Navigating the Current Tech Job Market with Remy Schor (Podcast & Transcript)

“I truly believe that getting yourself into conversations is the key. It doesn't have to be interviews. They don't have to be hiring, but having conversations. If you're on a job search and you're actively looking and you're committed to the process and you have the time, challenge yourself to have five conversations a week, minimum. Four of them might not be with companies that are currently hiring, but you just never know where each of those is going to lead.” - Remy Schor

Remy Schor is the talent recruiter at Voxel51. With two decades of talent acquisition experience, both in agencies and as an internal recruiter, Remy brings extensive knowledge of what recruiters are looking for and what job seekers should expect from a good recruiter.

In this episode we discuss:

• Practical advice on how to stand out among thousands of other applicants

• Remy’s journey to her current role

• How to optimize your resume

• How to handle salary negotiations

• Remy’s take on interviewing “for practice” when you’re not looking for a new job

Transcript has been edited for clarity.

Karen Ko: Hey there. Welcome to Engineer Your Career, a podcast brought to you by WEST, a learning community empowering women technologists through mentorship. Join us as we hear from inspiring women tech leaders who are challenging stereotypes and paving the way for future generations. We hope their career journeys inspire you with new ideas to engineer your career. Let's get started.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to our latest episode of Engineer Your Career. I'm Karen, and I'm so excited to introduce our guest and my longtime friend, Remy Schor. Remy is the head of recruiting over at Voxel51, a Series B AI workspace startup. Their product allows machine learning engineers to curate their visual data sets and build and refine their models accordingly. With 2 million installs of their open source tool and a robust enterprise portfolio, Voxel51 is in growth mode.

Remy has been a recruiter for nearly 20 years and has spent the first 16 years of her career working on the agency side of the business. Over the past several years, Remy has moved into the startup space, and she started with Voxel51 earlier this year. Welcome, Remy.

Remy Schor: Thanks, Karen. It's great to be here.

Karen: Awesome. So you and I have known each other for a very long time, and it feels like since, I don't know, since when we met, you were already working in the tech recruiting space. I'd love to hear how you got there.

Remy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I got into, originally technical recruiting and now it's sort of broader recruiting, including go-to market, by accident. And so in 2005, I was living in Chicago, which is where I'm from. I was a fairly recent college grad, and I was working at a restaurant I was sort of interviewing for, at the time, in the aughts, there were a lot of door-to-door, almost like scam jobs, where they would send you out to the suburbs and you had to sell, I don't know, AT&T packages for outdated technology and stuff.

Anyway, I was doing that kind of interview and I got a call about, I got a call from a recruitment agency called Stride and Associates. It still exists, it's been through a couple different name changes, rebrands, but it was an in-office job, and in my mind, that correlated with what I consider to be a real job.

And so I took it, and it was essentially a business management training bootcamp, but I stayed for six years, and they taught us how to full desk recruit—which means recruit, which is what I do today, fast forward 19 or 20 years later—but also generate new business. So business development, which of course, there's an element of sales in everything. So it's certainly relevant, but it's something that I moved away from four years ago, and super grateful to just be focused on full recruiting now.

So I stayed there for about six years, ended up leaving, joined a competitor where I was for 10 years, and then about four years ago, three and a half years ago, left the agency space and started working in startups. The last two startups that I've been a part of building, including Voxel51, I'm the sole recruiter across the whole organization.

Karen: Awesome. Thank you for laying that out for us. So you mentioned that you've been in this space for about 20 years, pretty close to 20 years at this point. I'm curious how you've seen the job market change over the last couple of years or even months?

Remy: Yeah, I mean, the only, this is sort of cheesy, but the only constant is change. So that's always going to be the case. I've seen some really, really fruitful times, where what I consider to be fruitful is the candidates are in charge, so the candidates really have their pick of excellent opportunities.

I think we saw that kind of a market really at the peak of the pandemic. So, probably about two and a half years ago, where the best candidates were dodging interviews left and right. I mean, there wasn't enough time in the day to field all of the interviews that were being offered, and also some really barren times. And of course, we know right now is pretty tough, but I think that it really boils down to two consistent questions.

How does one get noticed as a candidate? That's always going to be a question. And then how do you advocate for yourself as a candidate during the process? And those two things are always true in a good market. So, a candidate-favoring market, fruitful market, or a bad market, which feels barren like right now, it boils down to those two things always, I think.

Karen: So it sounds like you are feeling like the current market is more of a barren market. Is that right?

Remy: Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think in part, due to something similar... in 2008, 2009, when we had this mortgage crisis, I was in LA and LA was home to, at the time, Countrywide, which was a major player in that crisis. And something we saw happen at that time was not just big layoffs, massive layoffs, but a saturation of the market with similar types of people.

And I think, unfortunately for tech, I think that's what's happening right now. We've got these large-scale layoffs, but there's a lot of redundancy. I mean, that's in fact part of the reason why there are these large-scale layoffs. And so the question, I mean, we can go back to that question. How does one get noticed? How do you get noticed if you and 50 people with a similar tenure, similar background, similar team, similar skillset are all being laid off at the same time. So I mean, that would be my go-to example.

So I hesitate to use the word barren, but I do think it's somewhat candidate-saturated. So that's what we have to control for, or that's what we have to address, really, is how to get noticed, how to stand out.

Karen: Thank you. And what would you say people get wrong when it comes to their job search?

Remy: Yeah, so it's a really interesting question, a kind of inevitable question. Of course, there are a number of ways that you can hurt... I'm going to say your candidacy for a specific job. I actually think it's pretty difficult to sabotage your job search because the person you interviewed with yesterday, maybe you messed up, maybe you made a mistake or you didn't, I don't know, say what they seemed to want you to say, but it's not like that person's talking to the hiring manager that you'll be speaking to on Monday, Monday's a holiday. On Tuesday.

