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Good instincts are earned by making mistakes. If you're lucky enough to survive a few mistakes, you're going to do all right out here." - Love & Monsters 🍿

Finding a decent job in the 21st century is a long, enduring journey where you constantly sell yourself to someone that may or may not need you after all. This someone may be a Recruiter, a friend of a friend, your old boss, your future N+1 you targeted on LinkedIn, an old classmate that became a very famous CEO... As an Applicant, you rapidly become a Product in this vast and ultra-competitive ecosystem.

How did I survive? Growth Hacking 🚀

A recruitment process is a C2B model, C you the Applicant & B the Company you are applying to. The experimentation that took place between May 2020 and October 2021, in-between my freelance missions. Like any Business Model, it has its own little tips & tricks (Growth Hacks) to learn from the Data collected from 3437 Jobs Offers & 76 Recruitment Processes.

In this article, you'll find everything I know about being an Applicant and ways to build a better Applicant Experience, baby steps 🍼.

• 👤 Applicant Marketing Funnel
• 🗂 CRM
• 🗄 Database
• 📊 KPI & Lead Generation
• 🧰 Sales Funnel
• 🤑 Pick a choice
• 🛑 Churn Rate
• 🎁 Lesson learned
• & now what?

👤 Applicant Marketing Funnel

To get how 90% of applicants feel (the ones that did not get lucky to create their own company, joined at an early-stage a team that excelled or worked for his family business), I needed to be one. Rest assured, while I was applying, I was working on freelance missions to survive, learn and work.

A year and a half are long if you are planning to apply for a job, but it can be fascinating if you measure the right Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and improve your storytelling along the way. And old-fashioned Growth tale about A/B testing, lean startup and Product Management.

🗂 CRM

Notion

As a good-old Low-coder, I started to build my own CRM engine where all applications, Recruitment Process and freelance missions were stored and accessible anytime, anywhere. Notion was a natural selection because of its UX/UI, accessibility and automation possibilities.

So, one Kanban = all my processes.

Of course, I used tags and filters to facilitate search and navigation on mobile and iPad during my interviews. I can’t say it was easy to automate this, as there were no tools adapted for this specific use case (Applicant measuring their performance). Introducing Homemade Tooling! To get that amount of data (& more), I had to go through a number of tools 🧰 to build my own Infrastructure. It's not easy as few fools are available, as an Applicant.

Let’s look at the top of the funnel.

🗄 Database

Airtable

On 3437 jobs on the market,

• From various Funding Rounds: 55% Scale-ups, 40% Start-ups, 20% Intreprenariat, 10% Corporate, 5% Early-stage
• Coming from +45 sources (Social Media, Platforms, Referral, Website, Cold Emailing, Email, ...) 🛒 +25 Platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed or Welcome to the Jungle are a great way to schedule reminders. I, personally, used an API to automatically fetch new jobs (that fit certain criteria) and include it in my CRM‘s backlog (Notion). My routine was just to centralize information and literally apply in 1 click. I guess the automated message is part of a bigger problem: tools.
• And from all major industries and business models: 15% HealthTech, 32% SaaS, 27% E-commerce, 37% B2B, 12% LogisticTech, 9% AdTech, 7% MobilityTech, 3% FoodTech
• I was looking at various positions from 📈 +20% Product Manager, 📉 -20% Growth Marketing, 📈 +40% Product Marketing Manager, 📉 -5% Product Design, 📈+25% Consultants, … PMM is by far the best niche job title I could find. (with few candidates and many opportunities - 1 candidate /3 jobs)
• I found 📉 -20% fake jobs — I guess Chatbots 🤖 are common on Indeed or LinkedIn. Google Search is the worst for job search unless you are looking to work at Google.
• 📈 +12% expired jobs — I guess startups forget to update the job offer when the position is filled, so applicant waste a lot of time selecting the job and applying the right way and startups just forget about it and end up not replying to their Applicants. According to LinkedIn Chief Editor, it happens 3 out of 5 use cases on their platform.
• 📈 28% of jobs come from Recruiters or VC funds — Recruiters generally use anonymous startup hire to evaluate the motivation of a candidate since the CV upload. Also, Slack is a great way to get into the Local Ecosystem, even if the jobs are most likely to be 70% Early Stage. Try Schoolab, NCF, StationF, Kima, Koudetat, Contournement, Germinal or even Product School.
• 📈 Welcome to the Jungle is by far the best platform if we take UX/UI as an asset. Licorne Society is the most promising one. Elinoï or Ignition, among the best recruiters out there. For Recruiters, the secret is your consultant. The better your relationship is, the more offers would flow from this marketing pipe. It’s a first interview at 💯.
• 📈 +25% duplicates — Recruiters tend to duplicate offers changing some elements, for SEO purposes. This strategy is applied when applicants need to use sexy names like ‘Growth Product Manager’ and get more applicants in their hiring funnel 😂. Sometimes, it is due to their lack of profiles for the position.
• 📈 +17% Inbound — jobs coming from Recruiters, my website, newsletters or automated messages on Social Media (thank you Phantom Buster 💻) were at 90% High Priority (High Priority = a Job that fit half of my 70 criteria). So Quality vs. Quantity.
• 📈 A surge of opportunities in September and June, with -70% of all activities in August) — I guess everyone needed a vacation after the year we got through.

