How long will my job search take?
Specific guidance, hustle aptitude, accelerating vs waning industries, job search sweet spots, and a whole lot of distilled nuance so you can design a faster job search.
Hey, it’s 📣 Coach Erika! Welcome to a 🙏 paid subscriber edition🙏 of The Career Whispers. Each week, I tackle reader questions about tech careers: how to get one, how to navigate them, and how to grow and thrive in your role.
If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed this month:
Job Search Diary No.3: Jill-of-all-Trades Airbnb & Uber alum pivoting into Climate
Job Search Diary No.2: Senior Product Designer 8+ months actively searching
Job Search Diary No.1: Staff PM (Twilio, Yelp, Okta) juggling 14 in-flight opportunities
Q: How long will my job search take?
The million-dollar question from tech workers seeking certainty in an uncertain job market.
After helping over 230 job seekers land new jobs in tech over the last 3.5 years, I’ve distilled five primary factors that will most influence the speed of your job search:
Role classification (FTE vs contingent)
Scope/Title (and how much it differs from your previous)
Industry (and how similar it is to your current)
Company stage (their growth posture, number of employees in your target function, and hiring process maturity)
your Hustle aptitude (strategy, networking, willingness to go the extra mile)
These factors influence how swiftly you’ll land a new role. But it's more nuanced than it appears on the surface.
Today, we'll explore the nuances within each factor, as well as some sweet spots to shortcut your job search for those seeking to:
🔝 Level up: increase your scope and/or title
♻️ Re-enter the workforce after a break or intermission
🪜 Pivot into a new role
🏗️ Switch industries
💸 Get a paycheck fast
Let’s dive in ↓
Factor #1: Role Classification
This one's straightforward.
Any non-FTE arrangement (contractors, freelancers, temps) carries far less risk and red tape for employers. Reflecting that, their hiring processes are fast-tracked, and you can land a role more quickly.
🐇 Fastest: contingent (non-FTE)
🐢 Slower: FTE
💡Non-FTE arrangements include temps, independent contractors, seasonal workers, contract employees, on-call workers, or gig workers.
In a difficult capital environment, companies often lean on contingent workers to continue growing and operating without adding to their burdened costs (i.e. headcount).
👀 Worth knowing: contingent workers are typically budgeted for separately from FTEs and have a different impact on the balance sheets and company financials. Contractor funding comes from operating budgets, whereas full-time workers are baked into COGS (cost of goods sold), meaning that they directly impact product margins. In a tight capital environment, companies may grow their contingent workforce to keep costs down and margins up (after all, contractors don’t get benefits or require the same management oversight).
I’ve written about seven situations when it makes sense to take a contractor role over an FTE role, and I suggest reading it if you’re considering using this lever to shorten your job search.
Factor #2: Scope/Title
We’ll focus our discussion on your scope rather than your title because titles vary dramatically between companies. For example, it’s generally accepted that the Director level at Google is the equivalent of VP or higher in a startup. Titles are squishy, so we’ll stick to scope.
When you stick to the scope you know (and have mastered), your job search will be faster. Scope changes (steps up or down) will add friction to your job search.
🐇 Fastest: stay in your scope sweet spot
🐢 Slower: (1) increase scope beyond your demonstrated mastery or (2) decrease scope without a clear, justifiable reason
🐌 Slowest: total scope overhaul (net new function or +/- multiple levels)
But there’s more to consider when it comes to step-ups and step-downs in scope. Let’s discuss.
Increased scope
Using a job search to grow your scope significantly will raise skepticism. Going from managing 5 to 20+ direct reports? You'll struggle to sell that leap. It’s much easier to increase scope from within a role than to do it in a job search.
Decreased scope
Why would anyone abandon upward career momentum? You need to be prepared to explain why you’re applying for roles that are smaller than your previous role. While it’s not entirely uncommon for technical people to shift up and down from IC to management roles, if you’re doing this in your job search, be proactive and offer a clear and compelling reason.
Net new scope (ie a role pivot)
This is hard to do in a strong job market, and near-impossible to do in a soft one. It’s difficult for employers to take that leap of faith with you. I strongly advise you either (1) upskill first or (2) rotate roles within your current company first to gain experience.
Factor #3: Company Stage
It’s not as simple as “big companies are slow, small companies are nimble.”
I asked a dozen senior-level tech veterans to share their opinions and experience regarding the relationship between the company stage and speed of hiring. From their stories, I extracted three major nuances: growth posture, number of employees (in the function you’re targeting), and hiring process maturity.
Growth posture
🐇 Fastest: post-PMF (Series B) and early to late growth (Series C → D+)**
🐌 Slowest: pre-PMF (seed → Series A) and Public (esp giants)
🌀 (mileage may vary): pre-IPO
Companies swing for the fences post-PMF (Series B, C, D). They have cash to burn for growth, so they should hire quickly. Series B and C can be slower if the team size is too small and creates interview bottlenecks, but by Series D, they should have enough “butts in seats” for volume hiring.
