🎧 Stop Starting Your Job Search With Your Resume!
If you’re about to kick off a job search and your first instinct is to update your resume, this episode is for you.
Hear me when I say: starting with your resume is the trap that keeps so many smart and talented Product Managers stuck.
If you’re about to kick off a job search and your first instinct is to update your resume, this episode is for you. Hear me when I say: starting with your resume is the trap that keeps so many smart and talented Product Managers stuck.
In this episode, I walk you through why the resume comes later and what actually needs to happen first if you want real traction. I also share a real SPRINT client story that led to an offer in 42 days, with a 15% salary increase + a $17,000 starting bonus... all because they took the time to craft a thoughtful job search strategy.
If you want your next job search to feel focused and intentional instead of chaotic, this episode is a must listen.
Could you use some support on your product job search?
Whether you’re new to Product Management or looking for your next role, the job search can be tough. If know you need guidance, strategy, and end-to-end support, learn more about my SPRINT coaching program that helps Product Managers land their first (or next!) role.
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Jess Sherlock (00:00)
if you are thinking about kicking off a job search, think about just the tactical updating of your resume or the assumption that you're going to continue doing what you have been instead start to look at where you want to go.
because then you can start to see the bridge between where you are and where you want to go and what strategy you might need to leverage to get there.
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of AFTER THE CERT After last week's episode, I got a lot of messages from you all wishing that you could hear more success stories from SPRINT clients. So here we are, I'm going to share in this episode and in the next couple episodes, some deep dives into a few clients who managed to get offers in this market within 90 days. And I think you're gonna be really interested to hear what seemed to...
be the patterns because a lot of folks think that it's about having the perfect resume or it's about just volume applying or it's about using AI to edit your resume for every single job that you apply to to try to hit on all those keywords. And my hope for you here is that as I share these success stories, you can pick up on some of the deeper elements that really contributed to the momentum and traction that each of these clients found.
because it goes so far beyond any of those things. It goes so far beyond resume. And so I'm really excited to share these with you. dive into client success story number one. this is a client who applied to SPRINT back in the spring. They were super busy in their current role and they hadn't started job searching just yet because they knew they wanted to be thoughtful and intentional about their job search. And they just...
knew that they hadn't really had the time to get their thoughts together working this full-time gig. part of the inspiration for reaching out and knowing that they wanted to kick off a job search was that their current company had just completed a reorg and their role that had always been a PM role was transitioned away from actual product work towards more go-to-market strategy work, which is fine if that's what you want, but this particular person knew that that was not at all the direction that they wanted to go in in their career.
So they applied to the SPRINT program. had a quick chat and yeah, I accepted them into the program and we got to work. step one in the SPRINT program is a one-on-one with me where we will work on setting your personalized job search strategy. And here's what I'll say about that session is, first of all, folks are often really surprised by the fact that we're not opening up the resume until your second one-on-one call. I may look at it in session number one with you, but...
we are not actually editing it and putting in the details into the bullet points until after we decide on your job search strategy. And folks are often really surprised by how deep we go into their career background and even into their personal life, their childhood, because The best job search strategies that I've helped folks create that have been the most effective.
go well beyond superficial approaches that I usually hear folks using. So some of those more superficial approaches, and you may be guilty of this, but this is a safe space. So if you're someone who just says, you know, I've got my old resume from the last time I was job searching. I'm just going to go in and update it. I'll throw in what I've been doing most recently, you know, and that'll be good enough. That might feel productive, but you're often not considering
where you want to go, right? You're just focusing on what's accurate and what's chronological and updating your resume from that perspective. But that doesn't at all allow you to understand your strategy for how do your skills, how can you set up your skills to be as marketable as possible in the job market that you're jumping into? Okay. So the next superficial approach that I see often is, well, this is my current title. So I'm just going to search for that.
I'm a PM now, so I'm just going to look for PM roles or I'm a senior PM, I'm just going to go look for senior PM roles. And again, that's not always going to get you where you want to go because so often I have seen folks whose current title is actually under representing the level of responsibility that they have. And so if you are a PM who's operating at a senior PM level, because you are the one generating insights and you have a significant scope of ownership over a significant part of the product,
maybe even setting the strategy for that area, we're going to talk about whether that title is appropriately representing what you're doing. Okay, so if you're basing your job search off of your current title, that may lead you astray. And the final thing that I see is folks getting hyper-focused on their current industry, and assuming that just because they're working in a current industry now, like maybe banking, that they'll just continue to work in that industry. And sometimes that makes sense.
But not always. And I think it's important to consider whether you enjoy the challenges from that particular industry and if you want to continue to specialize there or if you want to make an intentional pivot. my advice to you here is if you are thinking about kicking off a job search, think about it beyond just the tactical updating of your resume or the assumption that you're going to continue doing what you have been doing and instead start to look at where you want to go.
because then you can start to see the bridge between where you are and where you want to go and what strategy you might need to leverage to get there.
