Job searches today are typically involved, multi-step processes that take an immense amount of time and energy on both sides.

A standard private sector interview process might entail a resume review, recruiter screen, tech screen or hiring manager (HM) screen, a full loop or on-site consisting of 4-6 additional interviews, and a reference check. My thoughts here are limited to the full-time employment (FTE) interview process as I’m not personally familiar with freelance and contract work.

This lengthy process can be exhausting and overwhelming. How and where should you focus your energy? Revising your resume? Focusing on informational interviews? Heads down for hours on LeetCode to practice for coding interviews? Every rejection or ghosting is further discouragement and can send you spinning in circles increasing your stress and uncertainty.

Everything I say (and everything you read on the internet) should be taken with a healthy dose of salt. For example, while I’ve been deeply involved in the recruiting and hiring process for dozens of roles across multiple companies, I’ve never officially worked as a manager. And the interview process is a bit different for every role and company.

Alexandra Holien of Ada Developers Academy first introduced me to the approach of deciding how to allocate my time based by diagnosing my success/failure rate at each step of the interview process. Since then, I’ve used it myself in numerous job searches and shared it 1:1 with many other job searchers.

Tracking your job search in a spreadsheet with notes about how each step of the process went can be helpful and provide better data for this analysis. In another post, I’ll talk about how approaching the job search with an experimental iterative mindset is also key.

Review your job search data

Look back over your job search to date and get a sense of how you’re faring comparatively at each stage of the process. What ratio of interviews to applications are you getting?

What ratio of your applications are cold (you just applied online) vs warm (you have a referral or contact with a recruiter or employee at the company)? Are you getting recruiter screens from warm applications but not cold? You’ll always get fewer from cold, but if cold is zero, that’s something to investigate.

How often are you advancing from the recruiter screen to the tech screen? Tech screen to onsite?

Once you have a sense of the first big failure point in the pipeline, that’s a place you’ll want to shift more of your time and energy.

What to do if you’re getting stuck here

Resume review

At bigger companies it’s not unusual to get several thousand resumes for an open role. Typically a recruiter, but sometimes also a HM, will briefly review them to decide whether the applicant should advance to a recruiter screen.

This review is typically a combination of human review in conjunction with AI or other filtering software. Only a small percent of the resumes received will be reviewed by a human, usually those first identified by software as being a particularly strong match.

If you’re failing to get past this stage, two avenues to invest in are networking and revamping your resume. I’ll dive more deeply into common resume mistakes and how to fix them in other posts. But the most common issue I see are resume bullets that read like a job description instead of quantifying the unique impact you made during your time in that role. A good resume offers summaries of interesting stories that the recruiter and HM will be excited to dive into more deeply.

Recruiter screen

Especially for technical roles, recruiters are doing their best to translate from your resume to the job description, but they likely don’t have first-hand technical understanding themselves. As a result, you’ll often need to frame stories and your skills differently for a recruiter than a HM.

Recruiter screens can vary widely but are often a few “Tell me a time when” behavioral questions or asking about your experience with certain domains/tasks/technologies.

You should have 3-5 well prepared (but not excessively rehearsed) stories that you can tweak or shape to be responsive for many common questions. Common pitfalls here include forgetting the details of stories or projects mentioned on your resume, getting too in the weeds and losing the recruiter, or not having a polished succinct narrative on how your experience is relevant to the role. Your answers should not meander or drag on.

Your interviewer is aiming to get as much signal as possible in a limited time. Many folks are too polite to cut people off repeatedly when their answers are circular or unfocused. They just don’t move forward with the candidate.

Once you’ve covered the basics of the story, you can pause and ask what direction the interviewer would like to go in or what specifically they’re interested in hearing more about. “I could speak more to the impacts of the project or the challenges we encountered if that’s of interest?”

If you’re failing to pass recruiter screens, your resume is working but how you’re speaking to those stories could be revamped. Maybe you need to be more succinct. Or maybe you need a clearer narrative for how to speak to your interest in the role and how your previous experience makes you a great fit.

Tech screen / on-site

Went well but you didn’t get the job

Every hire decision truly requires an amazing number of things to all go right. So if you keep making it to on-sites, odds are high you’ll find a new role soon.

If you didn’t get the role but the feedback was positive (for example the classic, you did well but another candidate had more specifically relevant experience), add the folks you interviewed with on LinkedIn. They often won’t give it, but you can always try asking the recruiter for any feedback for how you can improve for the future. If you really hit it off, could thank the hiring manager and ask if they know of any other opportunities you might be a good fit for at that company or if they have connections hiring elsewhere.

The interview reps are also really helpful to gaining confidence and experience.

10+ people often have to say yes to a hire, plus exigent factors like the economy and hiring freezes all have to work out. I’m sometimes amazed that anyone gets hired at all as it feels like such an uphill climb even when you’re inside a company actively trying to fill a role.

Wasn’t great

You’ll want to assess how to split your time between revising for technical and behavioral interviews depending how each went.

Is there any interview type you’re struggling with more? For example, algorithms are fine but system design is hard. Focus your prep accordingly. Post on LinkedIn or ask friends for specific, concrete recommendations like their absolute favorite system design prep resource. Mine is: https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview The more specific your ask, the better advice and suggestions you’ll receive.

A small caveat

If you’re interviewing for a role where the on-sites require a significant amount of prep such as software engineering technical interviews or management consulting case interviews, you’ll have to parallelize and split your time smartly. But putting all your focus on LeetCode won’t help if you can’t get past the resume review or recruiter screens.