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We often do not believe how broken things are, before we experience them ourselves. So was the case of the Labor market for (AI roles). You might be puzzled, because what more hot industry than Artificial Intelligence can you image to look for job?! Well that was my piece of mind as well, until I was subjected to 400+ job processes over the course of 6 months,<\/p>\n
that many are bizarre to say the least.\u00a0 And they are completely orthogonal to your skills or weak points. They are simply HR habits and processes born before AI era and now got completely out of sync with reality.<\/p>\n
As I didn\u2019t want to drop these things just into well-of-disbelief for myself, I decided to release it as Wicked Hiring Advent Calendar<\/strong><\/span>. You can read day after day, where (AI\/Tech) hiring stands now. And how not to depress yourself further, because most likely, what you go through is not your fault. And just for the record, over the 6M I describe here, I came across (turned down) and finally accepted suitable job. But the noise to signal ration is disgustingly terrible. Hiring industry is really ripe for major disruption. Read on why<\/p>\n (too speed up reading, sequels of this series are ordered in descending order)<\/p>\n PART | 14 | AI triggering cynicism of hiring managers <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Within one of the previous episodes of our Wicked Hiring Advent calendar we stumbled upon Hiring (mal-) practice that is very recent, actually emerged directly within 2025. Today Let\u2019s take this short mention into full-fledged episode, as its implications are definitely worth it.<\/p>\n Artificial Intelligence<\/strong> entered our life in almost any area it could sneak itself into. The fact that GPT chatbot is now the name-holder (for most population) for AI services, has had one less observed (but serious) impact on the hiring market. OpenAI managed to spread its ChatGPT product mainly as B2C service. As a result, hundreds of millions of regular folks started to play with AI, while enterprise companies were (and still are) dragging their feet in AI implementation in company processes.<\/p>\n You hardly find more obvious demonstration of this duality than the process of recruitment. Almost all the (B2C) candidates have used<\/strong> some of the AI tools to pimp their profile or chances to pass through selection process. This included combo of some of following:<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Please note that I only listed the AI use-cases that no hiring manager should have issue with. But of course, the implication of all these tools is that all of the sudden candidates (if screened old way) look better than previous cohorts. But are they making things, pretending to be someone else or are they simply better using information (and tech) that was already there? In other words, if now candidate looks like (s)he is 85% match where year ago the average was 60%, are these 25% fabricated? Or are 90% matching candidates able to better convey their profile, so that now 85% of it can de-blurred (compared to 60% before)?<\/p>\n On the other side, most hiring managers<\/strong> didn\u2019t<\/strong> elect to use much of the AI beyond some of:<\/strong><\/p>\n Just optically you can see that AI got hiring managers (especially the lax ones) astonished. Off-setting their quality rulers, desensitizing their feeling for what is great, good and less so. Now surprisingly too many candidates pass the screening call, the technical interview. So obviously they need to cheat, right? And I, hiring manager, need to catch them cheating (to return things to original balance).\u00a0 Now I am on crusade!<\/p>\n Let me tell you, that I am weird candidate. I donate concepts and ideas that came to my mind during the interviews. I write back to companies that rejected me to thank them for time and hand over my tips how their business might improve even without me being around. And I am not doing that to overturn their decision or make them regret choosing somebody else. In 90% cases I never seen or heard of them ever after. But it\u2019s karma.<\/p>\n And therefore, I can’t understand why hiring managers got so cynical about AI<\/strong>. Why do you assume candidates use AI to cheat ? why don\u2019t you take the higher quality of input from candidates and don\u2019t turn it into something useful? You still can pick 1 best. Nobody forces you to hire 10 people, now that all 10 look like the best candidate from half year ago. It\u2019s your choosing process that needs to adapt. Not your cynicism, dear hiring crew. Think about it!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PART | 13 | Free Tech Labor illusion<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Many of the previous episodes of Wicked Hiring Advent Calendar have been about general disruptions in a way that (not only) tech roles are being hired. However, over the course of 430 job discussion I have come across one interesting trend that emerged for CTO role<\/strong> mainly.