Large public tech companies tend to be slow to hire because they are beholden to a higher set of legal, HR, and operational standards that add process steps and scrutiny.
Early stage (pre-PMF, pre-revenue) job searches will also be slow. The team is usually heads down, few roles are open, companies at this stage are often hard to discover, and at this stage, hiring decisions are critical.
Pre-IPO hiring speeds vary wildly. Some companies slow or halt hiring to optimize finance metrics. Others will continue to invest in hiring as they expand their platform and embrace new bets.
**shout out to
‘s description of company stages and ’s stage descriptors as well. I used them as a basis for the company stages I describe in this post
Number of employees (in a function)
🐇 Fastest job search: robust and mature function (10+ people)
🐢 Slower job search: small and/or nascent function (<5 people)
🐌 Slowest job search: net new function (0 people)
It’s a difficult cold start problem to hire the first person in any function. They know why they need the function, but may not know how to describe, attract, or assess people to seed it. This can slow your job search, as the company may unintentionally use the hiring process to align internally on the goals for the role.
As more people are in a function (5+), there’s sufficient interview bandwidth, but the team will often spec out a unicorn to round out gaps in the team. Unicorn chasing can slow job searches as the internal team determines which tradeoffs they are willing to make to acquire the one missing skill or competency they need.
Once functions are well-staffed (10+ individuals in the function), they can handle interview load and have learned how to hire effectively. This is when job searches speed up.
Process maturity
🐇 Fastest: streamlined process
🐌 Slowest: WIP process or “Frankenprocess”
🌀 (mileage may vary): limited process or “winging it”
Process is a double-edged sword.
Mature, streamlined hiring processes create clarity and keep things moving predictably. Weak or no process can result in hiring quickly with reckless abandon, which means faster job searches.
When the team starts trying to add to or optimize the hiring process, job search timelines become less predictable. VPs may add seemingly random process steps here and there to core sample candidate quality and interview effectiveness (WIP process).
Then there’s the process that has been glued, duct-taped, and bolted upon so many times by so many people that it’s become overly lengthy, confusing, frustrating, and exhausting (the Frankenprocess). This tends to be present in larger orgs with low risk tolerance. Job searches here are predictably slow and onerous.
🤩 Job searching? Get set up or unstuck in your job search!
Enrollment is open for my live cohort-based Job Search Design Workshop. Join us to get application-ready and screener-ready with confidence, community, and all the job search tools, tactics, and frameworks I teach in my 1:1 coaching.
Seats are limited to ensure you get individualized attention as part of a small cohort of like-minded tech job seekers to help source opportunities, critique applications and case studies, and mock interviews after the workshop wraps.
And now, back to the post!
Factor #4: Industry
Companies want to ensure you (and they) are set up for success when they hire you. If you’re unfamiliar with their industry, that’s a risk. The easiest job search will always be to look for a new role in your current industry and segment, and in an industry that’s taking off (EVs, space, AI for example).
Domain and Segment
🐇 Fastest: your current industry and segment
🐢 Slower: adjacent industries or same technology, different industry
🐌 Slowest: wholesale shift (new industry)
The quickest path will be in the domain or technology you know. You can often shift to a new segment without adding much time to your job search, i.e. Fintech B2B → B2C. Same skillsets, just new customers.
Adjacent industries like MedTech → Biotech are also workable leaps.
Switching industries but finding companies with the same underlying technology is another workable leap, i.e. Fintech security → cybersecurity.
But if you want to shift into an entirely different industry, like Fintech → Gen AI, healthtech, or (outer) space, you'll likely need to upskill, and your search will take longer.
Accelerating vs Established vs Waning
🐇 Fastest: accelerating industry
🐌 Slowest: established industry
🌀(mileage may vary): waning industry
Accelerating industries hire faster than established industries. They often need to take more risks on talent because there isn’t (yet) a large enough pool of industry-trained talent to siphon.
Companies in established industries are often older and have more bureaucracy, slowing down the hiring process. Consider that it’s often faster to land a role at a:
privately funded pie-in-the-sky space company than Boeing
VC-backed biotech than Pfizer
nascent AI company than AWS
Candidates often conflate ease of interview with speed of decision-making, but these are different. Companies in established industries may have “easier” or more documented and predictable interview processes, but the hiring process overall is likely to be slower.
Waning industries will have more company-to-company variability, as some companies will fight to survive and take aggressive steps to bring in fresh talent, while others will languish.
Sweet spots: fastest path to an offer
🔝 Leveling up: increase your scope and/or title
Step down in company size and stage but stay in your industry and segment. An earlier-stage company in your space will value your expertise and the scale at which you’ve operated, and they will be happy to give you a larger title and scope.
♻️ Re-enter the workforce after a break or intermission
Assuming you liked the role you left, return to your previous industry and role scope. Some may think that they need to take a step back in title or scope when returning after a gap, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Think about it this way: it’s unlikely to take you as long to shake off the rust as it did to earn your last promotion, right? So don’t demote yourself. Speed up your search by taking on a contingent role or offer to do a paid work trial if you sense hesitation due to your time out of the game.