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A recruiter from a specialist HR firm got in touch with me directly. I hadn't applied anywhere near Intercom on my own. I was open to a move but hadn't started a proper search, so the timing caught me off guard. I'd submitted around six applications in total over the previous few weeks, mostly just having a look, but this one came to me and felt more serious than the rest straight away. The brief was specific: Intercom was scaling its engineering organisation from 200 to 400 people within 18 months and needed an HR Business Partner who could run that function from end to end.
The process ran across four interview rounds over 33 days, which felt thought through rather than dragged out. First was a screen with the recruiter, mostly about my background partnering with technical organisations and whether I wanted to work somewhere growing that fast. Then I spoke with the CPO, who wanted to understand how I thought about people strategy at scale: levelling frameworks, internal mobility, training managers. The third round was with the Engineering VP, the hiring manager, and it got more practical. How I'd structure my first 90 days, how I'd approach a reorg, how I'd handle a situation where engineering leadership and HR priorities didn't align. I came prepared with examples for all of it.
The panel round with two senior engineers was the one that set me apart, I think. They walked me through an actual disagreement about a performance review for someone on their team and asked me to coach them through it live. I stayed neutral, asked questions that helped them surface what they actually disagreed about, and got them to agree on what the real question was before the hour was up.
The offer came in at €72,000 for a full-time hybrid role in Dublin. I negotiated a four-day week at the same salary before signing, and they agreed. I signed.
I had been following a design studio in CDMX on Instagram for almost a year before I was brave enough to write to them. Their client work in Roma kept appearing in my feed, and every time it did I saved the post, took a screenshot, and thought "someday". I liked how simple they kept everything, and the way they used type on printed signs and installations. It was the kind of studio where I wanted to learn. I had already sent cold messages to two other studios in the city and neither one answered, so I knew that a normal "I love your work, here is my portfolio" message was not going to work.
I spent one afternoon reading their recent open briefs and chose the one I felt most sure about. I did not write a long cover message. Instead I made three quick sketches with ideas for that brief, rough and not finished, and sent them to the founder in a short DM of four sentences. He answered the same day. I read the notification twice before I believed it was real. He invited me to visit the studio in person, at their space in Roma Norte. The visit went well, and they offered me a trial week and paid me their full day rate for it. Many studios ask you to work that week for free. That mattered to me.
The trial week was hard. They put me on a real project that was already running, gave me feedback while I worked, and expected me to help from the first day. Two weeks after my first DM, they offered me the job full time, with a hybrid schedule.
The credit made my decision. The studio puts the names of junior designers on the work it publishes, and right now that is worth more to me than more money somewhere else. I said yes immediately.
After about six weeks of quietly looking, I'd sent out roughly fifteen applications across Sydney's tech sector before the right break came through. A former client, someone I'd worked closely with on an integration project a couple of years back, got in touch unprompted and said he'd put my name forward to the Solutions Engineering manager at a Sydney B2B SaaS company. I hadn't given them a serious look before that conversation, but the hybrid setup and the scope of the role made it worth having a crack at.
The process ran over six rounds across about forty-five days, and I won't pretend the pacing didn't wear on me. The early stages were standard: an initial screen with HR, a technical discovery call, then a deeper architecture whiteboard session where I had to walk through a multi-tenant cloud migration scenario with two senior engineers pushing back on my assumptions. I felt confident enough after those. But round five was a panel with cross-functional stakeholders, and the tone shifted. They were assessing how I'd handle internal politics as much as technical complexity.
Round six was the one that mattered. A sixty-minute mock customer demo, except their actual sales team was in the room, watching in silence. About fifteen minutes in, someone broke character and hit me with a hard CFO-style objection: budget authority questions, timeline scepticism, the kind of thing designed to knock you off your prepared flow. I acknowledged the concern, parked the slide I was on, and reframed the value case around risk reduction rather than feature set. It went sideways a second time near the end, when a "procurement lead" challenged our integration assumptions. I recovered by being honest about the constraint rather than bluffing through it. The hiring manager called out that moment of transparency in the debrief.
The offer came two days later: a base of AU$140,000 plus a sign-on bonus equal to one month's base. I took it.
I'd been a UX researcher for six years and had a small but specific reputation in the diary-studies sub-niche of the field. I gave maybe one or two talks a year at conferences. This one was at a UX research conference in Boston in late fall, a five-minute lightning slot I almost didn't apply to because it felt too short to do the topic justice.
The talk went well. The audience was about a hundred and twenty people, most of them researchers, and the questions afterward continued in the hallway for a good half-hour. Two of the people who stopped me were from the company's UX research team. They told me they'd been looking for a researcher with diary-studies experience for several months and hadn't found anyone they wanted to talk to. Could we talk later that week?
We talked the following Tuesday. It was an informal conversation with the head of research, no formal interview structure. We talked about their work, my work, the methods they were trying to use, and where the team was struggling. By the end she said she'd like to put me through a real interview process if I was open to it.