So that third example that I gave you about the assumption that someone would continue in the current industry, that was the case with this client I'm telling you about. they had exclusively in I think the last seven or eight years had only worked at one large legacy bank, big giant bank. So they had made this assumption or had been telling themselves a story that
that was probably what needed to be next. Nope. So we had our job search strategy call and there were a few really important insights that stood out to me as we were having our conversation. And these really went on to inform the strategy and ultimately the success for this person's job search. one of the things that surfaced was that while this person had gotten very good at navigating the bureaucracy and politics and
multi-layered stakeholders and very complex organizational design at this large bank they had been working at, they were so hungry more ownership, more autonomy. They really wanted to work on a smaller team, a more nimble team, one that could move more quickly, maybe do more experimentation. And this was a really important thing to know because if a hiring manager or recruiter is going to look at this person's resume and they saw this
big bank, it's easy to wonder, can this person be successful here in our startup or in our small innovation team going to require much more autonomy and ownership, right? So by knowing what you want, you can kind of get out ahead of how do I message or how do I package myself in such a way that it's clear not only what I want, but that I can do it. So that was the first insight that came up.
The next insight that came up was, as we were talking about their various roles that they had held over their time at this company, they did have some experience with people leadership in the past. They had actually had a few direct reports, had enjoyed it. But, you know, when asked, I said, is that something that you want to do again? Is that something that you want to pursue in this next job search? And it wasn't something they had considered. But here's the thing. In this market, it's important to know that
companies more more are looking for people who will do hands-on, roll up your sleeves, get it done type work, even with a really senior title. So was great to hear that this person didn't necessarily want to pursue people leadership now. They really just wanted to get good at the craft for themselves. So not only was that a helpful insight so that we could make sure we packaged them more as an individual contributor than as a people leader, but what I do know about the current market is that it is a bonus to have people who
have leadership mindsets who can influence people who may have been more involved in strategy. And so what we needed to think about was how do we tell this story of your career in a way that surfaces those skills but doesn't pigeonhole you as a thinker and not a doer.
So here's the third insight that came up during this job search strategy call. And this one really surprised me. This was, and surprised the client as well. This wasn't something either one of us had expected to come up. But as we were talking about previous projects that this person had worked on, it came up that they had had this kind of series of side projects. And it was this like offhanded comment, honestly, at first it was like, yeah.
You know, a few years ago I worked on this one thing that was like cybersecurity and fraud detection and da da da da. as I was watching this person tell the story, I noticed them light up. Like they're literally their body language, their energy, almost their voice to an extent. They really became alive when they were talking about these projects. And so I started to ask a bit more about, you know, what was it about these projects? What did you enjoy? Who were you working with? And what we discovered is that
they have this really deep and interesting experience in working with highly technical engineers. I'm not talking your typical like full stack, Ruby on Rails type engineer. I'm talking like deep backend, cybersecurity, data modeling, data pipeline type engineers. And additionally, this person's dad was an engineer. So they literally had been around highly technical engineers their whole life.
and really appreciated the way those folks thought about problems and tackled problems and the way that you had to kind of communicate effectively in order to collaborate effectively. So this was like a massive insight. And this is my favorite part about the SPRINT program and why I'm such a stickler for starting with a thoughtful strategy is because that last insight, it might sound minor to you, but it was an unlock for this person's entire job search.
their entire positioning and eventually the new role that they landed. So had it not been for this conversation, it's highly likely this person would have landed a job. I have no doubt they're very talented, but I suspect they would have landed kind of a generic FinTech type role. Maybe have even had some challenge getting their story across about moving from kind of big legacy company to small startup, but...
It's not an issue of would they have landed a role? But what I see and what I want to encourage you to see is that they landed a role that is truly a better fit for where they want to go long term with their career growth. So by understanding what's important to you, we can have an eye towards how do we pitch and package you in a way that's going to bridge you closer to what you ultimately want out of your career.
So in this case, it was smaller, more nimble team.
organization that might appreciate their leadership skills, but not a people leadership role. And maybe even a role that allowed them to work with highly technical And so if you think about it, this insight, was really the core that allowed us to make smart tweaks to move this person from, hey, I'm a generic FinTech PM. You should take a chance on me.
to a highly enthusiastic and uniquely skilled PM who has worked specifically with cybersecurity, payments, and merchants. And what this allowed was super clarity in what their value was, what they bring to the table for a company that's looking at their resume or that's looking at their LinkedIn. It allowed them to create a much more compelling and differentiated pitch when they got interviews.