📊 KPI & lead generation!

Phantom Buster + Zapier

I’ve applied to 200 job positions.

Applying to jobs is putting yourself out there. The secret sauce is to always track your application links to monitor their Interest Rate % to your profile. I, personally, used this method to score my applications: If recruiters open your profile, click on the CTA you put on your follow-up email (portfolio, Calendly,...) or even reply with a positive response, it goes up the scale from 1 to 5. You'll need to monitor this or automate this scoring. I used Excel + Airtable + Notion to score every job opportunity according to my +70 criteria I predefined.

• 📈 35% of offers were for freelance missions - I ended accepting 9 gigs because I couldn’t afford to be jobless for long (Time is literally money). Skills wise, I needed to apply what I’ve learned for the past 2 years as a founder.
• 📈 Only +20% allowed full remote, 📈 +50% ‘local remote’ preference (e.g. Remote France = flexible but not as flexible) and surprisingly 📈 +30% of jobs offers were not even flexible. Guilty, I was curious to see offers outside of Little Paris (in 🇧🇪 🇬🇧 🇩🇪 🇪🇸 🇵🇹🇮🇹 🇺🇸 and 🇦🇪 (Argument: Expenses < Salary)
• The one-click CV application did not work at all. Recently, startups add questions to pre-select applicants. It solves the problem for startups, but not for applicants. Applicants need more resources on the job or the startup in question. Trends.vc predicts that Career Pages is the future of Recruitment, let’s see if that’s going to be true.
• Nevertheless, the most promising channel for an excellent job was indeed FFF, using my Lebanese WOM (World Of Mouth) super-power for example. Typically, knowing people is a greater good asset you could ever get. That’s why the cliché of being in a good MBA school doesn’t mean a guaranteed job.
• On a personal note, an old-fashioned LinkedIn message made 📈 +60% conversation rate, making it my best acquisition channel. I was generally adding a profile (CEO, N+1 or a Sales person) working for that company and start a conversation. That way, when I applied, I had friends in common with the HR + I had a better understanding of their current need.

🧰 Sales Funnel (= Recruitment Process)

You are the Product, Companies your Clients

I juggled between 76 recruitment processes.

The typical recruitment process consisted of 4 interviews with different names every time, probably to confuse us, Applicants or even impress us. For freelancers, the process, which takes 4 calls, generally consisted in: 1st contact > Skills Assessment > focus on the Mission > Contract > signed.

1- Call with the HR: My usual preparation starts with a brainstorming on the industry, market and what they’ve done in the past to market themselves, in my case, or generate leads, depending on if we talked about growth. Don’t ask many questions, just the magic number of 3.

2- Tech spec with your boss: This is the most tricky as well as the simplest to pass. Be confident yet vulnerable, remain structured with your answers (PAR system), add relevant industry / role lingo & be funny at times.

If I did 76*4 speeches, I got pretty good at questions recruiters ask. Memorize your story and train yourself. Ideally, start by failing to finish with a job and nail every interview. For that, you’ll need to prepare these questions ahead of time.

1. Introduce yourself (Make it sexy, interesting ++ and sell your story)
2. Why did you choose this industry / company?
3. Can you tell me more about your experience at [experience]?
4. Tell me about a time you had to make a difficult decision. What did you learn?
5. What are your key weaknesses? What constructive feedback do people give you? What skills do you want to improve?
6. Tell me about a time you made a mistake. What did you learn?
7. Tell me about a time you led a team.
8. What are your key strengths?
9. What positive feedback do people give you?
10. What makes you a strong candidate for this role?

3- Business case: This is the moment to shine. Give more than what you’ve been asked to do, precisely 25% more. Showcase the process and reflection you took to get there. Eg. Show not just the Delivery of your Product, show the Discovery.