<\/p>\n Many start-ups operate in very capital constrained limits. Thus, it is not unusual for the founders to work for (almost) no salary until first major investment is gained and are being compensated by (so called) sweat-equity<\/strong>. But there are some major differences for early roles, which are striking.<\/p>\n Especially now in AI era, start-up ideas are easy to come from product-minded or marketing-minded founders. They have insight into what kind of product or service to offer. As in majority of cases these take form of digital goods, before you even have anything to show to investors you need to build MVP to prove not only if works but also to gain early feedback from the users. In this sense the technical work is 0 to 1 switch<\/strong>.<\/p>\n With use of AI in coding a workable prototype<\/strong> can be erected in 2-3 month of work. Thus I found amazing that non-technical founders of business ideas were shopping on LinkedIn for CTO\u2019s that are expected to work without any salary for 6-12months. Even more daring is that these founders expect the founding CTOs to work full time for a year. Now don\u2019t get me wrong, the other founding things (like building pitch deck, meeting investors, \u2026) can be (and often are) done along another income bearing activity, working full time on single-handedly developing the app or platform for a year is lost opportunity of 100K+ EUR. Is really the work of other non-technical founders committing 100K each?<\/p>\n This issue becomes even more evident when you learn that most cofounders are \u201cwilling\u201d to pass on 10-15% of equity to the technical cofounder that they recruit. In usual model where there is duo of non-technical founders, you invest disproportionally more than 1\/3 of total effort for receiving less than 15% of the stake. For CTO to ever recover that time investment, the company would have to be sold within 2-3 years for 2+ mil EUR. Adding 4y+ vesting of the shares (not unheard of in one of those offers), one would have to bet almost half a million<\/strong> of own potential income on somebody would pay ~10mil EUR in cash for the company (due to financing dilution). In what percentage of cases that will happen?<\/p>\n All in all, many non-technical founders shop almost for free tech labor<\/strong>. And many have I seen. Over the course of last quarter, I have seen 50+ cases of this kind of CTO\/Technical cofounder \u201cwork offers\u201d. Most of them have few people who bothered to react first place. Maybe the non-technical folks hope to build their MVPs through AI tools. But if they don\u2019t succeed with it, then they need to adjust their expectations. As the technical guy should not be the person with most skin in the game, especially if upside is so foggy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PART | 12 | POLAND\u2019s and UKRAINE\u2019s hiring self-defense (and what you can learn from that)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n When hiring we aim to find somebody who fits in. But what if fitting in means actually screening some totally unwelcome candidates<\/strong>? How to do that without crossing line into discrimination? Let me share with you interesting case I experienced lately.<\/p>\n Most of us live in peaceful and progressive environments where you appreciate any new candidate (at least for the first few hundreds), as the more choice you have the better you are off you are to pick right choice (assuming your hiring process is not broken). But what if your country (or your biggest neighbor) are at war and you want to prevent the adversary representatives to infiltrate your key enterprises vital for the economy?<\/p>\n This is exactly the situation that Ukraine (and also Poland) are facing. Being assaulted by Russia, your territory and fellow Ukrainians being killed, top management of Ukrainian (national) enterprises would not like to fall victim to enemy\u2019s spies infiltrating the production lines (and potentially attempting sabotage or technology espionage). Situation is even more precarious with Poland<\/strong>, that is strong ally of Ukraine, has accepted millions of war refugees (who now work in collectives), and is not at war itself. Being a EU member state and in explicit war state, you cannot screen people around their nationalities, in fact you cannot even ask for nationality of the person as mandatory application field. That\u2019s downright discriminatory. So, what do you do?<\/p>\n I stumbled upon this accidentally but found it clever way<\/strong>. Linked In \u201cEasy apply\u201d process allows hiring company to define set of additional questions that all candidates need to answer before their application is filed. Usually companies use this to filter down on those who meet certain expertise criteria (\u201cHow long have you worked with GenAI?\u201d) But some Polish and Ukrainian companies got clever by using this to also negatively select. On quite some Polish LinkedIn job ads there popped question \u201cWhat is your level of mastering Russian?\u201d What is not obvious that the \u201cadvanced\u201d or \u201cnative speaker\u201d does not get you ahead of the other candidates (as usually for these questions), rather it sends you down the priority list.