How Soorna went from six months of silence after a Microsoft layoff to a Senior Director role at $200,000 base

Soorna was caught in a large restructuring wave at Microsoft in June 2025. In 20 years her career had grown internally, through promotions and acquisitions, so she had never needed to run an external search. When she started applying she was shocked to get almost nothing back, despite being clearly qualified for director and senior director roles.

She landed a Senior Director, Enterprise Data Analytics Platform role at $200,000 base.

Paying upfront while out of work

She is direct about how that felt, and it is the version worth publishing rather than a comfortable one.

“Paying you $8,000 up front when I did not have a job, and with the market and all the crazy things, I had lost a lot of money. It was very stressful for me.”

What got her past it was a referral from someone whose judgement she trusted:

“The person who referred me to you, I have known for a long, long time, so I know he will not casually recommend anything.”

The arithmetic that made it obvious

This is the clearest statement of the volume problem we have from any client, and she was doing the maths on her own life, not on ours.

“Number one, the volume of applications. It’s always 80/20. You have to apply to 100 to land 20, and out of the 20 it starts getting filtered. So if I were to do it on my own, it is practically not scalable. I would have to stop my life to have that many resumes sent out consistently, and follow up on them consistently.”

After almost six months of trying alone, the decision took one transaction:

“Having that 8,000 ship out with one credit card swipe was easy, especially when I had tried on my own for almost 6 months with very few interviews.”

What she still cannot explain

“I still don’t understand how you land me getting the interviews. That part is still a mystery for me, because it’s amazing. I think the way you have written the resume, that clicks.”

The search in numbers

• Almost 6 months applying alone after the layoff, with very few interviews
• Senior Director, Enterprise Data Analytics Platform at $200,000 base
• Level: Director. Function: Data and Analytics