So trying to look at each new conversation, whether it's an interview, and I can get into this more, an informational conversation as a fresh start. There's almost no chance that they know each other, so they don't really know where you've erred previously.

I will say, and, unfortunately, I'm seeing an uptick in these kinds of errors. So let me see if I can explain this. I get a lot of applicants, honestly, thousands of applicants. And what I'm seeing is an inattention to detail that I think may be the results of relying on AI tools that can be great, but aren't necessarily proofreading the way that a human would.

And I know we have a Grammarly engineer on the call, which is great, and perhaps they have something to add, but I received a note a couple days ago from a candidate who was like, 'Hey Remy, I saw your company,' and then he plugged in the name of a different company, not my company 'has several openings, some I'm qualified for, some I'm overqualified for, can we chat?' And I could have just left it. I didn't have to respond. I could have called him out, which I really hesitate to do. I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad.

I ended up writing back, and I'm sort of going over this in my mind. It's a little sassy, maybe I could have handled it a little better. I just wrote back, and I was like, to be honest, I'm not sure. I suggest to reach out to that company directly.

Now I know what happened. He messed up, he made a mistake. He obviously meant to plug in my company name. But I think it goes without saying that when you're using a form like that and you're obviously leaving blanks to plug in names and company names and stuff, you got to make sure it's accurate because I'm going to tell you what, he may have blown it. I mean, I give people a second chance, but when I have a thousand applicants for one job, 800 of them don't align. And I can talk more about that in a moment, but that means I have still a hundred-plus, 200 people to go through. Second chances are fewer and farther between, mostly just out of bandwidth.

I can't keep following up and babysitting other people's errors. So maybe that's not the most elegant way to handle it, but I do think it's really important that that stuff be correct right now. Right now, more than ever.

Karen: Yeah. So, making sure that you're on top of the details, making sure you're addressing the person from the right company. Yeah, definitely.

Remy: If I can just add one more thing. So LinkedIn, which is the platform I use predominantly for recruiting and networking, and I mean frankly, most of my professional life, it has an AI function, and that AI function is not particularly creative. Which is to say that I get the same form notes from many, many people each day. And it's very clear that LinkedIn just said, “Hey, message this person Remy about this job,” and I'll get the same language. It's like, “Excited to talk to you about plug in your company name.” And then it's like, “Here's why I think I'm a good fit.”

The exact same verbiage. And one of the things I've noticed is perhaps this is just a testament to LinkedIn's, I don't know, evolving AI, but it takes the person's title and plugs it in a really unnatural way if that person's title's not a natural title. So I call myself talent acquisition, that's not actually a title. If I used a form built by AI on LinkedIn, it would say, “Because of my experience as a talent acquisition, I think I'm a good fit for..,” and that's not human. That's not how we communicate.

So I don't want to over-index on this, but I have noticed a tremendous uptick in these kinds of errors. So I do think it's a really important thing to make sure you're proofreading every note you send.

Karen: Yeah, I think that's really great advice. And so, as someone who is reading thousands of resumes for various jobs, I'm curious, how would one get noticed as a candidate, and what tips do you have to stand out from other candidates?

Remy: Yeah, of course. That's a great question. I would say there are two primary answers. The first is, and I feel like this is kind of a tough thing to hear because I'm sure people are saying this to any job searcher all of the time. The first is you have to network. And unfortunately, networking doesn't start today. It started like a year ago or five years ago or 10 years ago. So feel free to look back and see who you might know.

I mean, if you worked at a large company, a big tech company, let's say, and you're not connected to everybody on that team, go back and just send them a note. Most people are going to accept. You'll get the occasional decline, but I don't even think that LinkedIn tells you when that happens. So it's not a huge deal. So the first thing is networking, and I'm happy to share how I found my current job, because I think it's actually a really cool story.

And the second thing is introductions, which I know sounds like networking, but it's a little different. So let me, if I can just take the time to walk through both of those. So when I think about networking, I decided earlier this year, in March or April, I've been with my last company for two years. We had grown and then we had shrank, and then we weren't really recruiting, and I was doing a whole bunch of other stuff, which was fun, but it wasn't recruiting. I really missed recruiting.

So I decided, alright, the time's right. Actually talked to my CEO, he was fully supportive and, in fact, offered to recommend me to other places. So it was a really positive experience, super positive exit for me. And so I started putting out feelers. Now I had the advantage, I could contact almost anyone and just share that I was looking, which if you're currently employed and your boss doesn't know you're looking, that's a little bit more dangerous. We can talk about that.

But I basically just started out by putting out a bunch of notes to people that I've known over the course of my career, and just said, “Hey, I'm starting to think about a job search. Here's what I've been doing. Here's what I'd like to do. I don't even know if you're hiring. I'm hoping we can chat.”

And what's really interesting is I got on the phone with, I dunno, half a dozen people, some old previous colleagues, some friends, professional acquaintances that I'd known over the course of my career. And, originally, I was in a call with somebody, and she was like, okay, what's your self-pitch? And I rattled off my self-pitch, and she was like, you haven't done this in a while, have you? And I was like, you're right, I have not interviewed in a while, and she actually helped me.

And this is 18 years into a recruiting career, even I needed to get back up to bat. So reaching out to people, you call your sister, you call your dad, whatever, and you pitch yourself, right? Succinctly, concretely. Do that 6, 10, 12, 15 times. So that's the first thing.

That's actually, I think that's networking and that's actually how I found this job I'm in now. It's really cool. Voxel51 wasn't on my purview at all. In fact, they hired me technically the week before we received our Series B funding. So at the time, they were a Series A company. We partnered with Bessemer Series B, which is a top-five Silicon Valley VC firm. Really high repute.

But I mean, they weren't in Bessemer's portfolio yet. I wouldn't have ever found them. And what happened was I had this former client, actually, of mine back when I was an agency recruiter, and she and I connected with respect to this sort of, can I practice my intro, my self intro with you? We did. She said, I'm not hiring. I've got these kind of projects I'm working on. Maybe something will come up. No problem. Thank you for your time.

