🎧 2025 Wrapped: Real PM Job Search Data from Inside SPRINT
Wondering how long it actually takes to land a PM job offer right now?
What interview conversion rates are realistic?
And where are offers really coming from?
In this episode, I’m sharing real 2025 job search data from inside the SPRINT program, including:
time to offer ⏳
salary offer amounts 💰
whether referrals actually led to jobs (hint: probably not as often as you think!) 🤯
If you’re a data-driven PM, this one's for you.
Ready to land your next awesome Product role? ✨
SPRINT helps you position yourself as a top-tier Product candidate so you can land high-quality interviews consistently and confidently - without guesswork, burnout, or wasting months applying into the void.
-
Jess Sherlock (00:00)
Some of the most pivotal moments that define your earning potential over the course of your lifetime happen when you take a new job. The pay raises during your tenure at a job tend to be pretty incremental.
the big jumps are when you move from job to job. And so if you're not in a position to negotiate that, that can mean tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars when it comes earning potential over your lifetime.
Happy New Year everybody! I hope you had a wonderful holiday break and I'm excited for today's episode because I took some time to
look at the data from last year's job searches and yeah, a to talk about. So I've got my notes here in front of me. Let's dive in. So as you know, the SPRINT program is for product managers who are job searching. It's really designed to help you stand out as the obvious choice in your job search so that as you are bringing yourself to market as a candidate,
you know exactly what your unique superpower is. You know exactly what is most marketable about your experience and that and only that is what you're talking about. So that from your LinkedIn to your resume to your narrative to your interview answers, you are being as relevant as you possibly can to help these hiring managers and recruiters see exactly why you would be a perfect fit for the role.
And so I'm really proud to say that we had just a tremendous year in SPRINT.
I want to share some of my favorite highlights with you. shared some of these already on LinkedIn. So if you follow me on LinkedIn, you might've seen some of these, but I thought I might go deeper here in today's episode because hey, any good PM is data driven and gosh darn it, I brought my data to the table.
So inside of the SPRINT Program, as much as I would love to guarantee all of these talented folks jobs in a certain number of days, that's just not something that I'm able to do. So we look for certain leading indicators and then certain lagging indicators. And these are the things that we pay attention to to ensure that the folks going through the SPRINT Program are as successful as possible.
One of the big program milestones we look at is getting people applying to their first few jobs and starting to do outreach as well, ideally within two weeks, at most within three weeks. Beyond that, we look at how quickly folks are getting interviews. We're looking at what we call our conversion rate, our application to screener rate, or our outreach to interview rate. Some of those early indicators are that
the folks who are following the SPRINT program are receiving initial screener interview requests, either through cold outreach that they're doing to hiring managers or recruiters, or that they are receiving interview requests from applications they're sending out. Many other times, they're actually getting inbound requests where they're being sourced by recruiters who are finding them on All of those are signals, early signals to us,
folks have found a valuable positioning and that their experience set is resonating with their audience. And so those are few things we look for.
But one of the metrics that I'm really proud to say we have is on average, when we look at folks who are doing cold applications as at least a part of their job search strategy, we have almost a 10 % conversion rate, which is pretty amazing, To think that in this world of cold applications, if you are submitting, let's say 10 applications,
on average, folks in the program are receiving at least one interview request from that application.
One of the other things that you might find interesting as it pertains to cold applications is that I think cold applications get a lot of flak. A lot of people are saying, bother? There's just a lot of noise. The only way to get a job is through a referral. You have to do outreach. And you know what? We have had folks sending out thousands of applications, thousands of outreach messages. And here's an interesting stat from last year.
85 % of those offers came from cold applications. Now folks did receive interviews from referrals but that didn't necessarily lead to offers.
that only led to offers in 15 % of the cases. you know, it's an interesting takeaway from the year and something that surprises a lot of folks when I share it. But I really think, you know, if you are positioning yourself clearly, your resume is well-written, it's relevant to the job, it's submitted quickly. And if you back it up with an outbound message, maybe just a DM to the hiring manager or recruiter,
that clarifies your unique value, right, gives them a heads up that they should look. Those are a lot of the techniques that I think we can thank for this high number of offers that folks receive that came from cold applications. The other thing I would mention is that many of the folks who went through the program
also received offers that were not the bare minimum. They were on the high end of the pay range, in some cases above the pay range, and in other cases included an additional signing bonus. So I'm just really proud to say that
In the SPRINT program, one of the very first things that we do is we look at your unique circumstance. We look at how mature you are in your career, how high the demand is for your specific set of skills, the industry you're targeting, the types of products that you're trying to work on. And all of those factors contribute to what we decide on for your job search strategy and how much we're going to lean on cold applications, how much we're going to lean on outreach, how much we're going to expect inbound. so while we have these sort
overall SPRINT success metrics that I'm talking about today, what I really love about working with folks is that we have an honest conversation about how and if we want to diversify. Because I don't think there's a one size fits all approach for everyone. Some folks are really well armed to do outreach, other folks, their resume speaks for itself. And so I really enjoy figuring out that personalized strategy for folks and I'm proud to say it's paid off.
So you're probably curious about some of the other metrics that I have. if, like I said, if you follow me on LinkedIn, you've gotten a sneak peek of some of these, but you know, some of the most exciting accomplishments from 2025 inside the SPRINT program are number one, we had someone who received an offer in 18 days. That's one eight. That was our fastest offer of the year. And that's just, I mean, so amazing. This was a person who
been job searching on their own for quite a while. And I remember looking at their LinkedIn profile and feeling like, you know, knowing what I knew about their experience and seeing how they're marketing themselves on LinkedIn, it just wasn't coming through. And so with some, adjustments and adding some clarity and then getting this person applying to roles that were a better fit for their level of experience, it's not a mistake they got an offer that quickly.
