Job search postmortem

As I embarked on my one last week of freedom before going back to work, I decided to do some postmortem analysis on my job search process. Since I’m a nerd I made it into a methodical data mining exercise 😛 Anyway, here goes!

After 7+ years in consulting, I was looking for a career transition for several reasons:

1. The higher up I move, the more I have to project manage and sell, two things I don’t actually enjoy doing.
2. I like to gather a lot of information and understand things from multiple perspectives before making recommendations, and the time sensitive nature of consulting projects doesn’t allow for in-depth study most of the time.
3. I want to understand how a company operates as a whole, instead of just focusing on one specific function.
4. I want to make long-term contribution to something that I can see growing.

I reviewed my strengths and weaknesses and came up with this SWOT analysis:

Having picked up a lot of random skills throughout the years, and being the curious person that I am, there were a lot of jobs that I was interested in and thought I could do, everything from financial analysis to corporate development to marketing research. So I actually started my job search by looking at companies I wanted to work for, and combing through their careers page to look for anything that I might be able to do. This was quite a fun, since during the process I was able to discover many cool new companies and technology in general, even if I couldn’t work for them.

Long story short, after a while I decided the best fit for my skill set and interest would be something that involves:

1. Business analytics – I love digging into data to find trends and interesting stats, and figuring out what it all means
2. Financial analysis – I also love building Excel models. I don’t even really care what they are for. Just love building them (again, nerd).

Unfortunately I don’t have enough experience in either of these to make a lateral move from my current position. I can’t “manage” someone else in a job I’ve never really done before. So I accepted the fact that I will likely need to take a step down in terms of level and pay to get on the right career track. After all, title and money matter a lot less than being excited about going to work!

Now that I had my search words, I went back to the company list. Ideally I wanted to work for companies that fit at least three of these criteria:

1. Tech company (that part wasn’t hard!)
2. Less than 200 people
3. A product that I use or like
4. Located in the city (hopefully within walking distance)
5. Can wear jeans and flip flops to work (super important, also reflects the kind of culture I want to be part of)
6. Growth potential

Well, with these constraints the pool ended up not being that big. I started passively looking for a job in October. This was a scary thing to realize, but I haven’t really looked for a job since 2006. That was almost a decade ago!! So I had a pretty slow start with this and two lessons were especially important from this stage:

1. Apply for lots of jobs, even ones you don’t want, just to practice. My second interview in 10 years was with Airbnb for a global operations analytics position which I absolutely coveted. I’m pretty sure I could have done the job well. I completely bombed the interview because I was so out of practice.
2. Keep applying for jobs even if you really like certain companies and think you have a pretty good shot. Look at this table — I applied for 10 jobs in 3 months! That’s just… stupid. What was I thinking?!

So of the 45 applications I did manage to submit, well, I didn’t hear back from 73% of them. Eek! I think the biggest reasons are what I already anticipated:

1. Lack of industry/corporate experience
2. Lack of direct experience for the role
3. Too many years of work experience for the position

Thankfully after I got passed the resume review, I didn’t do too bad on the interviews. The main reasons for not moving on to the next rounds generally involved:

1. People/cultural fit – I think there was a mutual lack of affection during hiring manager interviews for some
2. Salary expectations – I’m willing to take a reasonable pay cut, but I do live in a ridiculously expensive city
3. Position fit – The position was too high or too low for my experience

When I first started the job search, I figured I would have the best chance at getting into a finance position. After all, that’s where most of my experience lies, and CPA + Big 4 background would mean a bit more to people in the finance world. Surprisingly, I actually didn’t do that well with the finance crowd. I think the difficulty is due to:

1. Finance people generally really want people who already have the right experience
2. HR not super clear on what the hiring manager wants and let me slip through the crack
3. I probably wasn’t super excited about certain types of finance roles

I realized the jobs that fit me best is generally something that involved a combination of business analytics and financial analysis. Unfortunately a lot of times the roles I’m seeking aren’t defined appropriately. So I ended up looking for anything that includes “analysis” in its job description, which is a much wider net, but I had plenty of time to sift through the job postings.

Well, in the end, I found a position that I’m quite happy about. I’ve used the company’s product for years, the interviews were challenging yet friendly, the culture seems to be open and collaborative, I get to walk to work, but most importantly, I can define my role and my future career.

Being unemployed for an extensive period is hard. While I wasn’t worried about not ever finding a job, it would defeat the purpose of quitting if I ended up in a similar role and company. Not that I didn’t think about giving up.

But I’m really glad I didn’t give up.