<\/p>\n Why do I mention this? If you are hiring company and you have desirable as well as undesirable criteria<\/strong> can be turned into candidates prioritization sorting, you just need to formulate them as positive statement (and use higher values as negative points). So keep that in mind when preparing your recruitment screening question.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PART | 11 | BREATH of 90’s\u00a0 (Terrible hiring sins that still prevail)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n If you follow our Wicked Hiring Advent Calendar from start you already have been initiated into set of bizarre and out-of-sync with reality practices. But today we have special treat for you.<\/p>\n Round of 432 job application I ran through brought set of bizarre experiences. And when I say bizarre, I really mean it. If I did not come across these situations myself, I would not believe these things are still happening. So without further due, let\u2019s jump directly into them.<\/p>\n Proving your CV wrong<\/strong>. This interview lasted almost 60 minutes, but had actually just one common theme. The person leading the interview was on mission to catch me lying in my CV. \u201cHow come your career starts with managerial role right away, what did you do really before your first managerial role? What does such a VP really do in his job? Here you have not been promoted for 3 years in row, what did you fail to do?” She did not find anything. I did. I found good reason to drop off the process.<\/p>\n Lying about their company<\/strong> role<\/strong>. I was invited to in-person interview. One of the participants introduced as \u201cHR team member\u201d. But I knew who she was, as I checked on LinkedIn the names and roles of people on calendar invite. She was CEO of the company in disguise, trying to pretend she was not one. What kind of culture is it signaling if CEO lies about her role in ordinary interview?<\/p>\n I have to see you 6 times<\/strong>. If hired role is stakeholder contact heavy, it makes sense for the candidate to meet different stakeholder groups for mutual chemistry and respect check. This usually makes the process longer, but with at least some decent reasoning behind. Now, some prefer dating to go slowly. Or very slowly.\u00a0 On our first meeting with CEO, who was also hiring manager for my role, I have been informed by the very CEO that he needs to see me 6 more times before he can decide if we can work together. When double checking, if I heard really correctly, I could not help myself asking: \u201cBut why do you need to make 6 distinct sessions?\u201d I am quite sure you wouldn\u2019t guess what the answer was: \u201cAfter each of our meeting I have to sleep on it before I can talk to you again.\u201d I told him that I would not like to kill that much of his time and I hereby withdrew my application. I was supposed to be hired there for large transformation project (run in extremely short time plan), that CEO was supposed to be leading himself. Sometimes it’s crucial to spot the issue already from the distance.<\/p>\n Attention test<\/strong>. Testing candidates for psychological profile or leadership style smells like sweet 90\u2019s, but still might offer some insights for hiring manager about resilience or combativeness of person. So whenever I was asked to take some of those tests, I willingly let myself get tested. However, the crown jewel of ridiculousness was coronated when I have been asked to test for attention for top managerial position. Yes, you read well, they sit me in the room and let me go through exercise testing my reflexes and eye movements. After interview I rushed to double check if the role included leading not only team, but also train locomotive, too.<\/p>\n Hiring bottom-up<\/strong>. Over the time I learned to tolerate (or at least withstand) many ridiculous HR practices. However, there is one practice I truly don\u2019t believe in and I walk away from any company trying to apply it in hiring process: Bottom-up hiring means that technical competence of candidate is tested by his future inferiors. In other words, employees pick their own boss. Tried 4 times, all 4 cases were disastrous, where people interviewing were specific niche experts and were asked to evaluate breadth of my technical skills. The most bizarre case of this was when I was supposed in new role to fire and rehire Data Science team because they were not bringing enough drive and motivation. After interview session with one of my potential subordinates I got feedback from the team that I was very change seeking and thus HR had to drop me as candidate. I just can still wrap my head around this, even few months later.