Maybe a week later I got an email from my current boss, the CEO of Voxel51, sorry, the COO of Voxel51. And he was like, “Hey, found your contact info. We definitely need a recruiter. We're about to get our Series B. Can we meet?”

I assumed that because he had this connection to Bessemer and my last startup was also in the startup space and had been in part of YC and stuff. I assumed that my old CEO somehow floated my name out there, and that's how Dave, my current boss, found me. Turns out this mentor of mine mentioned to a friend of hers that she knew a recruiter— I call myself like a power IC, an individual contributor with no direct reports, who owns the motion of recruiting— She knew an IC recruiter who was in the startup space looking for a new job.

Then, so my contact's contact then posted in Bessemer's job board. Bessemer, knowing that they were about to fund Voxel51, sent it to Dave, and Dave reached out to me, and to me, that's networking. I didn't actually even ask for introductions.

I'm going to talk about that in a moment, but that just, you get your name and you practice out there and you demonstrate that you're open to feedback and you have all that coachability and stuff. Honestly, I mean, I think that's a really cool story. I didn't find that out until five weeks in, right? I was the whole time just thinking, oh, my former boss, my former CEO must have made some intro along the way. So I think that's really cool.

The second piece that I mentioned, this intro piece, so I could talk about this for an hour, and I won't, but let me preface this by saying that the amount of work that you want to ask the person you're asking for an intro to do must be minimal.

So I'm going to give you guys an example. I'm going to give you all an example. If Karen knows somebody, whatever, Jane Smith, that I want an introduction to, I'm not going to say to Karen, “Hey Karen, I saw on LinkedIn you know Jane Smith, can you intro us?” I'm going to say to Karen, “Hey Karen, I saw on LinkedIn that you know Jane Smith, I don't know if you know her. Can you send her this email? Can you send her this note and introduce me?” and the note, I will have already written for Karen to send.

And that note will say, “Hey, Jane,” right? “I have this former colleague or contact or whatever, friend, who is looking for a new job. She's starting to explore opportunities in this space. Here's what she's done. Can I connect you two?” And it's not, are you hiring? It's not, are you hiring for someone like this, right?

It's just, can I make an introduction? Or if they're bolder, maybe they just introduce you. I'm making this introduction. I'll let you two take it from here. But there's very little lift then from the intermediary, and that's really what you want to do. And I would say that's true for candidates applying for jobs, generally reaching out to people, generally don't make them work hard.

And I'm going to interject, I'm going to answer this earlier question with respect to creating a parsable resume for ATS, for applicant tracking systems, because I think there's a relevance here. Make it simple, keep it simple. The more complicated and heavily formatted and the more asks there are of the recipient, the less likely they're going to do the work to open your resume in a strange format or download it from somewhere else. So just keeping it as simple as possible and doing the work for them.

So I know that was a lot of information, but I do think it kind of boils down to those two things, which seem like they might be the same, but in fact, you can decouple them, networking and that sort of introduction piece.

Karen: Yeah, I love that. And actually, I think I did one of these intro emails for you. I think so.

Remy: I think so. And I'm not going to lie, I sent out.... So I probably started my job search on a Thursday. I probably sent out 50 of these types of like, Hey, could you introduce me? Or Hey, I don't know if you're hiring, but or, Hey, can we chat just because, kind of notes. I applied applied to very few, almost no jobs, and I can certainly talk more about that.

I think I probably interviewed at nine places, received an offer, and then right before I accepted that offer, received this email on a Thursday from my current boss, and in fact was able to get an offer from them within 24 hours. I was basically like, look, I'm almost off the job market, but this seems really interesting. So they turned it around very quickly, which we'll do. So I advocate for talking about your own timeline. I think that can be really helpful to drive offers. But yeah, I think Karen, I surely asked you for at least one introduction. Hopefully, I did it right.

Karen: You did great. I connected you with whoever it was that you were wanting to talk to. So yeah, you made it really easy for me.

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Heidi: And now back to our discussion.

Karen: So in terms of the current job market, how would you advise a current job seeker in a weaker job market where you have less control over the situation? Would you do anything differently?

Remy: Well, I am actually a huge fan of ignoring posted jobs. I think that, and this is especially true if you're in the startup space, because if you're looking to, and there's nothing wrong with clocking in, clocking out. Some people, for them, that balance is the right fit, in which case, yeah, it's pretty hard to cold intro your way into a Google, right?

You kind of got to look to see what's posted and then apply. Those companies, they always have what we would call evergreen openings. They're never not going to have software engineering roles posted. And so you just keep, I mean, apply to big tech. If big tech is your thing, apply all the time, right? You never know. It could take six months, could take 12, but you might get a call in the future at the right time. You just never know. So that kind of large-scale applying, I feel like if you're ever antsy, you may as well throw your resume out there cautiously.

The kind of interviewing that I do, and the kind of hiring that I advocate for from a candidate standpoint is ignore what's posted. Ignore job boards, reach out to people, and again, just ask, can we chat? It's not, are you hiring? It's not, are you hiring for someone with my skillset? But if you send every week, if you're actively looking for a job and 15 times a week you send a thoughtful short note to a person who seems like they could be a decision maker, whether that's a C-suite exec, head of talent acquisition, whoever you assume might be the right hiring manager, you're going to get into several conversations a week. And as I've sort of walked through, several conversations a week over the course of a month is going to lead to opportunities.

So I'd say that's my number one thing is don't worry about what's posted. And there's even a way, this is like, look, if you want, look at the company's job board. Every company typically has that Careers page so that you can intentionally and accurately reference what might be open. But there's also a way to just say, I see there are some posted openings. I'm not sure exactly what would align. I'd love to learn more or I'd love to chat.

