My grueling 4-month job search as an ex-management consultant / corporate strategist

For most it probably goes without saying that searching for a job sucks, but I was surprised and humbled by how difficult it was to land a ‘good’ job.

If you are wondering ‘how long your job search will take‘, ‘how many applications you should submit‘, or ‘what you can expect in the interview process‘, this post may provide some insight.

Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes 🙂

A bit of background

tl;dr looking for a job in Strategy & Ops / Business Operations / Corporate Strategy at a mission-driven tech company with 6 Years of Experience (4 in management consulting, 2 corporate strategy)

After undergrad I worked as a management consultant at a tier-2 firm for 4 years, progressing from Business Analyst to Senior Business Analyst to Associate. Money was great, hours were abysmal (so was the money really that great?)

Next I worked in corporate strategy for a Fortune 500 company for 2 years. I took a bit of a ‘pay cut’ off the top, however, the pay was actually comparable on an hourly basis and I had more hours to enjoy my life.

Then, like so many others during the Great Resignation, I quit without another job lined up. It’s a popular saying that ‘people quit bosses, not companies’ and that was 100% the case for me. My new boss was a tyrant and a poor cultural fit, which was an opinion shared by most of my coworkers and he actually ended up leaving the company 2 months after I quit, but I digress.

Sidebar: Instead of immediately searching for a new job I was fortunate enough to be able to pursue some passion projects (such as starting this blog). I bring this up because people often look at you crazy when you tell them you’re not working nor looking for a job, and I felt this stigma acutely. Many passions, perhaps most, cannot flourish within the confines of a 9-5 and the world is a better place when more people follow their passions. Additionally, our leisure time becomes less valuable or at least more limited as we age. Pursuing a passion or simply enjoying the fruits of labor before retirement should be celebrated, not shamed. Work is important, but it’s not the only thing. Please be supportive to those who are going against the grain, it can be really rough.

Anyways, eventually I decided that I wanted to rejoin the business community and began looking for Strategy & Ops, Business Operations, and Corporate Strategy roles at mission-driven tech companies.

1 Page Summary

In consulting you are often asked to provide a one-page summary or ‘one-pager’ for short. Details are important, but executives often don’t have the time (or attention span) to carefully read through multiple pages so you have to convey the most essential information with a few bullet points or a single graph.

According to r/dataisbeautiful, the best visual for a job search is a Sankey Diagram:

However, I disagree–think a simple funnel is better:

Although a funnel is less ‘beautiful’, it is far more digestible. With a funnel it is much easier to identify where issues are occurring and compare your performance to benchmarks. See how long it takes you to identify what % of interviews lead to an offer with both visuals. The Sankey Diagram provides more raw data than insight. That’s why in my 6 years of working with the C-Suite I have seen precisely 0 Sankey Diagrams…

That said, I believe Sankey Diagrams can still be useful, but it belongs in the appendix along with other materials for those who have the time and interest to dig deeper.

Lessons Learned

There has been a lot of solid stuff written on the major components of a job search (e.g. creating a resume, interview prep, cover letter) so I want to focus on more niche aspects:

• Identification:
  • Industry first: If you search on LinkedIn, Indeed, or any other job site, you will quickly become overwhelmed, and it’s not your fault! The search functionality on these sites is atrocious and the quality of postings can be poor (duplicate postings, title and responsibilities mismatch, no salary range, etc.) Sorting through all this noise is exhausting, so search by company (instead of ‘title’ or some other criteria). This takes additional effort upfront to identify companies and industries you are interested in, but will decrease your time spent blindly scrolling through jobs, will ensure you apply to companies you are actually interested in, and may even help you find opportunities that are not highly visible or even present on job boards!
• Application:
  • Do not over-apply: you do need to pump out a lot of applications, but pump out too many and you’ll end up having bombing 6 interviews in a week because you were overwhelmed.
  • Do not network for a job: by the time someone responds to your request to chat the interview process will be well underway or even complete. Also, the person may not have influence with the hiring manager or be willing to advocate for you. Networking is great for your long-term career, but too slow and time-intensive to realistically help you get a leg up on a specific job posting.
  • Measure and monitor: develop a simple spreadsheet to track your applications. This will allow you to notice where you should focus on improving and will allow you to send updates to friends to help hold you accountable (I sent weekly texts of a few graphs).
  • Be your own hype man: if you have done SQL for 1 month, congratulations you know SQL. If you have managed a team through persuasion, your resume and interviews should speak to your direct management experience. Do not let a technicality disqualify you from an opportunity. If you know you are capable, then lie. I left a decent amount of money on the table because I was honest about how much I had used ‘Tableau’, which is a tool anyone can become proficient in a few weeks…
• Interviewing:
  • Be wary of Take Home Assessments: if you feel confident the fit is wrong, then proceed with caution. If you feel confident the fit is wrong and there is a Take Home Assessment (more on this later), then run away (after receiving the Take Home Assessment to inform your gut feeling). I wasted many hours on Take Home Assessments for companies who had such low interest in me that they did not even bother providing feedback on my work…
  • $$$ up front: do not waste your time interviewing if a company is unwilling to discuss compensation in your first meeting. Those companies are almost always going to make you a low-ball offer. Sure, the exact offer amount depends on how well the interview process goes, but, if a company is unwilling to provide you with a salary range, it’s because they know you won’t like it…
• Decision Making:
  • Compare offers holistically: it’s not all about the money. People matter, location matters, work-life-balance matters. This is probably worthy of it’s own post, but don’t base your decision based on money. There is ample evidence that money, after a certain point, does not increase happiness.

Final Thoughts

Appendix

How long does it take?

