I’m happy to announce that I’ve ended my job search and accepted a new Senior Software Engineer position. I won’t name the company here in an effort to provide a fig leaf of separation between my work and my personal blog but, of course, it’s probably not that difficult to figure out.
I can’t wait to get started in this new role but before I do that, I want to take a look back at my job search and – as Jessica Mauerhan did before me – share out some stats from that process.
I found out that I would be laid off on July 10 but didn’t officially leave my position with Intuit Mailchimp until September 9. In the middle of that I took advantage of a service Intuit paid for to have my resume professionally rewritten, getting the final draft of that document back on September 6. As such, I see the first – more casual – phase of my search as taking place between July 15 and September 5 and the second – more intensive – phase between September 6 and now.
With two exceptions, I applied only for positions where I met the vast majority – if not all – of the listed requirements. This is because I explicitly was looking for positions where I felt like I would be in a better position to hit the ground running. None of that “I’m sure I could learn that language” stuff. I also exclusively applied for positions with a listed salary range.
In the first phase, I applied for eleven positions. Five of those resulted in outright rejections, where the only contact I had with the company was them telling me I was not being considered.
One of the eleven led to an interview. I completed an introductory call, a technical evaluation, and a technical interview. At that point the company ghosted me. Emails to one of my contacts started bouncing and I got no response from the other.
It should be noted that one of the rejections was for one of those positions where I didn’t think I was a great fit. A recruiter reached out to me and it was early in the job search so I figured there was no harm in putting my name forward and, as kind of expected, it didn’t work out.
This leaves five positions that, as of this writing, I’ve simply heard nothing about. One of those has a applicant portal where I’m simply listed as “In Progress.”
In the second phase I applied for 32 positions. Nine of those resulted in outright rejections, two led to interviews, and 20 of the remaining 21 I’ve heard nothing about.
The last one was a position posted by an external recruiter and, after a conversation with him, we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t what I was looking for.
Of the rejections, one came near-immediately for a position where I am still 100% certain that I met or exceeded all of the listed criteria, which came as an absolute shock to me. Another was the second position where I knew I did not meet the criteria but the position was too interesting not to try for.
One of the positions I was interviewed for was, obviously, the one I accepted. Joining this team involved a five-step interview process. First was a phone call with an internal recruiter, followed by a video call with two more technical team members. The third interview was a Live Coding session while the fourth was a Live Systems Design session. The fifth and final interview was a cross-team interview with a product manager.
The final position that I interviewed for started with a video call with an internal recruiter and was followed up by a video call with the team lead for the team I would be joining. I was told that the next step would be a technical evaluation but I never heard any details about that. During multiple weeks of radio silence (despite my attempts to follow up), I accepted the offer elsewhere.
So that’s 43 total applications with 14 outright rejections, three interviews, one that I declined to pursue, and 25 that just never got back to me. Of the 18 that did get back to me, the average response time was 18 days. The shortest response time was one day (actually about 12 hours) and the longest was 57 days.
With the position I accepted, the time from submitting my resume to completing the final interview was 31 days, with six more days until the formal offer was in hand.
I love the work that I’m going to be doing in my new role but some of the positions I never heard back from are also for work that I was really excited about. I’m not going to cross my fingers and wait to hear back from them with a nearly 60% non-response rate, though.
I do feel like I should explicitly throw some disclaimers in here. Obviously, this is only my experience. That average response time could change if I continue to get responses from any of the 25 I never heard back from (in fact, I did get one more response between when I first drafted this post and when I could actually publish it). This is hardly scientific. It’s what I went through and, in this challenging job market, maybe seeing this information will help someone else.