And now I'm sort of perhaps compromising what I said earlier with respect to making it as easy as possible. But here's the thing, if your profile aligns with the company, they're going to respond, and we can talk a little bit more about... I actually want to get into one of the things that I assume Karen wants to ask about, which is like, should you apply to jobs you're not quite appropriate for, right? So I do want to talk about that a little bit, and hopefully put people's mind at ease when I say that if you are the right fit for an organization, provided it's not, let's say a FAANG company, it's not like tens and tens of thousands of people.

If you get your resume into the hands of the right person, they will effectively determine if it makes sense to have a conversation. I feel like that's a little confusing, but one of the things that I've noticed is I'll interview a candidate for, I don't know, a machine learning engineering role, and it won't quite be the right fit. We'll have a really thoughtful conversation. Sometimes I give real-time feedback. I obviously always ask people if they're open to feedback, or a couple of days later, I'll let them know it's not quite the right fit. And then a week or two after that, this is very common, I'll get a note from them saying, well, what about this other role? And I really want people to understand, at a sub-50-person company, trust me, if you were a good fit for any of my open roles, I'm going to let you know in real time. I'm not going to just leave you wondering.

So I think, again, if the priority is getting your information into the hands of a right person, then casting a wide net, not worrying quite as much about what the exact job description says, is really valuable. I sort of prematurely brought up this topic, Karen, but I'm happy to dive into this question of whether we should be applying for jobs we're not a hundred percent qualified for. If you think that's of interest.

Karen: Actually, before we move off of the job postings and whatnot, there's been a string of tech job posts that have been fake or illegitimate, and I'm curious if you have any advice on how to check as to whether a job posting is real or if it's a scam, just to prevent time wasting and all of that.

Remy: Yeah, it's a good question. Generally, I'd say...gosh, I think there's a distinction between what we might consider a real job post, a stand-in job post, and then a scam. I don't know enough about, I know that these scams are happening. I don't know quite enough about what that looks like. I think generally, if the job is posted on a reputable ATS, right, applicant tracking system, Greenhouse, Lever, I hope that they're legitimate.

What I sometimes hear or read, there's a lot of discourse on LinkedIn about fake jobs just because they're not really open. And what I'll say is it's a little bit more nebulous than it seems. So if I have three open machine learning engineering roles right now and I fill two of 'em and I've got five people in process for the third, and then I make an offer, but then, oh, wait, actually we need a fourth, but it's actually junior.

I don't know. Is that third job posting real? Is it legitimate? Right? And so my point is that things constantly change. I might keep a job posted because I know that next month I am going to have another new role, even if I don't today.

And so the distinction between what's real and what's legitimate and what's actually just straight up fake, listen. I mean, I think we all know, although unfortunately there's really elegant scammers out there, but if anybody's asking you to buy anything, give them any personal information during the interview process, be wary. And if you get to the offer stage and that offer is not sent via DocuSign or some rough equivalent, I would be pretty cautious.

Having said that, I did receive an offer from a sort of, we'll call it a legacy company, a we'll say non-tech company, and it came in Word, and I swear I pinged them three times. Wait, is this right? You want me to print this out and sign it? You don't use DocuSign? I was actually concerned, actually thought like, is this real? What's going on here? So be mindful of that. I think hopefully those situations are fewer and farther between. That's a good question.

Karen: Yeah, I feel like that also leans into the, if you're networking for these roles as well, and you're getting to know someone who's at the company, do you have more of a pulse as to what is actually currently open right now? And if maybe a role might be open down the line so that you're not just working off of what you see on the internet.

Question for you. So do you feel that a person should always be passively looking, even if they're doing okay in their current role, and they should continue if they should be interviewing for roles, even if they may not be interested, but just as a way to gauge the market?

Remy: So I really don't think so. I really don't think it makes sense. I don't think it's a good use of your time. I don't think it's a great use of the company's time, although that's fine. I mean, so what? I don't know that I necessarily think it's really that helpful. It's like if I went to an ice cream store and they were like, we have chocolate and vanilla, I'd be like, oh, no problem, chocolate for sure. But if they were like, we have 20 different flavors, I'd be like, oh, now I have to choose.

What if you interviewed at a place that does seem great, that people seem great, but you actually love your current team? There are no real meaningful pain points for you right now. Just put your head down, right? Now, this is a personal philosophy. I know some people who constantly interview. Occasionally I speak to a candidate who reveals that that's what they do.

I really don't like it. So what I will say is, if that's your story, fine. You don't have to tell the interviewer. What better way to tell the person that you really don't value their time? Also, it's kind of a signal that you might then do it to them in the future. So it's like you can do it, just maybe I wouldn't advertise it.

I'm also in a somewhat unique position, and I think a lot of people are who are in tech these days, where, listen, the harder I work, the better the company does, probably, and the better the company does, the better my future is going to be. So any extraneous time spent on interviewing, I mean, you may as well, I don't know, be writing lines of code or doing whatever it is that your core responsibilities are.

Karen: Yeah, I feel like there's another way of looking at this question in the sense that maybe what the focus is on is more of keeping your skills relevant when it comes to being able to share your story and what you're looking to create with your skills or the type of company that you're looking for that might be aligned with your values or maybe figuring out what your market rate is, which someone had told me a while ago that a good way of figuring out what your current market rate is is to talk to a recruiter friend. So maybe talk to a Remy who can be like, Hey, what's the going rate for an engineer level 4 these days, for this size company?

And get a ballpark of what that could be, just so that for your own sanity, if you've been at that company for several years at this point and you're like, I don't know if I've, I would be paid about the same or if I'd be paid significantly more at a different company at about the same size. So gut check.

Remy: Yeah, I have quite a few thoughts, actually, about what you've just shared. I think the first thing is there are resources that recruiters use that have percentages based on market information that companies share with these aggregators, these sort of salary aggregators. And I don't mean salary.com, I mean, they're behind paywalls. It's like a service.

They're only as accurate as the market supports. So OpenAI sort of throws everything off, but we know that. We know that's true. Unfortunately, if you're at sub-50-person startup, you probably don't have traditional levels yet because that kind of org chart and job architecture that comes, that's later. That's employee number 75 to a hundred to 150.