I was. The process was three interviews.
The first was a portfolio review with the head of research and one senior researcher. I walked through three studies. They cared most about how I'd handled the messy parts: what I'd done when participants dropped out of a longitudinal study, how I'd reframed a research question after the first round of data told us something unexpected.
The second was a whiteboard exercise with two product managers. They gave me a real research question their team was struggling with, how to measure whether a particular education product was actually changing student behavior over a semester, and asked me to design a study on the spot. I asked twenty clarifying questions for the first ten minutes and then sketched a design. They pushed back on one method choice. We argued for a few minutes and ended up with a hybrid approach I think was better than my first version.
The third was a final interview with the head of product. Mostly behavioral. The question I remember was "tell me about a time you were the only person on the team who thought a study was a bad idea." I had an example. We talked about it for a while.
The offer arrived a week later. $112,000 base. I asked for a few thousand more, citing the seniority of the work and the conversations I'd been having elsewhere. They came back at $118,000. I accepted.
I didn't apply through a job board. I never sent a resume through a careers page. The conference talk was the application. The interview process was a formality on top of conversations that had already established I was the right person for the role. If I hadn't given that talk, I wouldn't have the job.
Welcome to the Jungle worked exactly as it promised. It put me in front of the right person.
I had updated my profile about a year before this with a clear summary of what I wanted. An internal recruiter role, mid to senior, in a consulting firm or an agency, French-speaking but French not obligatory. After that I left the profile alone. Every six months I updated it when something changed in my career.
The talent team at a Paris recruiting firm wrote to me at the end of February. The first message was three sentences. They were hiring an internal recruiter, the role was focused on hiring senior consultants, and they wanted to know if I was interested. I answered yes within an hour, because the description matched my profile summary almost word for word.
The first call was with the head of talent. Forty-five minutes. Most of the time she described the firm's hiring process honestly, including the parts that did not work, and asked what I would do differently in the first ninety days. I told her. She disagreed with one part, and we had a useful discussion.
Round two was a role-play of a sourcing call. They gave me the profile of an invented candidate, a senior consultant at a competing firm, and asked me to make the first cold call. The interviewer played the candidate, and the candidate was not interested. I had thirty minutes to find an approach. I found one in about twenty. The candidate did not say yes, but the interviewer told me the approach was the right one.
Round three was with two senior consultants who would work closely with the recruiter. They wanted to know how I would talk to them about candidates, when I would say no if they wanted to make a search too wide, and what I would do if they wanted to hire a friend. I had a real answer to all three questions.
Round four was a final conversation with the managing partner. Mostly about culture. He asked what I did not like in previous firms, and if anything he had said sounded true to me.
The offer was €54,000 base plus a quarterly bonus. I asked how the bonus was calculated, and I worked out that realistic total pay would be about €60,000. Two other firms I was talking to in the same period had offered €45,000 to €48,000 for clearly the same work. I mentioned those numbers calmly and asked if the base salary could move. They came back at €56,000.
I said yes because the pay was clearly better, because this team had been the most direct with me, and because I liked the partner.
If I did this again, I would update my profile earlier. The platform did the matching. I only had to be easy to find.
I was at a marketing meetup in late autumn. I'd ended up in a corner of the room with two people I didn't know, one of them the head of marketing at Koala. We talked for about thirty minutes about a campaign I'd run earlier that year and what I'd learned positioning a B2C ecommerce brand against a much larger competitor.
We swapped numbers because she said she might want to follow up on something specific from that campaign. I didn't expect anything to come of it.
Three months later she emailed. The team had been thinking about hiring a marketing manager focused on exactly the kind of brand work I'd described. The role hadn't been advertised yet, and she wanted to talk to me before they posted it.
The first interview was her, ninety minutes, in their office. We didn't really do a formal interview. We walked through three of her current campaigns and she asked what I'd do differently. I disagreed with one of them, bluntly. We argued for about ten minutes and she ended it by saying the disagreement was the most useful part.
The second interview was with the head of growth and the head of product. Sixty minutes. They asked the standard "tell me about a time" questions. I gave the standard answers. The last fifteen minutes were the interesting part, when they asked what I'd prioritise in the first ninety days. I'd thought about it on the train.
Round three was a short campaign-pitch exercise. They sent a one-paragraph brief: the company was launching a new product line and wanted a five-slide pitch on how to position it. I had three days. I sent back four slides. The head of marketing later said the cut from five to four was the part she liked most.
The offer was AU$84,000. I asked for the option to work from home three days a week, since the job ad had said hybrid two days, and they agreed without negotiation. I asked for AU$86,000. They said yes within an hour.
Total applications I sent during the search: four. None got past the recruiter screen. A thirty-minute conversation did it, at an event I almost didn't go to, with someone I didn't know, about a project I'd run a year earlier.
I had no plan walking into that event. But I had a clear answer to "what's the best campaign you've ever worked on", because I'd been chewing on it for months. That was enough.
4Applications
3Interviews
3 monthsSearch length
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