Why you're not getting interviews
Over the last few years, Relentless has helped hundreds of candidates book thousands of interviews.
Our interview calendar across just a sample of our candidates looked like this on a given month this year:
Here's everything you need to do to get interviews:
Target the Right Role:
The right role to target is one which:
You are good at.
Has a lot of job posts.
Here are some examples:
Example one
If you spent several years in a product manager role, you are probably good at it.
Additionally, you can validate that there are a lot of job posts for this role by checking LinkedIn and looking at the number of posts that appear for "Product Manager"
Example two
If you spent several years in a role that has low demand, but is similar to a role that has high demand, you can probably target the role that has high demand.
For example, we had a candidate with a lot of experience in “Learning development.”
“Learning development” jobs have similar responsibilities to “Human Resources” jobs, so the candidate targeted a “Human Resources” job.
Additional tips:
Go for an industry you're skilled in:
For example, if you're skilled in sales and spent a lot of your time selling to 3 different industries, focus on those 3 industries during your job search as opposed to focusing on sales in any industry.
The same applies for being skilled in any other function.
Here's a snippet from an email a candidate sent us when they got an offer from a company because they "had a background marketing to the same audience"
Apply to 30-50 posts per week that were posted in the last 7 days.
The best way to do this is to play with job titles so you can get enough jobs in the door.
For example:
If you're targeting a leadership product manager role, query with the following:
Group Product Manager, Senior Product Manager, Principal Product Manager, Director Product, VP Product, Chief product officer, Lead Product Manager, Staff Product Manager, Head of Product.
If you're targeting a leadership product manager role, query with the following:
Group Product Manager, Senior Product Manager, Principal Product Manager, Director Product, VP Product, Chief product officer, Lead Product Manager, Staff Product Manager, Head of Product.
If you're targeting a junior customer success manager role, query with the following:
Customer Success Manager, Account Manager, Senior Customer Success Manager, Senior Account Manager.
A lot of the art relies on understanding how different companies refer to your role title.
2. Find people to contact
Relentless does this using an algorithm to predict who to reach out, but the manual way to do this is to target people who:
Have high decision making power over whether you get hired
Are likely to reply
People who have high decision making power include:
Hiring managers of roles:
A hiring manager is the person who a candidate would report to if they were hired to do the role.
For example, at Relentless, I’m the hiring manager for some of my sales roles because the sales hires report to me, while other people on my team are the hiring managers for other roles because they have a different set of candidates reporting to them.
Here's an example of a hiring manager for a job description:
Recruiters tasked to the role:
A recruiter is the person responsible for finding talent to do a role and pushing them through the screening process.
Example:
A role title of executive recruiter implies the recruiter recruits for Director / C-Suite, Technical recruiter implies the recruiter recruits for technical roles like SWE and DS, senior recruiter implies senior / director level roles and so on.
For each of the above, target those:
Who posted the job
Who are more senior (e.g. directors of the function or any founder level individual)
Who have been at the companies longer
4. Generate their emails
Get real emails which don't bounce.
I've gotten (and successfully gotten responses) from everyone including hiring managers at companies I wanted to work at to billionaires.The best way to get verified emails is to use a tool like ZoomInfo or ContactOut, but they can cost up to thousands of dollars a year.
Relentless bought them because we're doing this at scale, but it doesn't make sense for 1 off use cases.The cheaper but more time consuming route is to use something like Name2Email.
5. Reach out
I've written several articles about to reach out to hiring managers and recruiters effectively including here where a CEO called my email the best they've ever received, here where I show the strategy our candidates use to get replies from the Lyft CEO, and here where I outlined how
I heard back from billionaire and founder's fund managing director Peter Thiel.
Hope this all helps!