So I can tell you what somebody with X number of years of experience in this market doing this thing is making, approximately, but I don't know that I feel that that necessarily is going to help somebody who's in a company that they like because talking about somebody who's happy, who's not actively looking, I'm just going to default to you're better off putting your head down and staying put, and maybe you deserve more money. And that's a separate meeting, conversation we can have about negotiation, of course.

But it's true that people, and again, I'm speaking for tech, almost always, maybe always receive the biggest upticks in compensation when they change companies. That is how companies get you to change companies. So if you are sitting here today and you're like, I need at least a 15% increase, you're probably not going to get it from your current employer. You might go, you might get five or eight or 10 even, but if you want 15, 20% increase and you're worth it and you feel like your skills stand up to that, then yes, then you got to go look elsewhere because that kind of bumping up, it's probably not even happening even with promotions, much less with just salary increases internally.

Karen: Yeah, I appreciate that. Hard talk. All right, so switching gears a little bit. So I've creeped your LinkedIn and I've seen that you've gotten lots of recommendations from previous folks that you've been able to help with the recruiting process. I think as an external recruiter, and I'm curious, if I was looking for a recruiter or if someone was looking for a recruiter, external or internal, what should you be looking for in such a recruiter, and how can you tell if they'd be advocating for your interests and might be a good fit?

Remy: That's a really good question. First and foremost, this might be an unpopular answer. I actually think that tenure is really important. If you're looking at a recruiter's background and that recruiter has had 2, 3, 4, or five 18-month stints or nine months, I see a lot of sub-one-year, just over one year. To me, a couple of those could have been bad luck, timing, circumstances, whatever.

But if that's your story as a recruiter on the agency side, it points to, frankly, candidly, it points to a lack of grit, which on the agency side, grit is basically… tenacity and grit are the most important thing. It's actually fairly toxic. So I'm not advocating for people to go in that direction. But if you can last at an agency for a couple of years and beyond, that is a pretty good indication that you're an advocate. Now, you might be an advocate for your clients.

You might be more of an advocate for candidates. That depends on the person's style and arrangement, et cetera. But it shows perseverance in a way that I think it's very easy for recruiters to, it's a very low barrier of entry kind of career. So it's very easy to enter it and then just every year pop around. So I would look for tenure, but then you know what I'm going to say, right? I would look for networking. I mean, Karen and I know each other from an extracurricular activity that we do that is very heavy engineering. There's a lot of people in our sport who are engineers.

I've been a recruiter, yeah, ultimate Frisbee. I've been a recruiter for 20 years. You know how many ultimate Frisbee players I've helped with their search? I've considered as candidates, I've interviewed, I've placed candidates with, so I've worked with them as clients. So here's my point. If you're in the US and you play ultimate, we're probably connected in some way. So you know a recruiter. So that's what I'll go back to. So if you're in the US and you play pickleball— I'm anti-pickleball— or you CrossFit or you play guitar or you whatever, you probably know a recruiter in that scene. So yeah, leverage that.

Karen: No hate on any pickleball.

Remy: No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not hating. They're a pro sport before ultimate, but Karen and I are working to change that.

Karen: Working to change it, absolutely. All right, so let's say that you've gotten your job offer. You did all of your networking, you heard about the roles, you interviewed, they've loved you, job offer. So what is the best way to negotiate for, I don't know, for a better job offer, or is there any room for negotiation? What are your thoughts?

Remy: Yeah, I think that this comes down to the quality of the very first conversation. So, a couple of tips. Often, the first conversation is going to be with the internal recruiter, right? They're good. They're not going to punt the money question. I want to talk about money early, not in the first five minutes of a call, but in the last five minutes of the first call, for sure.

So to me, it's actually a little bit of a red flag if the recruiter doesn't bring up money. Having said that, I don't think you have to. Okay? I don't actually think it's necessarily your responsibility. If you're interviewing for a job where you have absolutely no idea what they can pay, that's maybe a different conversation. But in the United States, in at least six states and counting, companies must include a salary range on their job descriptions.

And so even if what you're applying for or you're doing an introductory conversation for a job that's not really open, just look at what the other job postings are at, so you get a ballpark figure. If they're paying 150 to 200 for every job on their site, then they're probably paying 125 to 225 for every single person that works there. So you get a ballpark. You understand if they can afford you, if you're in the right place.

Again, I don't think you need to bring it up in the first call, but I hope that they do. That's my note. Now, in that first call, I'm going to be honest, I try to beat the candidate to the punch. So towards the end of our first conversation, we've got the information I need. They've been given ample time to ask questions. I will say, okay, talk to me about compensation.

What's your target? Here is how to beat me at that question. When I ask that, talk to me about compensation. Tell me about your target. Ask me what I have budgeted for the role. I have to tell you if I have any employees in the states of California, Colorado, Washington State, New York, I don't know. Pretty much any organization in the US that has even one person in any of those states and counting, they have to reveal their salary range, their budget to you, if you ask. So I advise, this is the advice I give my friends, just answer their question with a question.

Hey, Karen, tell me a little bit about what your targeted compensation is. Well, Remy, that's a great question. What's your budget for the role? Or alternatively, what do you think my skillset is worth in this market? Or you can say, and most candidates, honestly, they just do this now.

They say, oh, I saw your range was X to X. That's cool. So a good recruiter, I like to think I'm a pretty good recruiter. I dive in a little bit more. I'll say like, Hey, that machine learning engineering role I have posted has no senior designation, but it includes both senior and non-senior. I have it posted at 190 to 240. It's 50 K range. Would you say you're at the top half or the bottom half?

I try to gauge a little bit more so that when we get to the offer stage, there's no surprises. The other thing that I do as a recruiter, as an internal recruiter, is once all the interviews have happened, I set up 15 minutes to speak to the candidate. I go back over the role if they have any remaining questions. I actually offer, typically, is there anybody else you want to speak to that you can't get a chance to speak to?