<\/p>\n Cynicism of hiring managers<\/strong>. Hiring managers (especially the lax ones) got astonished by sudden AI entry into recruitment world. As shared in dedicated episode of mAIndset podcast, candidates leaned into AI usage faster, while hiring side was often sticking to pre-AI approaches. This resulted into companies hopelessly stick to hiring their steps (like take-home case-study) only to get mad at candidates who consulted AI on delivering of those assignments. But the worst aftermath of this duality is that hiring mangers got desensitized to what good or bad answer is. They simply got cynical about any solution that was more elaborate. I got assignment to prepare blueprint for line of new AI products . I swear to god, I spent 3 days working on it and have not consulted AI for single line of it. How surprised I was to receive harsh answer back citing \u201cThis meticulously elaborate, all thought through AI-built document disqualifies you from further hiring process.\u201d Come again, please?<\/p>\n 10 rounds recruitment.<\/strong> You can easily spot ridiculous approach to recruitment by the mere structure of the interview process for candidate. I went through one such occasion lately, when HR informed me on first interview there will be at total 10 recruitment rounds. I gathered courage to call the elephant in the room: With 10 rounds you end-up with B- or C-tier candidate. Because no truly great A-player would bother to run for 10 rounds.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PART | 10 | PANDEMIC of internal candidates and why you SHOULDN’T PREFER them<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n We opened this Wicked Hiring Advent Calendar series with showcasing candidate ghosting. If you missed that sequel, let me just remind us that 52% of the Tech job postings never receive any answer. Today we reveal one of the main reasons why this is the case.<\/p>\n When venture is born, team is rather small, many have to multitask and if you happen to be part of the initial team there will be new tasks of all kinds thrown your way. But as company growth to corporation, roles get specialized and team bubbles into three-four digits of confederates. That\u2019s moment when even meticulous skills mapping might not cover the exact inventory of what your employees can do.<\/p>\n That leads to \u201cwhat if\u201d hope\/uncertainty on if newly opened role might potentially have match with some existing employees past experience. Combined with \u201ctime greed\u201d (we save 2-3 months of waiting for candidate and onboarding) and (declarative) employee equal chances (mandating for any role to be officially open for both internal and external candidates) you end up with large share of roles where internal candidates (or their referrals) are meeting the external round. That is the mother of disaster.<\/p>\n You might be surprised to hear rant against internal candidates, but hiring teams turned it into ridiculous and counter productive practice. Firstly, opening ANY role both internally and externally (without even second thought if we may have chance for relevant candidate) is pure negligence. If company wants to build SW development team with specific coding language or you need to hire first cyber security expert, how likely are you to find internal candidate?<\/p>\n Second issue is with \u201cInternal candidate preference\u201d. What are you here optimizing for? Aren\u2019t you looking for best possible match? Your internal pool is statistically inevitably inferior to whole world out there. So if you prefer internal candidates you are intentionally limiting yourself to less promising pool.<\/p>\n Thirdly, internal candidates are never through the same scrutiny as external candidates. Usually single meeting with hiring manager and some internal cross reference talk with existing superior of the candidate is good enough. Compare this to 5+ rounds of checks for external candidates, including past jobs reference calls. As a result, internal candidates are often hired more on \u201ctrust and vibe feeling\u201d than expert rigor.<\/p>\n Finally, some argue that you save onboarding time. This is probably one of the biggest misconception. Filling the role with existing employee might optically save you time of explaining systems and data used in company, but what you don\u2019t see that this internal candidate probably never worked on what you intend to do. So as much as (s)he will not need to get explained how to apply for vacation or which table to query, they will learn by attempting the actually challenge. The best way to explain is \u201cIf you need to undergo knee operation, would you like to be operated by professional surgeon from neighboring hospital or rather by internal gynecologist, that knows where the operation room and canteen in this particular hospital is?\u201d<\/p>\n All this for gain of what exactly? Some declare speed. But let\u2019s be honest, how many times is role so critical that 2 months waiting for great candidate is deal breaker? Others argument with hiring costs saving, but this is self-illusion. Because, if somebody jumps from internal role A to internal role B, you still need to hire for A (most of the cases). So very often it\u2019s just hiring manager (or HR team) trying to make their lives easier by cutting corners.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get me wrong, I am all for internal promotions and development. But it needs to be intentional. Company should proactively offer the role to internal candidate and not let it happen by random internal employee raising their hand.