Longer than you think. I naively thought it would take 1 month to land a job when on average it took 1 month just to get a ‘yes/no’ answer.

Interestingly companies that offered an interview generally responded sooner than those who did not:

In terms of how long the entire process takes (waiting to hear back from application plus interviewing plus waiting for a final decision), all 5 of my end-to-end experiences lasted between 30 and 45 days:

This lengthy process is due to the fact that all companies required 5-6 interviews and only 1 company did NOT require a Take Home Assessment (more on that in a moment).

In conclusion, don’t underestimate how long your job search will take. Sure you could finish in a month, but that is unrealistic given how long companies take to respond and how likely an application is to result in an offer (a measly 3% of all applications in my case).

The Rise of Take Home Assessments

A major reason why the interview process took longer than I expected is because ~75% of companies asked me to complete a take home assessment:

What is a take home assessment? What exactly you are supposed to do varies, but in my case they all involved analyzing data in Excel and making a presentation in PowerPoint. None of the analysis was very challenging (very simple descriptive statistics, PivotTables, and index-matches), however, every assessment came with a high, sometimes maddening amount of ambiguity and deciding how to frame your recommendations was usually difficult. As an ex-management consultant it is nothing you really need to prepare in advance for (you can listen to me because I think my ‘true’ pass rate was closer to 75%+ because I felt a few assessments were requested of me without much actual interest from the company…). Also, companies are going to tell you ‘don’t spend more than 4-6 hours on this’, but you will need to put in 8-12 hours to do a good job.

Why do companies offer them? There are a few major reasons in my opinion:

• 1) risk-avoidance — it’s sort of easy to bluff through verbal interviews so this is a way to make sure a candidate actually has some of the basic skills required for the role
• 2) filter mechanism — Nobody is going to spend 10 hours during the weekend on a take home assessment unless they are seriously interested in the opportunity. There are some drawbacks to this approach though, namely superstar candidates who are only weakly interested or super-busy will drop out of the recruiting funnel. This guy has some interesting thoughts on why this is a bad idea for companies
• 3) sense of the work — interviewers claimed that the assessment would give me a better sense of the work, which was sort of true, but I also could have gained a sense of the work by talking about the projects they work on…
• 4) it’s free — it costs virtually nothing for a company to ask you to do a Take Home Assessment. Someone has to develop the materials once and that’s it. For a shocking # of my interviews the interviewers had not even seen my completed case before the interview…
• 5) leverage — related to ‘filter mechanism’, but distinct. A company is almost always going to have more applicants for a role than candidates have other job opportunities. Also, if a company does not quickly fill a role, they are probably not going to collapse, whereas an individual has a much more compelling need for a job and the money that comes from it. So companies can comfortably assume that there will be some number of candidates who are willing to do pretty much anything a company asks them to do.

Ghosting

It’s not just a malady of online dating. Recruiters and companies also ghost candidates, which can be even more devastating than getting ghosted by your crush.

Similar to online dating, there are two types of ghosting:

• 1) never hearing back regarding an application (which of course isn’t really ghosting…)
• 2) never hearing back after talking to someone (which is definitely ghosting)

While hearing nothing regarding an application is frustrating, it pales in comparison to getting ghosted after speaking to someone for 30 minutes…

Companies and recruiters have the leverage, but we can fight back (sort of)! I am not going to dox any individuals here, but I will list companies the companies they worked for and implicitly allow this type of behavior:

• TuneIn
• Angi
• Zillow
• Steelcase

Of course, Glassdoor is probably a better resource than my obscure blog for fighting back so I left negative reviews for these companies, however, the site has some shortcomings:

• 1) you cannot easily drill-down by position, process length, ghost/no-ghost, etc.
• 2) there are a lot of people claiming that their negative reviews were removed from Glassdoor
  • Glassdoor explicitly states that employers cannot pay to remove negative reviews
  • However, but it’s pretty easy to imagine workarounds–e.g. ‘policy violation’–to effectively do so for their customers
  • Glassdoor’s customers are corporations, not individuals like you and me…

Nonetheless, I think Glassdoor (and Twitter) are probably the best thing us candidates have other than our informal networks.

Could someone please build something better?

Did I get better at applying and interviewing?

This is a great question to ask, especially if your job search is dragging on. In terms of applications, my performance fluctuated quite a bit and it’s difficult to argue that I improved…

However, there is a compelling argument that I got better at interviewing as time went on:

Of course, some context is helpful when interpreting these types of analyses. Did any of these jobs go to internal candidates? 3 of mine did. Were these long-shot opportunities or safe bets? To the moon! What else was going on in life that may have impacted your performance? Lots…

Emotional/spiritual/mental toll

I’ll keep this brief since many of you are probably strictly interested in the analysis. Searching for a job-especially when unemployed– is extremely stressful, frustrating, and depressing. It takes tremendous fortitude to withstand these negative forces. I am a pretty resilient person, but it definitely worsened my romantic life, relationship with money, and self-confidence.

And there is a lot of evidence that I’m not the only one who feels this way, from confessions on reddit to academic research (check the ‘related literature’ section to get a broad sense) to Jordan Peterson’s infamous comparison of humans to lobsters. And regardless what you think of Doctor Peterson, his claim that ‘winning’ in the present increases the likelihood of winning in the future dovetails nicely with the widespread belief in ‘momentum’.

I say all this both to warn you of quitting your job without another lined up and to implore you to be excessively encouraging to those looking for a job–they likely need the support more than you think.

That said, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend not quitting your job without a plan. I’ve done it twice and it’s worked out both times (professionally and personally). Sometimes you need a break or time to seriously pursue a passion.

Thanks for making it to the end!