them. Other than that they seem to organize mostly in a MeetUp group.

• ProductHunt Global: a global community by ProductHunt. Slack and MeetUp groups.

Marketing

• Product Marketing Alliance: a global community for current and future product marketers. Slack group.

• Social Media Managers: a global community for social media managers. Facebook group (of course).

• Growth Hackers: a global community for current and future marketing and growth professionals. Web forum.

HR & Recruitment

• Secret HR Society: a referral-only community for in-house HR and recruitment professionals. Slack group.

• Peoplegeeks: a global community for HR professionals with 15,000 members worldwide, managed by CultureAmp. Slack group.

• #Peoplepeople: a global community for HR professionals. Slack group.

Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!