<\/p>\n I applied for Chief AI Officer in mid-sized company on the day when the job ad was published. Received invitation to first screening interview right away. \u00a0A day before the scheduled call there came email from HR explaining that my interview has to be cancelled, because role was filled in internally. Now, seriously, how do you accidentally find in 70 FTEs company good Chief AI Officer that you were not aware of?<\/p>\n The overlooked downside of the internal candidate preference is that too many open roles end-up never filled with external candidates, but still effort of 100+ candidates is wasted on studying the role description, applying, even going through several rounds of interviews. When you sit on candidate side of the table, this piles up in tens of pointless applications, all just because somebody want to (secretly) make their life easier. Can we have major rethinking here, dear HR teams?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PART | 9 | YOU LEARN things over time …<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cRepetition is the mother of Wisdom\u201d saying goes. But in hiring cycles you learn weird things.<\/p>\n Many experts are willing to enter job recruitment process when still in active role with argument that one should \u201csharpen the saw\u201d or undergo some hiring cycles as a form of the drills. After you better, if you are to fail interview you better fail one you didn\u2019t dream of first place. Thus, one would really expect that going through 432 interview opportunities you learn many things.<\/p>\n And you do indeed. But given the way that Tech hiring process is set-up now, learnings are split between things you are guaranteed to learn and things that are optional (do not happen to all of us). And the guaranteed learnings are not that rosy.<\/p>\n Bypassing mishaps<\/strong>. As mentioned in yesterday\u2019s #8 sequel, companies try to illegally limit candidates by their geographies. So first thing you learn is how to swim around those illegitimate filtering’s.<\/p>\n How to type a lot<\/strong>. I can\u2019t wrap my head around how stupid the companies are when it comes to application forms. The worst evil are companies who expect candidates to manually retype all experience and education records. Now maybe not issue for junior position, but honestly in mid-career after 7+ jobs and 3+ education completions, you have really this monkey feeling. If this happened to me several times a day, I simply skipped the next ones. If you think you can send Ai to fill-it on your behalf, only half true. To exactly prevent bots filing applications, forms are intentionally JavaScript heavy, loading fields dynamically or offering drop downs with values that might not be directly machine readable. Captcha being often part of the journey.<\/p>\n How to spell your LinkedIn URL<\/strong> However, the most ridiculous issue (present roughly 70% !! times) is even for Job Ads that you react to directly from LinkedIn to have to fill LinkedIn URL. How the HR teams probably don\u2019t realize but to keep up with rapid fire of new applications appearing (and often taken down for enormous demand in 1-2 days later already), PEOPLE APPLY FROM MOBILES. Now, if you hit apply directly in the LinkedIn app, you can\u2019t go grab your LinkedIn URL, if you try open it in browser, it will deep link you back into app. So you literally have to type https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/yourhandle If you were not clever enough to choose your real name for handle (I was lucky to grab \/vitekfilip and you have just set of the number or gibberish letters, you gonna hate yourself (and still memorize that sequence). And it would only take hiring company very little effort to grab this directly from LinkedIn (e.g. Easy Apply button).<\/p>\n To move from cynical things into something real, you learn to read the expectations of the companies<\/strong>. When applying on LinkedIn, there are often follow-up (filtering) questions on years of experience with certain topics. (e.g. \u201cFor how long have you experience with managing teams?\u201d) Sometimes they mention explicit threshold, but often not and hiring team has some secret cut-off level in mind and if you follow below their expected value, you will be automatically rejected. But rather than gaming this (they will find out later anyway, so don\u2019t lie on those), it gives you extra signal about what they are looking for. For example if they ask about 7+ years of leadership experience and 2+ years of some expert topic, that gives you hint both for salary negotiations (mid senior pay level), but also on role positioning (we look for manager, who can be technical but is still primary manager).