Most people say no. Most people are cool by that point. They have enough information, and I'll just be like, Hey, by the way, when we first spoke, we talked a little bit about comp, now you know more about the role and your search is 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks further along. Any revision on compensation?

So there's a comment that people that places will still try to dodge. Don't push it. I really believe you can find out. I truly believe that, I hope, that the places that are trying to hire senior product managers, which is 225 to $250,000 job, at least in certain circumstances. There's not a ton of companies out there trying to hire that person at 90 k. And if you have questions about the legitimacy of the organization, dig into those anyway, whether they give you financial information or not, right? Do your due diligence anyway, and I'm sure I could come up with some ways to do that.

I mean, look, I'm not a huge fan of Glassdoor. I feel like it's a little inauthentic, but take a look at Glassdoor. The other one is Blind, B-L-I-N-D. If y'all are familiar. That's a pretty cool tool. It's a little sassy. It's a little Reddit-y, but at least it'll help you legitimize whether the company can afford you or not.

To the question, how would I handle if someone were specifically dodging that question? You got to ask yourself, do you really want the job? If so, just punt it. Just keep interviewing. Don't push 'em, right? If you don't really want the job, you can call them out. But I'll tell you what, call someone out in an interview and they're the interviewer. You're probably not going to get advanced. Whether that's legal or not, it's just the human, it's just natural to be like, ah, this person was a little sassy. I'm not going to move them forward or whatever.

So I would be careful. I would protect yourself, and if it's something that you want, just trust that the right offer will come. I will say that in certain markets, actually, in all markets with a certain type of candidate, a very confident candidate, if you're getting a ton of outreach, a lot of people are contacting you, you're getting interviews, you have a job, all of those boxes are checked. It's attractive to enter a conversation and say something like, I'm looking for a minimum of X. I think that's a little dangerous because, in fact, would you take 2K less than x? Probably, if you had to. You know what I mean?

So putting those boundaries or limitations on yourself, while it's good to advocate for yourself, I think it can be a little bit limiting. So maybe keeping an open mind, and then again, there's so many ways to value an offer, right? Equity in a pre-exit startup is effectively not real and also possibly incredibly real, but you don't know. That's the risk. So you just have to ask yourself what you value. I hope that helps. It's a little obfuscation.

Karen: Well, I think that there's, I mean, when you're talking to the recruiter and they're asking you that question on salary, and you turn it back on them and they don't answer. If it's in that first call, also, I would potentially be like, ah, if I really like that job, then I would have that next conversation.

It also could be that the person that you spoke with is still relatively new in their job, and maybe they weren't prepared to have that conversation quite yet. And so maybe it's that next person that has much more tenure, is more comfortable having these types of conversations, and we're all human. So I think if you're still interested in the job to keep going down that job process and see how it goes.

Remy: Yeah, I totally concur. I will say where I would draw the line, personally, is nobody should be asking you what you're currently making. That is absolutely out of line in this market. That's why there's a wage gap is because forever, employers based what they were going to pay you on what you were paid, and women and people of color have historically been paid less, and therefore updated salaries just reflected that lower pay, and it's completely illegal, against the law? I don't know, it's you're not allowed to do that anymore.

As a recruiter, as a company, you can't ask about somebody's current or previous salary history. Don't answer that question. Unless you're willing to box yourself in.

Karen: Yeah, whenever I've had that question be thrown at me, I think the asking for the salary range is really smart. I think something else that I've also said, has been, oh, I'm still learning more about the role right now, so I'm not quite ready to talk about compensation, and then I just push off.

Remy: Yeah.

Karen: I like [cross-talk]

Remy: That's pretty elegant. No, no, no. I think that's elegant. I think a good recruiter will turn the screws a little bit. When I hear that. I sort have a whole like, well, that's great. Let's see if we can come to a number together. Let me help you. There's ways then to counter that.

But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, advocating for yourself, protecting yourself. Don't throw out numbers that you won't accept, right? A lot of times, we feel pressure in that conversation to throw out a low number. They'll probably make an offer at that low number. If you throw out a number, have it be something that you'll legitimately consider. If not definitely accept.

Karen: Amazing. So I know we talked about the networking. We've talked about the salary ranges and negotiation. Something that we haven't talked about yet, which I feel like we're kind of bouncing all over the place for this job search discussion, but I'm going to go there anyway, because you know what, we're going to cover it.

So when it comes to your social media versus your resume, would you say that candidates still need to have a one-page PDF resume these days, or is a LinkedIn page sufficient? What do you think about cover letters? Are they necessary? Thoughts?

Remy: Great question. I don't think that resumes need to be a page. I think two pages is fine. I don't really like summary resumes. So when I talk about making it easy on the reader, I just want to know where you've worked, what you've done there, how long you've been there, and I want to know that information for the current job or the most recent job, and then maybe one or two previous.

Certainly, you can include your whole career history, but do so in descending chronological order. I wish that went without saying. It does not. But get to the point. That top half of the first page of a resume is very precious real estate. So if you're bullet-pointing out a bunch of skills and one of those skills is Word, you are wasting space on your resume. Just tell me what you're working, what you're doing there, and how long you've been there.

That's the most important information, in my opinion. I think that it's paramount that your LinkedIn profile and resume match in terms of dates, names of companies. That's a big thing that people overlook. They have their old company name on one of the two places, and then there was an acquisition. So it doesn't match. Again, if you make it hard on the reader and they see inconsistencies, they are more likely to just keep moving than they are to stop and ask you for clarification if you're not in touch.

So I think they're both important. I think the resume is important simply because, yeah, you kind of have to have something to send if people ask for it. And I think the LinkedIn is great because with LinkedIn, the way that I use it as a recruiter, and it's really my go-to, is I can very quickly determine what each company you've been at does. And for me, in my space, industry is super important. So I want to very quickly be able to determine this company you're at is a 50-person startup, received their Series A, and does this. I can't really tell that on a resume.