And this is the answer to the tell me about yourself question. That's your pitch. It also led to faster and easier traction because their high quality applications were only going to highly aligned roles. This is a person who applied to less than a hundred roles before getting interviews and ultimately their offer, right? So this isn't someone who had to apply to five, six, seven hundred jobs. And finally, having a niche value proposition like that, in
cybersecurity focus rather than just fintech, allowed them to have really incredible negotiating power. So to give you a sense for timeline here, this person got started with the SPRINT program. They were applying within a couple weeks. That's always our goal for folks in the SPRINT program is we want to get you market ready as soon as possible. And so they started applying using their new SPRINT style resume, SPRINT style LinkedIn, and
any application artifacts that reflected their strategy. And they landed their first interview in just two weeks. Two weeks. And then their offer came through in 42 days. This particular interview process was with a startup that was doing, no surprise here, fraud detection and payments. They were very smart during the interview process. And this was something that...
I remember coaching them on was constantly choosing relevance over recency. when they were engaging in conversations with the hiring manager, with other folks within the interview process, making sure that they were choosing those obscure, what they had considered like obscure side projects. But those cybersecurity projects were the ones that were the most relevant to the type of work this company wanted to do.
So in this case, the unique value that they were bringing to the table was their ability to come in with, proven experience, lessons already learned, industry knowledge, like the ramp up period being shortened is ultimately what the value was to the company. Right? Let me say that again, because it's really important. When a company is considering hiring you, I think as candidates, it's very easy to think about it from just like a, I'm awesome. They should hire me. Right? Clearly I can do the job. But
in this market especially, and it's always been the case to an extent, but it feels very acute right now, is companies are looking at candidates through the lens of, am I confident that this individual can come in and have the same or better impact that they did before at a different company? And as a candidate, you have a lot of stories, lessons learned and...
clearly a lot of domain knowledge, you can talk shop with your hiring team. The more they're going to believe that you can come in and with relatively small amounts of ramp up time, be able to start having impact in their organization.
So here's a fun fact, I love this. Initially in the interview process, this person was told, we usually do a take-home assignment, but we're going to skip it for you. So they were on Cloud9, they were like, woo-wee, I'm not even going have to do a take-home assignment. I'm about to get an offer. This is great. All they had done was have a couple interviews with the hiring manager and a couple other members of the team. And it was like, I got this in the bag. And then all of a sudden there was a curve ball. Actually, we do want you to present a take-home assignment.
But here's the awesome thing. They messaged me immediately, shot me over a DM with a screenshot of what it was. And it was like, tell me about a previous product that you've worked on. And this is a really common take-home assignment right now. I think a lot of companies are trying to create a better reputation around take-home assignments and interview processes and try to get away from this, it's like really polarizing to have people do work that might appear to be free work.
So I've noticed this trend towards take-home assignments or presentations where instead of asking you to solve a problem about the actual company or solve a problem about like a hypothetical company, that they actually just have you tell them about something that you've launched before. So this is probably not going to be a surprise, but was very smart in presenting about a very similar problem that they have solved before to what they knew this company wanted to solve.
because they'd had enough conversations, seen the job description, talked to members of the team to be able to connect those dots from not just, you know, here are my raw skills, but here are, here's an actual project that I worked on, something I launched that is so freaking relevant to what you all are trying to do that how could you not hire me? So we prepped, we prepared, I, was...
helping provide feedback to this person, kind of getting them to a point where they were hitting on all the things that we know are kind of the secret answers, if you will, to what companies really want to see when they give you an assignment like this. So they got it to a place where it was really full of the right kind of detail, went in and presented it, and then weren't sure how it went. I remember getting a DM, something to the effect of, okay, did I think it went well?
And I love those because it's like, we're always our biggest critic. But here's the best part, 27 minutes, literally 27 minutes after presenting their take home about that previous project that they had delivered. was in a very similar problem space. They got a verbal offer over the phone. Isn't that amazing? It's like when it's a fit, it's a fit, right? They wanted to put a ring on it fast. ⁓
So go and do the take home that you weren't even supposed to do, but you nail it. And it was probably a quick double check, if I'm honest, because when you're someone who interviews very well, sometimes the take home assignment can be a way to just kind of ensure that the skills are there. I suspect that's why the company probably changed their mind on the take home assignment, or maybe they had another fairly equivalent candidate and they needed a tiebreaker, you know, who knows. But the point is,
the sheer speed at which this person received the offer a direct reflection the alignment their value to this particular role. And I can say as a hiring manager, those times when I did finally find the person, I didn't waste any time reaching out. I would shoot a text, I'd make a phone call, call me a millennial if you want, but I was trying to get through to that to make sure that they knew
we wanted to extend an just fantastic traction. They clearly valued this person's skills and wanted to bring them onto the team. not only allowed them to be a more relevant candidate, more exciting candidate, but here's the best They also use the salary negotiation tools inside of SPRINT, which are super helpful if you're someone who's nervous about negotiating. I love helping people negotiate. It's one of my favorite parts of the process.
and folks often underestimate whether or if they should negotiate. You get to this point and you might have some fear creeping up or you're worried to negotiate because you're worried you might lose the offer. In all my time doing this, I have never once seen someone lose an offer they negotiated. I've seen offers get pulled for other reasons, but never because someone negotiated.
