SWE Lands Job in 12 Weeks

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Intro

It’s never a bad idea to get proactive and think outside the box.

You just might land your next offer this way.

I was working with a SWE (backend dev with approx 5 years of exp) who had trouble landing a job.

The 5 years of experience mark is a little tricky, because you’re smack dab in the middle. Too junior for senior roles, too senior for junior roles.

But there are still people hiring for SWEs at the mid level. Granted, things are much more competitive this year, but still, they’re hiring. We just need to get a little creative to increase our odds of landing something.

“Joe” saw layoffs coming his way, started his job search before the inevitable happened. Once Joe was laid off, he already had some interviews in the pipeline and eventually landed a solid gig.

Situation

Joe is a Backend SWE in the DMV area. He was working remotely for a company that RTO’d. He was completely open to working hybrid, but the issue was he wasn’t in an area where there was an office.

So he booked a call with me.

I started digging and asking some questions. He worked for a tech company who previously did layoffs, and most of the decision makers were hybrid.

A couple quotes that come to mind for these situations are: “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu” and “out of sight, out of mind”.

Given stricter RTO mandates, most of the decision makers were onsite (including his direct boss), and previous layoffs, it was safe to assume there was a solid chance he would be next.

After all, according to WSJ, remote employees are 33% more likely to get effected.

Task

They gave Joe & the employees a heads up there would be layoffs. They didn’t say who, but given the factors above, we figured best to assume he’d be effected.

After all - it’s better to prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. In this market, you want to operate from a position of abundance.

We figured the worst case, even if he doesn’t get laid off, he can see how good (or bad) his application does in the market. If he gets a ton of interviews, then he knows he can potentially afford to wait to start aggressively looking. If he doesn’t get many interviews, then we know he should get ahead of it while he can.

I’m more conservative in nature, so I would rather have more options to choose from, get out ahead of a potential layoff, and figure it out that way vs. waiting for the news come in and scramble for my next move.

Plus, if he lands a few interviews, you can also figure what his market value is and he gets some extra practice.

Finally - as we’ll get into below - it is an excuse to get proactive and to tap into his network now, vs. after the fact of a layoff.

So we took a look at his background. Half his time would be spent applying to jobs. But we also need to get proactive and make something happen.

Action

I advised to spend about half of his time applying to roles, and the other half building out his network. He admittedly didn’t have much of a network in terms of people he can call today, but we worked on a game plan to target “warmer” connections to increase the likelihood people get back to him and offer some help.

Two places we wanted to target: Previous college classmates and university alumni via linkedin and previous co-workers.

Both provide a good point of commonality so it increases the chances people get back to you vs. cold DMing someone you’ve never met before with nothing in common.

He went to a large university, so first order of business was tapping into his alumni network. You can find a detailed article here on how to do it:

I also had him start reaching out to his previous coworkers to see where they ended up and if they can refer him into the company they were in.

I’ve written a few articles in the past on this, most recently these two:

Result

Unfortunately Joe was laid off about a month later when we spoke.

However, he had a head start on his job search and got proactive.

He ended up speaking to someone he previously worked with who moved into a lead role and had a position open.

He was referred into the hiring manager, went through the interview process, and landed the offer.

Total time, ~12 weeks after we spoke, ~8 weeks after he was laid off.

Not that bad in this market.

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