Sometimes people put that information like in italics or whatever, but that's fine. I mean, that's great. But I am online. I'm on LinkedIn every day, all day. And so yeah, for me, that's a really easy way to look at it. I do think you need both.

You asked another question. Cover letters.

Karen: Yes.

Remy: Yeah, I don't read 'em. What I am a huge fan of is a three-sentence personal intro, and actually, that's the intro email that I mentioned earlier. If I send Karen a note that says, “Hey, please introduce me to Jane. Remy is a fill-in-the-blank technical recruiter who has been working for 20 years. She's starting a job search. We're not sure if you have anything that aligns, but you might, and I think you two could... There's value in you two speaking.”

My favorite personal recruiting story is many years ago I was looking for a new job. I was really interested in working for the New York Times. This is before I sort of got into startups, and I emailed somebody on the recruiting team who I thought might be in charge, and I basically just said, I don't know if you're hiring, but I'm super interested in what you are doing, what you and your company are building. Here's why.

And I listed all the things I love about the New York Times. They got back to me. I got an introduction to her boss. Her boss was the hiring manager. So I went through the interview process. They wanted me to move to New York. That wasn't happening at the time. It was during COVID. And thank God, I mean, again, I love the New York Times, but I'm more in the startup space now.

But that's just an example of, I'm going to be honest, I didn't even look at their website. I did not look at their career page. I don't know if they had an open position, but it turned out they did. And just by that quick introduction, now, if I had sent a cover letter that was as they often are, four or five paragraphs and in an attachment form and very dense and very formal, I don't think they would've written back. So I don't think that cover letters are necessary anymore.

Karen: It does feel a bit archaic in these times. Especially if you're doing the networking and someone's seeing the resume for you. It feels weird to also, here's my cover letter to go with this resume.

Remy: Yeah.

Karen: Yeah. Awesome. Okay. All right. Well, we've covered a spectrum of topics today with the job market and networking and resume and ATS and let's see, negotiation, social media.

Oh, one more thing about social media that I think is worth noting is that there is the backend— So there's actually another talk that Remy's done with us before. I would highly recommend taking a look at that because there's a slideshow that's involved with that one, including a behind-the-scenes look of this is what it looks like from a LinkedIn recruiter perspective, and you do a Google search, and then it pulls up all of the profiles that have that word in that that's associated.

So I think it's worth understanding how recruiters use LinkedIn so that you can optimize your LinkedIn page based on the types of jobs that you're trying to attract and the roles that you're trying to be a candidate for.

Remy: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think LinkedIn is an incredible tool. The LinkedIn recruiter feature is actually rather expensive, so of course, I understand not everybody can use it. I do want to make one quick note about LinkedIn. So it's a really good segue.

LinkedIn has this easy apply button that everybody's seen. I don't love it for a few reasons. I think it really promotes applying for jobs that you have no business applying for, and I want to clarify that. Apply for anything that you think algns. It doesn't have to align a hundred percent. It doesn't even have to align 75%. You don't have to have the right number of years of experience. You don't have to have whatever. Apply. By all means. But the easy apply button has made it too easy.

And so what that's doing is it's actually, it's causing so much noise that good candidates are being missed. And I mean, this is true for me too, and frankly, if you're a good candidate and you don't engage in this, you will be helping out other good candidates, and hopefully they'll be helping you out by also not engaging in this. But it also promotes this strange dynamic where I have 1900 applicants for a particular role I have posted. No one can go through all of those. And furthermore, I try to respond to everybody authentically and meaningfully. That would be 100 hours a week for the rest of the year kind of situation to go through.

So I have to do searches based on specific things like it's a marketing roll, do you have B2B marketing? If you don't, your resume is not going to come up and you're not going to hear back from me. And unfortunately, some people perceive that as being ghosted, even if we've never actually engaged.

That's a really dangerous dynamic because then there's a lot of people applying for a thousand jobs a month, easy apply, and they're getting discouraged. They're not hearing back, but it's because there's just a lot of noise.

So it just goes back to my point earlier, which is like network, ask for introductions, be bold, introduce yourself. I will tell you all for sure that when people apply and then they send me a note, whether that's an email or a note on LinkedIn, they get a response from me. When people just apply, they don't always get a response from me. So the response might be, no, not right now.

But if you want a response, you got to send a follow-up note and be mindful that if you're applying in multiple channels, if somebody applies on my website and emails me and sends me a LinkedIn note and applies via LinkedIn, they may get multiple declines from me.

Because in an effort to be as unbiased as possible, I don't look at names, right? I'm not trying to identify the individual, I'm just looking at their skillset. And if I decline someone today out of a thousand people and then they apply on Monday again, I might decline them again without realizing it's the same person.

So just try to, I guess the point I'm making is try to have some grace for yourself. Receiving multiple declines, maybe you applied in multiple places. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're being doubly declined. It just means that there's an information gap that we're all dealing with. So I hope that helps or that makes sense.

Karen: Yeah, I think it does. And I think to add on to what you were saying about being able to reach out to that person afterwards, after you apply for something, I think that also goes back to that question of how do you find someone, well, A, how do you find the hiring manager for that particular role? But B, how do you network your way into that company in some way?

Remy: Yes.

Karen: And for me, something that I've seen in the past is finding out if you have a connection that works there or knows someone there. Yes. That's one of the ways I think some of the other ways is also going to some of their events, if they're hosting any events and being active in chat or introducing yourself to someone that's working at the company there.

So there are ways where you can learn more about that company, see if that company culture is a potential fit for you, but also be able to be someone that they take more notice of so that you're not just one resume out of a thousand resumes that's across their page.