But you might be wondering, okay Jess, that's probably an outlier. You know what, it is. For a while, early on in the year, our fastest offer was, I think,
52
days so the 18 day offer beat that one out but the median number of days from the first application to the first offer in 2025 was 75 days. That's incredible right? That's just what is that two and a half months
to be able to start bringing in income in a role that you're excited about in less than 90 days in this market is incredible.
All right, you might be wondering about salary increases. So I shared a bit about kind of timeframe of folks landing offers, but we had some pretty impressive wins on the salary front. the SPRINT program overall was providing about a 5X ROI So the median salary increase for folks who received an offer through the SPRINT program was $29,000. That's about five times the initial investment
for the program itself. And I just think that that's really important to consider. I think a lot of folks wanna chat with me about the SPRINT program. They realize there's an investment required. And the thing I always tell folks is, my goal isn't to get you into a job where you're taking a pay cut. My goal isn't to get you into your next job where you're making the same amount.
My goal is to help you identify your primary value, right? Like what is that thing that only you can do? What is the way you can position yourself as a candidate that is providing such extreme and unique value to a company that they are willing to pay more for it? And so I want to see you beating out your last salary amount. I want to see you hitting the high end of the salary
not about getting you in a role where you're making the same amount. The median salary increase, like I said, post-SPRINT, it was $29,000. Now, the biggest increase was $75,000. That's life-changing for folks. This was a situation where someone was going from a role where they were
underappreciated, they were underpaid, obviously, but they were also under challenged. So not only was this person excited, of course, for a higher salary, but they were so looking forward to getting into a role where they could start to grow again. That complacency had started to take over in that last role. So anyways, really cool to see the salary increases. when I think about total comp overall, this doesn't even account for folks who are receiving incredible
RSUs and equity packages or as recently as today I had a fellow who managed to negotiate $10,000 above the pay range plus additional RSU values for total comp that's well north of $350,000 in the first year. So these are the types of positions that I want to see you land in and I want you to understand your value so that as you're going through the interview process and of course when you get to the
stage of offer negotiation, not only do you know your value at the very end when you're negotiating it, but you're really creating a situation in which you're making your value clear from day one so that you're positioning yourself with as much leverage as possible when it comes time for offer negotiation. I think that's a mistake a lot of folks make is assuming that the pay range is what it is, that it's not negotiable, assuming that they shouldn't talk about salary too early because it'll scare them away, or assuming that the company gave them
the best offer. It's like none of those things are true. And so over and over and over again in the SPRINT program, I love being able to help folks know their value, have access to salary materials so that they can see the market value of what they bring to the table, and then have the tools and the scripts to be able to engage in an offer negotiation conversation with confidence. this is a skill you can learn. And so I'm proud to say the impact that this has made on
and folks personal life is just incredible. And I'm so proud of what folks have been able to do taking these skills and getting these massive raises because you're earning potential over a lifetime. Some of the most pivotal moments that define your earning potential over the course of your lifetime happen when you take a new job. The pay raises during your tenure at a job tend to be pretty incremental.
And unfortunately, the big jumps are when you move from job to job. And so if you're not in a position to negotiate that, that can mean tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars when it comes to your earning potential over your lifetime.
So the median post-SPRINT salary, if we look across everyone who landed an offer through the SPRINT program, the median salary that they landed was That's pretty incredible. And like I said, that does not count equity
RSU's ⁓ starting bonuses or signing bonuses or any additional negotiation opportunities. I've had some folks who negotiate, like I said, PTO, some additional benefits or maybe some reimbursements for home office, flexible schedules, all sorts of things can be negotiated, pretty proud to say that the median post-SPRINT salary is well north of $160,000.
So that is what the year looked like just.
amazing to see folks recognizing their value, articulating a clear value proposition as they take themselves to market, and then seeing the fruits of their labor when they're able to negotiate impressive offers and start in new roles. And I've been able to stay in touch with many of the folks. I love doing the off-boarding calls with folks after they start in their new role and I get to hear how it's going. And it's just really neat to see folks get out of either toxic environments or I said, environments where they're not
feeling challenged and now they're thriving and it was just a simple environment shift.
so often PMs are questioning the career when the problem is the environment they're working inside of. And so that might be true for you and it's okay to want to kick off a job search even if it's not that bad at your current job. So if it's time for you, I'm always around, I'm happy to chat about the SPRINT program.
So I hope you enjoyed today's episode. It's a bit of rundown of 2025, a kickoff for 2026. I'll have some more episodes
upcoming about job search, of course, as always, but I really thought you might find it interesting to hear a bit about how things went inside the SPRINT program last year So as always, if you have any questions or if this triggered any ideas or thoughts, feel free to send me a DM on LinkedIn. I love to hear from you and
Always happy to answer your questions or share my perspective on something. Maybe you'll even inform a future podcast episode. And if you are thinking about kicking off a job search this year, definitely reach out. It's not too late.
It has been super active on the hiring front for folks who are in SPRINT at the moment. They are getting so many interview requests because companies who didn't get a chance to fill roles late last year or who are eager to fill roles now that budgets have been opened up for 2026, things are really active. so historically Q1 has been very, very active for hiring. Q2 is usually fairly active as well. And then things slow down over the course of the summer. So if you think of job search,
be in your near future and you'd like some support to figure out how you go to market with your specific value and an understanding of how to be the most compelling candidate, then we should talk. You should check out the SPRINT program at jesssherlock.com/sprint You can set up time for us to chat and I'd be happy to see if it would be a good fit for you. So with all of that, hope you enjoyed the episode and I'll see you next time on AFTER THE CERT.
