Navigating the 2023-24 tech job market's dystopian mess

In February of last year I was let go from my job at Evernote. The company had been acquired and the new owners decided it would be best to drop most of the workforce to cut costs and start to transition to their own teams. While the history of Evernote up to its sale is a story for another time, this one is about hitting the job market. But not just any job market. No, this is the 2023-24 tech job market, and it is its own special kind of dystopian hell.

The present American job market is the product three convergent events.

The 2020 pandemic shifted the requirements of job seekers and cemented remote work as a central tenet of both work life balance and compensation demands for employees. It also introduced a rash of technology hires as tech and gaming companies scaled to meet increased demand for their services (or as we later found out, hired people to do nothing so their competitors couldn't use the talent).

At home the macroeconomics haven't been great–a historically fast interest rate increase and continuous fear of recession created a tight lending environment, eliminating cash strapped companies and encouraging corporations to play a game of RIF copycat to appease shareholders. Tech companies that over-hired in the pandemic have unleashed hundreds of thousands of job seekers on the market.

And finally at our fingertips--machine learning tools are maturing into actual-honest-to-god AI applications and are being commercialized beyond enterprise usecases.

Job hunting is an accelerating technological cold war.

The merging of these three trends has led to an environment that is encouraging the technological acceleration of the tools and tactics being used to get ahead in the job market. It has become a cold war, waged between understaffed and overworked hiring departments and mobs of tech savvy job seekers, preying upon every poor requisition they can get their hands on.

Hiring departments have long deployed filtering techniques--like misspellings, keyword based searches, and requests for meaningless cover letters (not to mention the more biased types, such as removing people based on "ethnic" sounding names). They've increasingly had to rely on advanced features inside applicant tracking systems and tests to add friction to the application process as the pool of job seekers has radically expanded thanks to both layoffs and remote/hybrid expansion. Imagine flipping on a link and within an hour having hundreds of applicants to sift through. Keep it open an hour or two longer and you could have thousands. And to manage that pile, they're responding by tapping tools that--you guessed it--leverage AI. To enhance and automatically reply, and magically sift through to that perfect hu-man candidate.

With this most recent wave of AI enhancements, job seekers are now deploying countermeasures. They are creating resumes that can neatly meld themselves based on the requisition, and fine tune their backgrounds in real time based on keywords to optimize the latest clicks. Cover letters can be completely written, slightly adjusted for prompt and tone, by AI. And many are willing to pay for advanced versions of these services, so a new crop of resume and network hacking tools has popped up to equip applicants with weapons to counter ATS AI.

Navigating this World

And so now you find yourself--whether browsing or laid off--hunting for a job with this mess as a backdrop. Maybe it's been a decade since you had to look for a job. After 10 years at Evernote, that's what I was facing. How do you remotely proceed in this market?

The below are some of the key learnings I brought back from my job search in this market. Ultimately, you have two priorities. Staying sane--job hunting is a rollercoaster of emotions and it is an endurance sport--and landing a job. You can't do the latter without the former, so lets start there first.

Staying Sane.

1. Make a budget and determine your runway

First, and most important for the sanity–figure out what cash you have on hand, and how long would that last you. This is critical for rent, mortgage, family, etc. It will give you intel on how aggressively you should start looking, if you should take part time work, and what you ultimately should settle for in terms of a new target salary.

2. Take time off, but only if it wont drive you nuts

I took the weekend, and then jumped right into the process of hunting. For me, I had to get the "machine" running--resume ready and reviewed and a pipeline of interviews and calls. Only after establishing a semblance of momentum did I start to take time "off" from the search because then (and only then) could I take off time thoughtfully.

3. Get blue sky for a bit, then let that guide you

This is a classic, and it still matters insofar is you will want to focus hard to get results. Think through what you want your next job to really do for you. What it can give you in terms of new experiences. Let compensation take a back seat to what you imagine yourself accomplishing next, and with what type of company. Is it a big company? A start up? Think through how you want to expand and build upon your skills.

When you begin to search, let these requirements guide you. Apply only for those companies that meet one or more of your needs, and that you fit specially with. Spamming will feel necessary, but it will likely only expend energy you should be spending on the roles that you care about.

4. The influencers are here too--ignore them

Influencers are tapping into this rapidly expanding jobless market, with endless guides and hot tips filled with advice on how to land that next perfect gig. You will definitely run into them as you engage in your job hunt, and they're just as bad as health and wellness gurus. Preaching the 7 things you need to do to land that job. Make sure to include the video gram follow up, the 20 page deck explaining your first 30/60/90 days. Get that resume glow up and get hired to your dream job.

These people will make you feel terrible about your job search, make you feel like you need to do everything you possibly can for each role you seek. All they will do is contribute to the inevitable burnout you will feel during this search. They will drain your energy and make the search an interminable, painful grind. Don't listen to any of them.