• I, alone, handed over at least 60 business cases for 60 of the most innovative startups * Average 54 Applicants. Imagine all the waste gone with these business cases. Do managers or recruiters make it public to the rest of employees, or is it lost in someone’s laptop?
• Deliver an experience. The best format to get back a Business Case is not an old-fashioned presentation or PDF anymore. It’s open to applicants, so have fun! I tried 15 new tools like: Webflow, Miro, Notion, Canvas, Figma, Bubble.io, Whimsical… That’s actually an excellent thing, knowing a significant number of tools while you are a PMM-wanna-be with a growth background is a great asset.
• Show off your skills. Rest assured, you’ll have to defend your case in front of your N+1 and, usually, one more person. Think Good and Bad cop, ;) This session is key to getting a job offer. Recruiters, HR and the team, judge that step to measure the GO or NOGO % on their side.

4- Meet one of the CEOs: It is usually about the fit to her/his company's values, so remain open and check their recruiter page beforehand. The secret here is to ask complex and specific questions about their recent funding round, a recent campaign or a recent product launch success. Ask how the CEO got where they are today.

The result:

• Sales Funnel: 100% step 1 > 80% step 2 > 45% step 3 > 32% step 4
• Like I said, 60 business cases on Notion, 60 strategies or new product launches.

🤑 Pick a choice

From 23 choices

A few weeks ago, I had 5 job offers of 5 amazing opportunities with a clear deadline to accept (or not) one of them.

It is hard to say no to a great offer. But, how great is this offer? Choosing a startup instead of another is a matter of % of GO or NOGO, following your criteria and need for your own longer-term career goals. To make this final decision, I had to build a comparative table that rates job opportunities. Here, I was the Decision Maker, for once.

🛑 Churn Rate

From the 124 startups (200-23),

• I am not a great fan of these automated messages that give you bad news (that you are not accepted to the next step). They are all boring and do not give constructive information on why you were not taken.
• 22% responded with a no with ‘Seniority’ & ‘Relocation’ being the biggest reasons — The rest, they are too proud to answer 🥲
• What a shame — 5% of whom answered gave constructive feedback on why this wouldn’t be a good fit.
• 78% did not even open the website I dropped under Portfolio. I guess recruiters don’t necessarily study all your application, but only judge a person's CV. They probably did not listen to their mom growing up, never judge a book by its cover.
• 32% of those who answered did so after 2 months. Wonder how I tracked this number down, well just an old-fashioned Bitly & Phantom Buster to get the raw data on Notion 😉
• Not much to learn as this step of any process is a bit awkward on both sides - HR (Recruiter) <> Applicant. If you are advanced in processes or friend of, one advice: Try to build a good communication with your future N+1, so you can have constructive criticism as you exit recruitment processes, decline an offer or end-up not applying at all.

🎁 Lesson learned

It took me all year to figure it out, but I did. The journey is the most important. So, here is my little guidebook to help you get through with that Recruitment Process and get the job you always dreamed of having.

• I am glad this experience is done. It is the worst and best experience in my life. Instability vs. Flexibility. I was lucky enough to have a European passport and a family backing me up during this never-ending recruitment process. Not all Applicants are.
• The experimentation had a great effect on my LinkedIn profile. I was spotted from Sales Navigator and HR Recruiter as top 10 Applicants for multiple jobs! So, 'SEO' is a great tool to be first on LinkedIn! (1) Post interesting things and measure your performance, (2) like 'startup' topic posts and (3) grow your Network. Three possible benefits for being active on LinkedIn.
• Candidates are multiplying 📈 and that adds up the complexity of any recruitment process 🤯 There are not enough job opportunities for everyone, so Task management and an Organized Agenda is a must-have soft skill. You are going to sell yourself as the best version of yourself to differentiate yourself. Think USP.
• CV is not enough to be judged by ☠, but is still your business card. ♻️ No more CVs & inverse the system. Let startups sell themselves to applicants, not the other way around. That would (1) improve the selection process, (2) gain in efficiency and (3) make your inbox clean, all at the same time.
• 🎓 Business schools are not worth 200K tuition. Unfortunately, MBA's are not worth the money and the time it involves. Your classmates are generally your future bosses, competitors, or even angel investors. So, specialized teams are key to evangelize a certain methodology that startups are keen to be trended on (growth hacks, automation, agility, no code, …)
• 🔦 Find talents where they are. Startups are pickier than ever, worse than any Corporate. Apparently, 43% of new employees are not happy after the 3 months notice period, but 79% decide to continue either way. Platforms that let you create a profile and apply in seconds doesn’t work, and that everyone is starting to figure it out. That makes the process even harder. Specialized platforms like Product Hunt or AngelList are more likely to bring the right audience to a job than Indeed or LinkedIn.