How to search for a new job

Assess how relevant you are to the job

Before you tailor a single line, decide whether this role is worth an evening. Applying where your chances are highest — not where the title looks nice — is what turns a long search into a short one.

Judge your real chances against this specific role. Tailoring can sharpen a genuine match; it cannot manufacture one.

• Separate the job description’s must-have requirements from its nice-to-haves.
• For each must-have, answer honestly: do you have real, defensible experience for it?
• Check the non-negotiables too: seniority level, domain, location or time zone, salary range, language.
• Decide: if you clearly cover most of the must-haves, apply and tailor. If a hard requirement rules you out, skip it and put the evening into a stronger match.

Prepare your CV tailored to the job description

One generic CV sent to fifty jobs loses to a tailored CV sent to ten. Recruiters and screening software both compare your CV to a specific job description — so once you’ve decided the job is worth applying to, build the CV against that description, not against your career in general.

Start from the job description, not from your CV

• Read the job description twice and mark the must-have requirements: skills, domains, seniority signals, and the outcomes the role owns.
• For each must-have, find real evidence in your experience — a project, a metric, a responsibility you actually held.
• Rewrite your summary and most recent role bullets so the strongest matches appear in the top third of the first page.
• Use the vocabulary of the job description where it is honest to do so: if they say “stakeholder management” and you wrote “cross-team alignment,” say both.
• Cut what does not serve this application. A CV is a targeted argument, not a full biography.

Keep the evidence honest

Every line on the tailored CV should survive an interviewer asking “tell me more about that.” Tailoring means re-ordering, re-phrasing, and emphasizing real experience — never inventing metrics or titles. A claim you cannot defend in the interview costs more than the gap it was hiding.

Before you send it, check

• Does the first half-page answer the top three requirements of the job description?
• Would a recruiter who spends 30 seconds on it see the match?
• Is every number and title accurate and defensible?
• Is the file named clearly (your name + role) and exported to the format the application asks for?

Prepare for interviews

General interview preparation happens once, before any specific process starts — and pays off in every conversation that follows. The goal is a baseline you can adapt in an evening, not a script you memorize.

Build a story bank

Most interview questions — behavioral, situational, “tell me about a time” — are answered from the same small set of real stories. Prepare them once:

• List 8–12 significant situations from your career: launches, failures, conflicts, turnarounds, decisions you owned.
• Write each as a short structured story: the situation, what you did, and the measurable result.
• Tag each story with the themes it proves: leadership, prioritization, conflict, delivery under pressure, learning from failure.
• Say them out loud until each fits in about two minutes without notes.

Prepare the answers every process asks for

• Your introduction — a 90-second narrative of your career that ends at why you are looking now.
• Why you are leaving or looking — honest, forward-looking, without criticizing your current employer.
• Your salary expectations — a researched range you can state without hesitating.
• Your questions for them — a standing list you will later adapt per company.

Know the round types

Interviews differ by round more than by company: a recruiter screen checks fit and logistics, a hiring-manager round tests depth and ownership, a panel tests collaboration, an executive round tests judgment and business sense. Knowing what each round is for tells you which stories and what altitude of answer to bring.

Research the company

Know where you are applying. Company research protects you twice: it makes your applications and interviews sharper, and it filters out companies you would regret joining before you spend weeks on their process.

Where to look

• The company’s own site: product pages, pricing, blog, careers page, and any annual or investor reports.
• LinkedIn: the team’s profiles, tenure patterns, and who recently joined or left.
• Review sites and press: employee reviews, funding announcements, product coverage.
• The product itself: sign up, use it, and form your own opinion.
• Your network: anyone who works there, worked there, or sold to them.

Track your communications

A real search runs many processes at once, and each one generates emails, calls, names, promises, and dates. Memory does not scale past three or four parallel processes — a tracking system does.

Track per company, in one place

For every company you are in contact with, keep one record that holds:

• The people — every name you have spoken with, their role, and how to reach them.
• The history — each touchpoint with its date: application sent, replies, calls, interviews, tests.
• What was said — commitments in both directions: what they promised (“we’ll get back to you by Friday”) and what you promised (a portfolio, references, a task).
• The artifacts — which CV version you sent, the cover letter, the take-home assignment.
• The next action and its date — every process should always have exactly one: wait until X, follow up on Y, prepare Z.

Why it matters

• You never ask a question they already answered, and never forget a name in a follow-up round.
• You follow up on time instead of losing processes to silence — a polite nudge after a missed deadline is expected, not annoying.
• When offers arrive, you can compare full timelines and conversations, not just numbers.
• After a rejection, the record shows exactly where the process ended — the starting point for turning that result into a better next attempt.

Prepare for their interview

Your general interview prep gets you most of the way; this step focuses it on one specific interview. Every scheduled round deserves its own preparation pass — built from the job description, your company research, and everything the process has told you so far.

Tailor your prep to this round

• Confirm the round’s format and participants: who is interviewing you, their roles, how long, and what type of round it is.
• Re-read the job description and pick the requirements this round will most likely test.
• Select the stories from your bank that prove those requirements, and rehearse them with this company’s context in mind.
• Re-read your company research and communication log — everything said in earlier rounds is fair game in later ones.
• Prepare answers for the gaps: the requirements where your evidence is weakest are the questions most worth rehearsing.

Prepare your questions for them

Adapt your standing list into questions only this company can answer — about the team, the roadmap, the reason the role is open, and how success will be measured. Specific questions signal genuine interest; generic ones signal a mass mailing.

Handle the logistics the day before

• Confirm the time, time zone, and the meeting link or address.
• Test your camera, microphone, and connection for remote rounds.
• Have your tailored CV, the job description, and your notes open and ready.
• Plan to be ready ten minutes early, with water and a notepad.

Process the interview results

The interview is not over when the call ends. Every round — passed or failed — produces information, and processing it is what turns a long search into a better one.

Right after the interview

• Write down every question you were asked, while you still remember them. This list is your most accurate map of what this company — and this market — actually tests.
• Note what went well, what you stumbled on, and any new information about the role, the team, or the process.
• Record the agreed next step and its date in your tracking record.
• Send a short thank-you note that references something specific from the conversation.

When the result arrives

Review the pipeline, not just the interview

Every few weeks, step back and read your whole tracking record as a funnel: how many applications become screens, screens become interviews, interviews become offers. Where the funnel narrows is where your next improvement lives — a thin top means better targeting and stronger CVs; losses at the interview stage mean deeper preparation.

Rejections are data. A search where every “no” sharpens the next attempt gets shorter with every round — and the candidates who land the best roles are rarely the ones who never failed an interview. They are the ones who processed every result.