<\/p>\n It also gives you calibration<\/strong>. Both for length of the hiring process and for pay level on given market. For example, I was informed on second HR screening call that there will be 8 more rounds, out of which 6 will be my potential boss participating. I told them it would not happen with me. I don\u2019t aspire to succeed in such requitement where my potential boss needs to see me 6 times before (s)he can decide to work with me. I exited the process. Because that was off the normal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PART | 8 | LOCATION in Tech Jobs and Stereotypes ?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n There are several aspects in which job markets got out-of sync over time. LOCATION is deadliest of those.<\/p>\n Historically, most of the work was physical or bounded to physical location<\/strong> (e.g. office). This got so strongly entrenched into HR and hiring managers that before COVID-19 vast majority of the roles have been On-site. Few remote roles did exist even back then, but Hybrid category did not exist anymore.<\/p>\n Of course corona lock-downs have shuffled this entirely, forcing us to over-expose to remote model. After we crawled out of pandemic years, several \u201cSchools of Thought<\/strong>\u201d emerged on this topic.\u00a0Few employers realized that is reasonable quality of work can be done remotely, they save enormously on office rent, supplies and electricity. So they turned into remote-first companies. Most of the start-ups do not have (spare) funds for office rental, so they became remote-first by design.<\/p>\n Employees<\/strong> of course cherished the option to save commuting time and have remote work flexibility (e.g. working from multiple locations or workations model). So the preference stayed on Hybrid or Remote<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And then there is group of managers who do not trust in remote work and require people to be physically coming back<\/strong> to (office) location. But how does that translate into job market total mix?<\/p>\n Scanning the German Tech market in H2 2025 only 29%<\/strong> of the job postings declared Remote<\/strong> as working model. These are heavily start-up loaded, incumbent companies almost never appear here. Only mid-size companies from obscure locations realize that chances to find somebody locally are bleak, so they embrace the Remote as last resort. Due to strong push-back of candidates, 52%<\/strong> of German tech roles indicate Hybrid<\/strong> as acceptable model (citing 2O+3H or 3O+2H weekly schemas). But full 19%<\/strong> (so every 1 in 5) tech roles still require explicit On-site <\/strong>presence. But that\u2019s still not the full truth of it.<\/p>\n Many companies require your postal address as mandatory application field. Only to reject non-local candidates even 52% of the Hybrid-preferrable postings. How do I know? Well after receiving an instant rejection within minutes for a role about 65 kms from my home, I could not help myself and replied again with \u201cmistaken\u201d PLZ (postal code), now receiving invitation to screening call.<\/p>\n In tech location is just a mental block<\/strong> that hiring people have. As EU citizen you can work in any EU country freely without any visa or work permit. They even do not have the right to reject you based on geography, if you commit to office policy. But both candidates and HR teams are standing here in their own ways. I once was in discussion with interesting company from Goteborg, Sweden. They requested 2-days in office presence and were offering very generous compensation packaged. I told them I am happy to come for 2 days a week. They could not wrap their head around this: \u201cBut you say you live in Berlin, Germany?!\u201d Yes, and I checked there are 6 flights a day between Berlin and Goteborg, with tickets averaging 100EUR. Me taking the Swedish salary AND covering the travel costs I would be still better off. They literally hanged on me during the call. as not to be “ridiculous”.<\/p>\n And the learning lesson<\/strong>: Increase your pipeline with adding additional filter for all EU countries + remote roles<\/strong>. If you are brave (and ready to travel) you can add even the Hybrid ones for neighboring countries. But stop being your own enemy falling for Geo location. It\u2019s just prejudiced stereotype.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PART | 7 | HOW MANY CV’s should you have ?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n If you follow our series of Wicked Hiring Advent Calendar<\/strong> than you know that in first sequels of the series we introduced the errors and obsolete habits of the Tech hiring market. But this series is not to groan (or succumb) to the inefficiencies of labor market. This series aims to provide also the \u201cso what \u201c part of the answer.<\/p>\n After explaining how many frogs should you kiss before you get your (job) prince yesterday, today we move into how to increase your top of the hiring funnel.<\/strong> In part #2 of our series we explained that candidate needs to apply to about 5-7 new opportunities per day to keep the interview flow continuously flowing (until you hit final success). This might get some of you panicked, because what if my role does not have 7 relevant offers opened per day ?