I was back in the job search market in August 2023. Despite the challenging status quo and massive layoffs from big tech companies, I took a leap of faith and left my company to dedicate full-time to finding my next role in the Machine Learning/Data Science area.
Naively, I estimated that I would be landing a dream role in a few months. The reality turned out to be longer than this. So, this process has been a marathon rather than a sprint for me. Luckily, I finished the marathon this month.
Now, I want to share the precious rewards — my learnings — to motivate job seekers and let them know they are not alone in this marathon full of ups and downs.
Here are the tips I followed and learned while running this marathon:
- Define your criteria for your next role
- Rejections will be more than successful responses
- Don’t spray and pray
- Use AI-based recruiting tools
P.S. There is a bonus tip at the end.
Define your criteria for your next role
As you gather more work experience, you become more conscious of which work environments you thrive in. In addition to the role description, the company’s culture and values, the work setup (remote/on-site/hybrid), and the impact/results you create are important factors that add to your success.
So ask yourself those key questions:
- Are you more productive in a remote/hybrid/in-office setup?
- What kind of leadership and management style is for you?
- What are the cultural elements that you look for? What values resonate with you the most?
- What motivates you day-to-day? Do you want your work to make a positive impact every day?
These questions will help you solidify your ideal role and company. You can get a gist of these topics by asking the right questions in the interviews, especially for the cultural values.
I was preparing my interview questions with the help of keyvalues.com. It is a great website for designing the right questions for the interviews to get a gist of the company's cultural values, leadership style, and team’s daily routines.
Rejections will be more than successful responses
Prepare yourself to receive more rejections than successful responses. This diagram that went viral on LinkedIn is proof of this statement. It shows the application statistics of a job seeker in marketing tech. From my experience, I can tell it is a valid statistic for the data science/machine learning domain.
I got 23 successful responses and 5 offers out of 100 applications. The rest was either ghosting or rejections. At first, I was demotivated and felt down with every rejection I received. I even cried after some rejections where I felt a high culture fit with the company and a strong match with my skills 🥲. After several downs, I learned to go through the disappointment of the rejection and not to couple it with my self-worth.
Also, a rejection applies to a particular role and time. The same position might open again in the future and requirements might change. You likely improved yourself in the meantime.
For example, I was interviewing with two companies in November 2023 for the MLOps Engineer and Data Scientist roles. I was eliminated from the process after the first interview. Fast forward to February 2024, I got offers from both companies for a Machine Learning Engineer role. So never give up and keep trying.
Full article @ https://towardsdatascience.com/4-tips-from-my-job-search-marathon-a480613a9309