Landing a job.

1. Referrals are downgraded in power

Bad news for all the serial networkers out there– a solid referral no longer gets you a for-sure recruiter call--it gets your resume looked at. Besides a proliferation of referral tools and the ease at which you can leverage your "network" on LinkedIn, the biggest reason your buddy referring you does nothing is the simplest--there's too much supply and not enough demand. At larger companies, a recruiter could build an entire pipeline off referrals alone.

The most important thing about the referral (more on that in number 6 below) is the human connection you make along the way. So work that network, but in a way where referrals are a bonus, and not the core reason for your outreach.

2. Iterate on the resume, then iterate some more. Then do it again.

Reach out to recruiter friends, mentors, and ex-managers and ask them to review your resume. After at least three rounds of feedback, you can rest more assuredly on your resume.

It is worth using a keyword analysis tool once, matched up to a representative sample of job descriptions you would like to apply for. But only once--do not maniacally tweak your resume for every application. That is a waste of time and therein madness awaits.

While you should constantly iterate and adjust your resume, resist the urge to fine tune your resume to the job description. This is extra overhead and largely unnecessary if you are hunting grounds that closely match your background. If you are applying to more than one role type--then create a couple highly tuned versions of your resume.

3. Let AI guide your preparation, but not your writing.

At this specific moment in time, LLMs have a pretty clear "tell" if used for writing. The way they compile sentences and use unnecessary words creates an uncanny valley of words that's relatively easy to detect.

You will spend far more time adjusting and putting into your words what AI pumped out than you would if you had just written it yourself. Instead, use LLMs as assistants–they are great guides to refining potential interview questions you might hear, and partners in calibrating responses to those questions.

4. LinkedIn is tremendously strong, as long as you ignore the social feed

LinkedIn Premium is your friend and a lifeline. You can see who's checked out your profile, how often you're appearing in searches, and reach out to other users outside your network. The ability to set up and structure recurring job search queries adds structure to the hunt--and while it should not be the ONLY place you look for jobs, it should be where you start.

Just don't let it be your only tool for finding opportunities. Not everyone posts to LinkedIn, and for those that do the competition is fierce.

(A note on Indeed. It sent me a ton of noise. Most recommendations were not a fit for my profile, so much so that I quickly stopped using it. I ignored it completely after realizing its notification emails are written in a way to get your attention by making it sound like they're from a company interested in you:

Hi Geoffrey, We saw your profile on Indeed and thought you would be a great match for the Senior Product Manager opportunity. Please submit a quick application if you have any interest.

This is from Indeed and not the company in question. Nothing like being hyped that someone is looking for you, only to realize its Indeed's email team, using the most effective content to get your clicks.)

5. Find a group to search with

I was lucky to be let go with a group of amazing people. We connected after our last day, and worked through a process to support each other. There's plenty of this in the market, but the process we specifically worked through together was Never Search Alone. While the book is heavy on examples, the methodology is sound and can be your rock in the stormy ocean of a job search. (I am not getting a referral for this link, by the way. Simply recommending what I found to be helpful)

6. Most of all, be human.

We've gotten to a point, swimming in a sea of rage bait and irony and self aware content, that the simple statement of "be human" isn't so trite anymore. Or kitsch.

It is the most boring advice, and the most important. Forget your brand and drop the pretense. Ask for help, be thankful, be humble. You are not a brand. You are a pile of emotions, and cares, and wants, and insecurities, and you are surrounded by people who are the same.

Nestled inside the mess of this market is a nucleus of warmth– real people still doing the work of learning about others and creating connections with others. The best part of my job search wasn't in the wonder of opportunity, but in the invigorating moments of reconnection and recollection as I talked with former colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. They helped me remember that we'd accomplished so much together, and there is always the potential to accomplish and connect more.

Beyond the pile of friends and business partners (calling them a network feels disingenuous and rude) are also recruiters who will go that extra mile because they live in this world and they understand both sides of the coin. They are joined by active employees who take their time to refer, and provide guidance, and make connections inside their business, even if you are nothing more than a name that popped up years ago at a conference. These people are still critical to actually making a job search work, and they exist for you too.

It will all be ok

There's no getting around that the present job market is pretty terrible, particularly for tech in the United States. I completely neglected to mention many of the other reasons its terrible--from ghost job postings to recruiters ghosting candidates to interminable interview processes with 6+ rounds. Or that many jobs are under additional pressure from new waves of automation.

Despite this dystopian backdrop, much of the paths and the tools that were effective and important to finding a new job before the pandemic, before AI, before the tech layoffs, are still just as important. Pay attention to the people around you, focus on what is most important to you, and you'll come out the other end of this partially scathed, but ultimately still ok. It will all be ok.