On March 31, 2018, I started a search to find a new job, I’ve learned and grew through this process and it has come to an end recently. I want to document it here.
A few months ago I saw a great image of the 7 phases of a Job Lifecycle:
- The honeymoon
- Reality sets in
- Learning the ropes
- Mastering the job and achieving solid results
- The first question marks
- Demotivation
- Burnout
My job search started by the start of 2018 when I was at phase 5, almost 6 of this lifecycle and I started to ask myself if I was really enjoying and growing in my current work, this led me to make the decision to start looking for new opportunities.
Throughout my short 4 years of professional career, I’ve been creating this idea of my dream job and it goes sort of like this:
A mission I feel passionate about, a place where I’m working with awesome people pursuing a common goal which actually makes this world a better place impacting peoples lives in a positive way. And why not? With cool perks like open vacation policy, a competitive pay, remote first, education. What Japanese would call Ikigai, true balance between passion, mission, vocation, and profession.
As you can imagine, this is not a particularly easy job to find but it’s not a unicorn either.
NoRedInk
So, I started looking for this Ikigai job and sending some applications on March 31, 2018, and after a take-home challenge, I landed my first interview with NoRedInk. Great experience, they were really nice guys and I really enjoyed the process even though it finished with a rejection email. I was aware that most probably I was going to find rejection, however, it’s always hard.
We’ve decided not to move your application to the next step of the interview process.
Doist
Then I applied to Doist, I was very excited about this company, great mission, inclusion, a balance between work and life and values I deeply Identify with. I did my research about the company and found out that they like good cover letters, so I spent many hours writing a cover letter I felt proud of and send it on it’s way.
We regret to inform you that it has not been selected for further consideration.
YNAB
Another awesome company with a great mission I feel identified with. I know the positive impact that their solution is bringing to their users’ lives.
We hate to be the bearer of bad news.
Stop, Breathe & Think
Recently I’ve been very into meditation and mindfulness and I was very excited to think that I could stand a chance in a company like SBT when I found they were looking for an Android developer.
We don’t have any Android positions open at the moment.
All these were some of the steps of the journey, among others, more rejections and some options where I decided not to continue with the process, and finally…
TTEC
I had an interview with them and get identified with their mission and the company values, met part of the team I’d be working with and they were great.
Got really excited about the idea of helping a huge team create customer experiences that really assist and help an even more massive number of people all around the world in a human and meaningful way. That’s impact.
In the end, I got an offer from TTEC and I said yes without thinking about it twice.
The Wrap Up
So it took many applications, challenges, interviews, people I met, rejections, learning, preparations but at the end the result was great and that was the path I need to go through in order to get to the end. Here are some tips from what I learned through this process.
- You will find rejection. Don’t worry too much about it, learn from it and move on, remember it’s a step closer to the end of your job search.
- Do your homework. Before applying to any job do a good research about the company, their mission, their values. If it’s really what you’re looking for, then become what they’re looking for.
- Prepare for code challenges. There are plenty of sites where you can take challenges for pretty much any skill or programming language. By solving these exercises you will be more comfortable finding quick solutions and most likely you’ll find some of the questions or quizzes in your interviews.
- Expose your work. You surely need a nice CV, but I’ve learned is much more important to have a good exposition of your work, public code repos, your personal blog, blog posts on dev sites, StackOverflow, you name it.
- Open source. Start doing open source contributions, it’s a huge opportunity for people to see your great work and get a very clear idea of your motivations, creativity and besides, you’ll learn hugely.