<\/p>\n Given the pyramid of organizations, for individual contributors \/ freelancers role this is probably not the issue. When geographically broad enough thinking (which we touch upon tomorrow) almost for any individual role there are tens of new postings each day. However, for managerial positions this might not be true even if you extend your geo range to whole continent. So what to do about that?<\/p>\n The key to unlocking more options for you is to have several CV\u2019s.<\/strong> Now, you might think \u201cHey, there is only one truth so how can you have multiple genuine, not lying or pretending CV\u2019s in parallel?<\/p>\n This is the biggest mental block<\/strong> that candidates have: If I have been Head of BI, I should have CV outlining Business Analytics\/Intelligence. And you definitely should. But if you happen to be Head of BI for Ecommerce, you also analyzed Marketing channels conversion data, User browsing patterns or Supply chain replenishment. Thus, \u00a0besides generic Head of BI roles, you can equally try your luck with Marketing Analytics Lead or SCM Analytics Expert. The issue is that you should not do this with single CV.<\/p>\n The issue is that you most likely possess skills and experience that not only meet the requirements of particular of those 3 roles, but you also have skills irrelevant to that specific role. If you enlist all your skills on single CV you drown the hiring side into too much noise to pick the essential strength. Also you worked on projects worthy for all 3 roles, but you can\u2019t sell all 3 in consistent single pager<\/strong> that recruiter will read about you. Therefore, be strategic about it:<\/p>\n * Sit down and outline<\/strong> what kind of different roles you should apply to. If your imagination is limiting you, throw your name-and-contact-stripped CV into LLM chat and ask for what other roles you would be credible candidate for.<\/p>\n * After obtaining list of roles, iterate<\/strong> for each role on list to read several job postings for given role. Look for overarching skills<\/strong>, project history or know-how that employers seek for each of the role. Again, when in doubt throw them into AI and ask to extract the common points for you.<\/p>\n * Then create clone of your master CV<\/strong> to highlight skills and role relevant past experience, achieving at (slightly) unique CV for each of the roles. (My advice make them also visually different<\/strong> so that you can easily tell one from the other, you will need to send each to different roles. Having visual clue helps not to mess it up. \u00a0For illustration, my final role-specific CV\u2019s \u00a0looked following:<\/p>\n Store them all in your mobile<\/strong> (so that you can attach them to job respective offers equally easy. You will be surprised how hot of the candidate you are for \u201csecondary\u201d roles as well.<\/p>\n Punchline<\/strong>: Don\u2019t try to hit all job openings with one-size-fits-all CV, you do yourself injustice. Create CV clones to highlight specific projects or skills for each type of the role, to boost roles you are comfortably eligible for.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PART | 6 | How it feels to REJECT GOOD JOB OFFER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Choosing right hobby, flat, life partner or new job is difficult. Not only because you need to find a good match for you, but also because you need to turn down good (yet not optimal) offer. But there is mathematical proof for optimal decision making preventing regrettably poor choice. Let me walk you through it:<\/p>\n Issue with us picking partners, houses or job is that set of potential options is too big to even get to know all theoretical options<\/strong>. Not every role is free when you are, same as not every house is on sale when you are on look-out for yours. As a result, we can assess only options that presented themselves (or we got to learn about hiddenly). But no one can meet all people of planet to choose life partner or to see all houses or employers in town. So how to pick best if you even don\u2019t know if there are maybe better options?<\/p>\n Believe it or not there is algorithm designed for that bears mathematical proof of optimal choice. In expert literature this is named \u201cOptimal Stopping criteria\u201d but in regular population this is labeled \u201cSecretary Choice Algorithm<\/strong>\u201d (stemming from hiring for role of office secretary). You can read on this in book \u201cAlgorithms To Live By<\/em>\u201d (which I reviewed here).This optimal algorithm divides<\/strong> process into<\/strong> Scanning<\/strong> and Closing<\/strong> parts. But before you start you need to state yourself how many options do you have time (or other resources) to see at most. For example, if you unemployment benefits last 6M then you probably can only look for those 6M (of course, you can choose to invest some of your saving to go beyond whatever you are entitled to from social support or severance package.) Rather than time, you are better off counting pieces of job interviews you are willing to take, but that\u2019s nuance.<\/p>\n\n
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