As many of you are aware I was laid off from OneScreen.ai back in the middle of November. It wasn’t a complete shock having a pretty good understanding of the macroeconomic conditions and understanding what was going on under the hood at the business from my role and time at the company. What this meant was that I was back on the market looking for a new home for my services.
So I want to share some lessons I learned from this experience finding my new home. This was the first job search I’ve really done like this since I was trying to find my first job out of college. I’ve worked at a number of different companies over the last two decades, but none of them required an extensive search and campaign on my part like this. I broke the whole experience up into an A/B test. Because I wanted to see what I could learn from this experience, and I’d also spent a good bit of time in the past year actively working in talent acquisition so I had a deeper knowledge of the process from that side and wanted to see if my hunches were correct. The A/B test was essentially as follows.
A) Networking – Actively go out into my network, specifically those on LinkedIn, and reconnect to catch up and see what opportunities they might be able to help me land. This started before my shared LinkedIn post here but a ton of activity and awareness was generated from this post too that I’ll share later.
B) Apply – Go out and apply for jobs that match my interest. I mainly leveraged LinkedIn for this but when possible, I applied through the company’s website vs directly on LinkedIn so that I could do everything possible to help optimize the process, like including a cover letter.
Understand the Power of Incentives
My hunch going into this process was that just applying probably wasn’t going to get me my next job. Yes, there are a ton of open jobs right now, but there is also a ton of great talent on the market because of recent layoffs in the technology space. I’d learned a few important lessons during my recent role in talent acquisition that had me leaning towards networking being the successful channel.
Work with recruiters – These people are INCENTIVIZED to get you a new job. Literally when they can place you into a role, they get paid. Financial incentives are hard to ignore and let’s be honest, much more powerful than someone doing you a favor. Also recruiters can be especially helpful in crafting a resume that will stand out and land that next role. (More on this last point later.)
Network with friends in the company – If you know a company where you want to apply and know someone in that company then it’s kind of stupid not to reach out to them first. Most companies, at least in the tech space, offer referral fees to employees for helping them find and recruit good talent. Once again your friend has a FINANCIAL INCENTIVE to help you get a job at their company. A bunch of you jumped in and made the offer, and I can only imagine this incentive helped. And I am appreciative that your company turns you into a sales rep on their behalf for it.
So what’s the takeaway so far – Lean into financial incentives when they are on your side!
Make sure that you are setup for success
Now it’s important to share that before I started just applying everywhere I needed to get a strong resume together in order to stand out above the crowd. I’ll be honest, the day that I was let go, I wasn’t even sure exactly what I wanted to do in my next role. My background is all over the place and I felt confident I could go in a number of directions based on my experience. This is where it was extremely helpful to talk to friends and recruiters I’d met and worked with to understand the market and help me get the right resume out there! It easily took the first week and a half through a dozen revisions to get to a version of my resume that told the story and the role I wanted to go after. For me, ultimately this was to fully dive into a senior product role.
Do not play this strong resume point down. Even if you have already been applying, go find a recruiter or two and give them your resume and ASK how it could better sell you! If you don’t know any recruiters, ping me and I’ll gladly connect you to one or two that are appropriate for your domain.
What Were The Test Results?
After those first two weeks and a couple dozen discussions I figured out what I really wanted to do… so it was time to get to work. I activated a LinkedIn Premium account and went to town searching for senior product roles and applying to them. I created a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. In one tab I listed all the people I wanted to network with, along with results and next steps. In another tab I listed the jobs I applied for, including the date, role, and some notes with results. I quickly applied for 50+ senior product roles between the end of November and the middle of December.
Of the jobs I applied directly for without a connection into the company, they resulted in TWO automated testing assignments and ZERO interviews with people. It’s also worth stating that even over a month after the last apply only half of those companies have even followed up with me.
It’s not as cut and dry to state how many interviews I had through networking. There were some conversations that could have loosely been considered interviews if I was really interested in pursuing it but I wasn’t. And there were others that went into real discussion. In all I’d estimate something like a DOZEN interesting conversations about real opportunities worth pursuing. I count an interesting conversation at minimum a conversation with someone at the company where we are exploring a specific role or the possibility of me solving a real problem.
So think about that. I’m not going to put any statistical analysis around it, but I think it’s definitive in my case that networking was clearly returning opportunities instead of the sound of crickets and frustration.
My Takeaway Lessons
Lots of learning happened here so let me try and summarize some useful bullet points.
Network! Don’t be afraid to reach out to someone you haven’t talked to in years. Personally, I didn’t want these conversations to be one sided of me just asking for help so for me it was really enjoyable to also spend time catching up with people on what they have been up to and asking “how can I help you?” My ask was more obvious, but I also want to make sure that I am giving back some value in the conversation. Many new introductions were made and a couple of these connections actually lead to new jobs for people who weren’t me. Always add value!
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. I’ll admit it took some time for me to post on LinkedIn that I was unemployed, but once I did I was humbled by the comments and PMs offering help and connections. Thank you! It was all that out pour of support and help that made me decide then that I was going to ultimately write THIS post sharing back.
Always give 20 minutes. Ok, maybe not every single sales rep that cold outreaches you, but take the call or request and do that 20 minute conversation. You never know where it’s going to lead.
Treat finding a job as a job.That’s right out of the gate I was working 8+ hours a day 5+ days a week on the job search. This includes all the things from planning out who you should reach out and connect with, researching companies, tweaking the resume, seeing who’s connected to who and finally interview and question prep. Don’t let this last one sneak by you. Come up with a list of questions for each company you interview while including research on the individuals who will be interviewing you on the call.
Companies need to do better in their recruiting efforts. I’m sorry, but it’s kind of unacceptable for your automated email template to tell the candidate “We received your application and will be in touch” and then never actually be in touch. I get you might be flooded with applicants but it’s literally your job to manage that. As someone who’s managed this process it really doesn’t take that long to see a resume isn’t right and click a button to send out a templated rejection response. If you can’t decide in a month whether a candidate is worth an interview or not then you really shouldn’t be hiring for that role. Also there were a couple of occasions where I did go through a whole interview process only to have to ping the recruiter over a week later to ask for the unstated “We went another direction.” Everyone’s busy, but for recruiters and hiring managers to have such little empathy and human follow-through is pretty disappointing. Do better.
Oh, I Did Land a New Job
So after all that storytelling and lessons learned, I haven’t even told you where it ended. Ultimately for me the pull of OOH was too strong. I feel like I have a lot of uncompleted business in that industry to build the future that I believe it can get too. I took a job as the new Director of Product Management at Motionworks. I look at the growth opportunity for this advertising channel like I saw digital advertising play out from the end of the 90’s to today. Today there is ~$40B spent in Out of Home advertising globally where an estimated $566 billion was projected spend in digital advertising. The real world is SO much bigger and more interesting than online, don’t you think? People just need to understand and know that it can be measured, and that’s exactly what Motionworks is tackling! That’s right, all you digital marketing friends out there. It is absolutely possible to get analytics on real world advertising! It’s also not 30% bot traffic, doesn’t impede on personal privacy, and you can have WAY more fun with the creative!
Specific shootouts for helping me get through this journey:
Kristy Vivian, Tim Rowe, Michael Redbord, Michael Ewing, Dug Nichols, Jamie Reeves, Amy Odeneal and Douglas Barron for providing real tips, connections and direction during this process. Finally, and probably most importantly my wife Heather James for continuing to support me in all the ways that she does.
I talked to many more but these people really helped me figure out what’s next and how to get it. Thank you!
This post was migrated over from originally being posted on LinkedIn.