With these tools that we provide, this person was able to negotiate an offer that was 15 % higher, one five percent higher than their previous role, which is awesome to begin with, but get this. They also negotiated a whopping $17,000 starting bonus. Is that not amazing? And you're probably like, in this market? And I'm like, yeah. When you show your value and they want you to start right away, yeah. That's not the only story of a starting bonus I have this year.
So remember, none of this was an accident, okay? This is the direct result of a strong strategy from the start. This is the result of a focused and intentional job search. This is the result of high value, highly aligned interviews that drive your value home at every step of the way. you can imagine, this client is just over the moon excited.
landed the job. But remember, this whole time they were navigating these interviews and applications and everything else, they were also balancing a full-time job. time was super of the essence. And in the end, when I asked them if SPRINT was worth the investment, here's what they said. They said, "it cut out so much uncertainty and let them focus their time in a way that was most targeted and productive." And that's really the thing that I want to leave you with is many of you listening
experienced enough, smart enough, dedicated go out there and land a job. But are you sure that you're telling the strongest story so that you can get the job is going to most align with your long-term career goals? Or is your positioning and target a bit generic, you into a place where you're getting interviews and you're maybe even getting offers, but you're not super excited about it?
My goal is to help you get higher quality leads, if you will, into your interview you have is essentially a lead. And so my goal for you is not just to increase the quantity of the leads that you're getting you're consistently applying to high alignment roles or even setting yourself up for more inbound because your LinkedIn is optimized to highlight the right things.
but also that the quality of everything that's coming into your funnel is highly aligned. These aren't scattershot opportunities multiple different industries or multiple different stages of products or multiple different problem The clearer you are on the value you have to offer, the easier it is for hiring teams to see your value and get excited about you.
And so for this person, got clarity on their initial, most marketable positioning right from the very beginning. got one-on-one feedback on mock interviews that they knew how to answer the question behind the question at every stage. And they got the moral support, the DMs, the voice memos. That's my favorite part is being able to kind of provide validation that you're doing the right things,
bring you back down when you're starting to freak out. so, yeah, SPRINT was a no-brainer for this client.
you know, I think a few important reflection questions to think about in light of this client's story is,
Number one, are you actually clear on what you want most out of your next role?
Are you actually clear on what you want out of your next role?
Question number two, you have a compelling and marketable positioning for yourself relevant in this current competitive market? Again, do you have a compelling and marketable positioning for yourself that's likely to work in this competitive market?
Another question, and this is especially important if you're trying to manage a lot of things on your plate. Do you have the support systems in place to keep yourself consistent and accountable during the ups and the downs and the surprises and the curve balls? Right, do you have the support systems in place keep yourself consistent and accountable during the ups and downs?
And finally, would ask you, how would it feel pursue your next career move when you want to rather than when you're forced into it due to a layoff or something similar?
And I know in this time of, what seems like constant layoffs, that might feel like question you're not allowed to ask, but I still think it's an important one to ask, You are allowed to make career moves when it's the right time for you. It doesn't always have to be when you're forced into it. So again, how would it feel to pursue a career move when you want to? Maybe it's now, maybe it's not, but when you want to,
rather than being forced into it because of a layoff or something similar.
So if you feel like you wanna be intentional with your next PM career move, we should chat. You can check out my SPRINT program at jesssherlock.com/sprint. You can learn more about the program and you can even set up time for us to chat.
And by the way, if you're listening to this before Thanksgiving, you have one more day to take advantage of a little bonus that I'm running. I believe in the value of starting before the end of the new year so much. So if you do feel like there's a career move upcoming for you, or maybe you've been stuck and you kind of want to reset your job search, I really would encourage you to start that before the end of the year so you can take advantage of the, bit of a surge that we're seeing now, but also the natural start of the year hiring surge that we see every year.
So there's one more day to take advantage of this bonus. And so it's really simple. If you sign up and pay in full for SPRINT before Thanksgiving, automatically get an extra 30 days of job search support. That's it. Absolutely free. It's a $1,600 value. is my gift to you. And as always, I hope you enjoyed the episode, but if you have questions or you want to connect, you can find me on LinkedIn, send me a DM. I'd love to I'll see you on the next episode of AFTER THE CERT.