Remy: Yep. All notes, all emails, all outreach. You have to have that action item ask at the end, can we chat? Do you have 10 minutes? Whatever the case may be. But give them something to say, am I the right fit? And again, if you're reaching out to people directly, depending on bandwidth, speaking for myself, I always try to respond minimally to the people who are reaching out directly, who are following up their applications with a note or reaching out without applying, but sending me a direct note.

Karen: And not getting discouraged if you don't hear anything.

Remy: Yes. Yeah.

Awesome. So just to sort of summarize, the question is how do I explain a gap in my work history? And I think the short answer, which is a little tough to hear, is this is a challenge, and I would strongly advise people to protect themselves against getting discouraged.

If you apply to a ton of companies like mine, right? Sub 50 people, every single person is like they're owning one thing. The reality is you're probably not going to get a ton of responses. So if you have been out of work for a couple years, or you have some recent freelance that's a bit irregular, we're probably not your best audience.

That's where applying to bigger companies, applying to a lot of bigger companies and trying to make inroads with organizations that are set up with structures to help people get back to work can be really helpful. And some of these big companies, they do have really great programs.

Some of them have been a bit compromised over the last two years, but I really think that that will continue to come back. I also think in a lot of ways, I mean it would be a personal decision and everybody sort of has a different philosophy, but if I hadn't worked in a little while or I hadn't worked consistently in a little while and wasn't really used to a more traditional like nine to five, we'll call it, which is a little bit of an archaic concept, but I think I would actually want to be on a team of 20 other like-minded people who are doing something similar who I can plug into and work alongside.

So I would say that that's a good bet. What I would not do is I would not overexplain it in writing, so I wouldn't put on your resume freelance 2022 to present and then all bullet point about what you've been doing.

I think if you're going to write freelance, you could write consulting. Consulting is a kind of, I think a sort of fancier way of saying freelance in some ways, at least it's semantically similar. And then, actually, maybe list your clients or list specific projects that you've worked on.

There's some value there, but I don't think it looks great when people put, I saw this recently where somebody put whatever January, 2023 to June, 2023 sabbatical, and then the explanation was like, oh, after 16 years of working, I took some time off. And it's kind of like, okay, you can tell me that in a conversation. I want to hear where'd you travel? What'd you do? Oh, you took care of a parent or a kid, or, okay, I'm a human being, but it's hard. That's the kind of thing that you want to get your foot in the door first before you overshare about that kind of thing.

I don't think that's a terrific answer because I don't know that there is a great answer. The more conversations you can have, the more humanizing you can be and make the conversation about your specific situation. You don't have to overreveal; could have left because whatever you had kids, or you had somebody you were taking care of, or your circumstances changed. It's up to you how much you want to share, but it's always going to be easier to share that information in a conversation rather than explain it in a way that is sort of effective on paper. I hope that kind of helps. It's a tough situation.

Karen: You also mentioned something earlier about how a resume is viewed, I guess, by a recruiter where they're getting so many resumes that they're really spending a couple seconds on a resume at a time, and to really have the most important information at the top of the fold.

Remy: Yep.

Karen: And so you don't want them to spend a lot of time on the fact that you were on a sabbatical, and you want them to focus on the skills that you've had and the experience that you've had in other places. And then if they like you, then they can bring you in, and then you can share about the sabbatical.

Remy: Yeah. I don't want to over-index on this, but I truly believe that getting yourself into conversations is the key. It doesn't have to be interviews, they don't have to be hiring, but having conversations.

If you're on a job search and you're actively looking and you're committed to the process and you have the time, which I know is a big ask. Challenge yourself to have five conversations a week, minimum. Four of them might not be with companies that are currently hiring, but you just never know where each of those is going to lead.

Furthermore, you'll be that much more prepared to talk about your story when you do get up to bat in the game. When the 11th person gets practice, the 11th person you speak to could be the first actual hiring manager, but you'll have already been practicing your self-pitch 10 times. You're going to sound that much better.

So I would really advise in as much as this is controllable, try not to get discouraged. Stack your calendar with conversations even if they're not interviews.

Karen: This actually reminds me of when I was trying to do job interviews during the beginning of the pandemic, and I had gotten laid off, and then I was living by myself in the studio, and then I realized that every time I was on these job interview phone screen calls, that was the first time I was speaking all day because I wasn't talking to anybody else. I was at home by myself.

Remy: Great point. Yeah.

Karen: And then how am I supposed to nail this and be like, yes, I get this a hundred percent, and I can talk about it myself, and it's easy when it's the first time I've opened my mouth all day.

Remy: Yeah, it's such a great point. I used to tell people, this is before the Zoom explosion and before the pandemic. I used to tell candidates when you're interviewing on the phone, which was the typical first conversation, historically, be in front of a mirror because when you see yourself, you remember to smile.

Now I know it's stressful, and now we're all overused to seeing our own faces, which is its own disadvantage. But don't forget, to that point that Karen made, just practice even seeing yourself. Maybe you have your settings such that you can't see yourself when you're in this kind of a conversation. A lot of people do that now. I actually think it's valuable to be able to see yourself in an interview because you'll be reminded. It's like grounding, a little grounding, I think.

Karen: Yeah. The other thing that I think is worth noting is the length of time that you spend introducing yourself at the beginning and making sure that when you're practicing that it's 90 seconds long at max, several minutes, but not rambling and not giving them the chance to ask the other questions that they need to ask.

Remy: Yeah, several minutes is fine. 12 is too many.

Karen: Well, I am just so glad that we got a chance to talk about all of the things that we discussed today around the job search and what's different at these past couple of years and past couple of months, and thank you so much for your time. Remy, thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Remy: Thank you. Thanks, y'all.

Karen: Engineer Your Career is produced by WEST, a learning community that empowers women technologists through mentorship. Special thanks to our audio production team, Heidi Williams, Amanda Beaty, and yours truly, Karen Ko. If you enjoy our work, we encourage you to share this episode with a friend. Want to hear more from Engineer Your Career? Subscribe on your favorite podcasting app. We look forward to having you back for our next episode. Thanks for tuning in.