I'm happy to announce that I've taken a new job! Whoo hoo! I'm leaving the company that I began my career with, which I've been with for 13 years. I'll be joining an actuarial consulting firm. It's a step up for me. I wanted to share some scattered observations on the job search.
I applied through a recruitment firm. This was an interesting and (I think) useful experience. The recruiter gets some kind of payoff if they actually deliver a viable candidate to the firm, so they have an incentive to help you get hired. They look over your resume and suggest adjustments. I'm assuming this helped me. When I write a resume, I'm just trying to honestly lay out my job history, relevant projects, skill set, credentials, etc. But the recruiter is "optimizing" for the low attention spans of HR folks and hiring managers who look over dozens of these things. I get the point of "resume optimization". But at the same time I'm thinking, "Do hiring managers really not have the time to vet candidates? Will they really pass over a resume because it doesn't reduce a work history to choppy, easily digestible bullet points?" How fucking shallow is this process? I originally had my work history spelled out in a few short, narrative paragraphs describing notable projects I had done. You know, the kind of thing that's written for a human being with high school level reading comprehension. Making the right hiring decision is probably worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and yet they can't be bothered to actually read the content of someone's work history? If I can't reduce an important project (one that demonstrates my skillset) to a single sentence, it won't pass the hiring manager's mental bandwidth? (Actually more like a sentence fragment, because one recruiter just told me to "start with the verb" and drop the subject.) The people who interviewed me certainly were not this shallow, so they must be optimizing for someone else. I understand that in many companies the HR department is the first to touch these resumes. The folks who interviewed me were technical people, and the folks in HR are often...not. I'm guessing resume optimization is for the sake of making it past this first round of "blockers," who really will reject a resume for stupid reasons.
(One recruiter suggested I pull out a thesaurus and change up my words. I build predictive models for a living, so my resume repeated the words "built" and "modeled" a lot. Is someone really looking over this resume and getting bored with the repetition? So bored as to not take in the actual content? How does a person with such a short attention span successfully hold a job in corporate America? And why are they in charge of important hiring decisions? Anecdotally, I've heard about managers getting furious with HR because HR's filtering system weeded out a perfectly good candidate, one that the manager knew about from another channel. Clearly there is some kind of broken "candidate filtering" going on in some companies. It could be a misfiring predictive model, or good old fashioned bad judgment.)
Another observation. I actually had two different recruiters look at my resume. One went first; she helped me revise my resume. Then I gave the resume that she and I had landed on to a second recruiter. The second recruiter had a bunch of revisions. I don't know if this second person had a set of exacting standards, or if she just felt a need to change something to make the exercise worthwhile. When I told a friend about the experience, he laughed and said he'd experienced the same. "I've had six sets of eyes on my resume, successful professionals all, and they each proclaim different opinions loudly!" All that said, the work that went into improving my resume is appreciated. I'm sure it improved my chances.
I'll complain about this privately, but I'm not one of these guys with a chip on his shoulder who won't put up with "stupid bullshit." It's just how the game is played, so play the hand you're dealt. Stupid bullshit is just part of the deal, so roll with it.
It really took a long time to work through the process. The whole experience left me feeling like I should always have a prospect "in the pipeline." It took me something like two and a half months from resume submission to receipt of a job offer. Of course, it takes them time to look over your resume, to decide whether to interview you or not, to discuss you after interviewing and share thoughts, and to ultimately give the thumbs up or down. While you're waiting, you feel like it's the most important thing in the world, so why won't they get on with it already? But you have to patiently remind yourself that it's not the most pressing item to the people making the hiring decision.
Applicant: (lying belly-down on bed with legs curled up, looking at phone). "Should I text him? 'Whatcha thinking about? :) Feeling cute, might update my resume tonight.' No, don't send that!"
Hiring Manager: "What's this half-hour blocked off on my calendar for this afternoon? Oh, right, it's to discuss those half-dozen buffoons we interviewed three weeks ago. I guess I'll review my notes, which I absolutely didn't take."
It's rarely the case that the most pressing concern in your life is also someone else's top priority. The experience is a reminder that, if my job were to suddenly disappear, I would be jobless for a span of a few months. At the same time, I feel a sense of freedom. I had felt "locked in" at my previous employer. No other employer within commuting distance would have offered me remotely comparable compensation. (A good problem to have, by the way, even if it does lead to a yearning for novelty now and then.) With Covid forcing everyone to work from home, 2020 opened up a lot of employers who were outside my geographic range. Some of those companies are embracing fully remote employment for the indefinite future.
Something happened when I gave my boss my two week's notice, which I'd witnessed when another colleague left. My boss tried to keep me. He asked if there was anything he could do to change my mind, even asking about my compensation in the hopes that he could match the offer by my new employer. I understand the impulse to do this, but it seemed strange. Does that ever actually work? Suppose you successfully make a counter-offer to someone who just told you he's resigning. Isn't there now a pall over your working relationship? Your boss now knows you aren't totally happy with your job, and that you'd obviously been plotting to leave the company for a span of weeks or months, and that you took concrete steps to do so. Can they go on pretending this was never so? You're still the same person, perhaps still slightly resenting a collection of unaired grievances against your employer. You'd be seen as a flight risk, your future departure being something that the boss needs to hedge against. Your loyalty to the company is obviously now in question. If someone is leaving your organization, the right thing to say is, "I'm happy for you!" Or "What a wonderful opportunity! Best of luck." On the other hand, I know some people will get a job offer as a negotiating tactic, expecting or asking for a counter-offer. Maybe my boss thought this was what I was doing? In that case, it's probably fine to view the employee's job search as entirely transactional, to not get bogged down in all this emotional baggage about questionable loyalty and unseen grievances.
(Have you ever witnessed the awkwardness that arises when a boss is trying to anticipate an older employee's imminent retirement? I've seen it in about three different contexts, but it's always the same. The older employee is slightly resentful about being nudged out the door. S/he wants to keep this very private decision about the exact timing to her/himself. The boss just wants to be able to plan properly, so the company isn't left short-handed and understaffed for important projects. But planning for recruitment and the training of a replacement entail knowing when the replaced employee will leave. I think an employee who nearly takes another job but gets snagged back at the last second is under a similar cloud of uncertainty. The employee would have to give some kind of credible signal that "everything is okay now," that it was all about the now-remedied compensation or a now-delivered promotion.)
Those are my scattered thoughts. If you've been at the same job for a while, I almost recommend looking elsewhere just to see what the market is like. Try to land a job interview, say, every two or three years, even if you're not seriously looking. You may learn a few things from the interview process about possible inadequacies in your skill set (or perhaps quite the contrary!). You may be taken aback by the lag in the decision-making process. Also, it's always good to have a "dry run" interview if you haven't done one in a while. Interviewing with a company that you're not 100% serious about may be a good way to get the jitters out. I feel like I flubbed a couple of my early interviews, and had a few "I won't make that mistake again" moments. It's good to have those out of the way when you're interviewing with a company that you're more serious about.
