The Retro (spective)
Us product operations managers love a good project wrap up! Retrospectives are a great way to take a holistic view of the project you just completed, bring together stakeholders, celebrate the wins, while thinking about opportunities you might keep in mind the next time you tackle a project like this.
To wrap up my 60 day job search here is the retro of how it all went down along with what I will keep in mind next time I have to go through this exercise.
It’s important to note that we are in a particularly precarious feeling time right now. With the recession looming, and layoffs a plenty, job hunting is especially challenging right now.
Insight #1: Job hunting is a numbers game
In previous posts I talked about job hunting being a numbers game. Usually, if you are job hunting alongside your regular job, it can be easy to overlook the casual JD you saw there, or the resume you may have put in somewhere. Given that I was treating this as a full time job I made a very concerted effort to track the leads that I was working. Here is what my funnel looked like:
If you had told me at the start of this job search that I would have had to scour 100 leads to land one job, I would have been in disbelief. Alas, in my case with the macro-economic conditions being what they are right now, plus the added nuance of needing visa sponsorship – it did indeed take me that many leads to land 2 offers.
The takeaway: Generating that many leads can feel daunting, but by keeping a short list of your "dream" companies, and investing in networking when you don’t actually need the job pays off!
Insight #2 : Job hunting takes a LOT of time
I've always been skeptical about people who say that "Job hunting is a full time job". This time however since I was methodically writing all of this down, I was able to do some number crunching and sadly I can confirm that it is indeed a full time job. Here's the breakdown:
Lead generation + applications : 200 hours
Recruiter phone screen : 68 hours
(17 hours for the calls + 51 hours to prep)Manager phone call : 30 hours
(12 hours for call + 18 hours to prep)Homework : 12 hours
Onsites: 45 hours
(15 hours for the calls + 30 hours to prep)GRAND TOTAL: 367 hours
Let's pretend that you are limiting your job search to 8 hours a day (which still is a massive amount of time) that could bring your job search to 45 days!
The takeaway: Job hunting is a process and there’s only so much you can speed it up. As you can see above, it takes weeks to move through the stages.
Even at the most rapid clip, the fact that most tech jobs have 3-4 stages means that you'll progress from initial screen to onsite in a 2-4 week time frame. (My fastest end to end took 4 weeks!)
All this is to say, sometimes we look at people’s job search and think - “wow that was quick!” or “how come it was so easy for them?”.
What we aren’t always privy to is the amount of hustle it took them to get there. My husband likes to joke that he’s never seen me work this hard! Not going to lie, I definitely need several weeks of Netflix and staring at the ceiling to recoup from the stress of it all. And all my stakeholders (read my husband and child) are thrilled this chapter is behind us!
