Three months out of work: 42 interviews and a Principal PM role

Three months out of work and six opportunities had already disappeared from this client’s pipeline before joining us.

When he first came to us, he had eight years of experience in Identity & Access Management and knew the market had changed since the last time he seriously interviewed.

When your network stops producing referrals

His immediate network was exhausted. Referrals had dried up. He had gone through a few interview processes but kept getting stuck at the hiring manager stage.

As he put it:

“I feel like I have sort of exhausted my reach as in like my immediate connections to get referrals and things like that.”

There was another problem: he was trying to figure everything out himself.

He wanted to stay on the individual contributor path as a Senior Product Manager, while keeping the door open to a Group Product Manager role if it created a stronger path toward leadership. He also wanted a role he could stay in for the next 2 to 3 years and use to build toward a future VP-level position.

Back in front of the right opportunities

Our objective was clear: put him in front of the right opportunities, as often as you can.

That meant taking the job search off his plate as much as possible while he focused on preparing for interviews and evaluating the opportunities coming back.

And the pipeline started moving again. He ultimately went through 42 interviews with companies including Google, PayPal, Stripe, DigitalOcean, Akamai, SoFi, Okta, Walmart and others.

The difference was obvious. He had gone from wondering where the next interview would come from to having enough options to actually compare them.

A Principal Product Manager role as a step toward VP

He eventually accepted a Principal Product Manager role at a Fortune 100 company with $180K+ base compensation and $290K+ in stock options.

What I like most about this outcome is that the role itself fits into a bigger career plan. He sees it as an interim step that gives him the scale, scope and experience to make the next move toward senior product leadership.

As he told us afterward:

“Would I have achieved what we together achieved? Maybe. But the possibility of that would be significantly less, or it probably would have taken a longer time.”

If your job search has started losing momentum and your own network has stopped producing conversations, it may be time to change how you're running the search. We’re just a call away.