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I'd been following a Mexico City design studio on Instagram for almost a year before I worked up the nerve to do anything about it. Their CDMX-Roma client work kept showing up on my feed, and every time it did I'd save the post, screenshot it, and think "someday." The editorial sensibility, the way they handled typography on physical installations, the restraint. It was exactly the kind of studio I wanted to learn inside of. By then I'd sent two other cold outreach attempts to studios in the city, both completely unanswered, so I knew a plain "I love your work, here's my portfolio" message wasn't going to cut it.
I spent an afternoon looking through their recent open briefs and picked the one I had the strongest instinct about. Instead of a long cover message, I put together three quick concept sketches responding directly to the brief. Nothing overproduced, just clean directional thinking. I attached them to a short DM to the founder and kept the message to maybe four sentences. He replied the same day. I don't think I fully believed it was real until I'd re-read the notification twice. He invited me in for an in-person studio visit at their Roma Norte space, which went well enough that they offered me a paid trial week at their full day rate rather than some unpaid evaluation arrangement. That mattered to me, and I made note of it.
The trial week was intense. I got dropped into an active editorial project, given real feedback in real time, and expected to contribute rather than observe. By the end of the week, two weeks after that first DM, they offered me the junior designer role full-time on a hybrid schedule. The salary is fair for a junior role in Mexico City, and the studio actively credits junior designers in published portfolio work, and that kind of visibility at this stage is worth a lot to me. I accepted.
A recruiter from a specialist HR firm reached out to me directly. I hadn't applied anywhere near Intercom on my own. I was passively open to moves but hadn't started a formal search, so the timing caught me off guard. I'd submitted around six applications in total over the previous few weeks, mostly exploratory, but this one came inbound and felt more serious than the rest right 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 own that function end to end.
The process ran across four interview rounds over 33 days, which felt considered rather than drawn out. First was a screen with the recruiter, mostly about my background partnering with technical organisations and my appetite for high-growth environments. Then I spoke with the CPO, who wanted to understand how I thought about people strategy at scale: levelling frameworks, internal mobility, manager capability building. The third round was with the Engineering VP, the hiring manager, and it got more operational. 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 a shared framing before the hour was up.
The offer came in at 72,000 EUR for a full-time hybrid role based in Dublin. I negotiated a four-day working week at the same salary before signing, which they agreed to. I accepted.
After about six weeks of quietly exploring the market, 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, reached out unprompted and said he'd flagged my name to the Solutions Engineering manager at a Sydney B2B SaaS company. I hadn't even considered them seriously before that conversation, but the hybrid setup and the scope of the role made it worth pursuing properly.
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 fairly 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 reasonably confident after those. But round five was a panel with cross-functional stakeholders, and the tone shifted noticeably. They were clearly assessing how I'd handle internal politics, not just 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 directly, 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. That moment of transparency was apparently what the hiring manager called out in the debrief.
The offer came two days later: a base of $140,000 AUD plus a sign-on bonus equal to one month's base. I accepted.
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 autumn, 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 afterwards 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 behaviour 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 behavioural. 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. US$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 US$118,000. I accepted.
I didn't apply through a job board. I never sent a CV 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 did what it said on the tin. It put me in front of the right person.
I'd updated my profile maybe a year before this with a specific summary of what I was after. Internal recruiter role, mid-to-senior, ideally at a consulting firm or agency, French-speaking but not French-required. I left the profile alone after that. Every six months I'd tweak the profile when something in my career changed.
The talent team at a Paris recruiting firm reached out at the end of February. The opening message was three sentences. They were hiring an internal recruiter, the role focused specifically on senior consultant hiring, and they wanted to know whether I was open. I replied yes within an hour, because the role description matched my profile summary almost word-for-word.
The first call was the head of talent. Forty-five minutes. Most of it was her describing the firm's hiring process honestly, the broken parts included, and asking what I'd do differently in the first ninety days. I told her. She pushed back on one part specifically and we had a useful argument.
Round two was a role-play sourcing call. They gave me the profile of a fictional candidate, a senior consultant at a competing firm, and asked me to make the first cold-outreach call. The interviewer played the candidate, who was not interested. I had thirty minutes to find an angle. I found one in about twenty. The candidate wasn't converted, but the interviewer said the angle was the right one.
Round three was with two senior consultants who'd be working closely with the recruiter. They wanted to know how I'd communicate with them about candidates, what I'd push back on if they tried to widen a search beyond what was reasonable, and how I'd handle them wanting to hire a friend. I had a real answer to all three.
Round four was a final conversation with the managing partner. Mostly cultural. He asked what I disliked about previous firms and whether anything he'd said rang true.
The offer was €54,000 base plus a quarterly bonus structure. I asked about the bonus calculation specifically and worked out that realistic total comp would be around €60,000. Two other firms I'd been talking to during the same period had quoted €45,000 to €48,000 for what was clearly the same work. I cited those quietly and asked if there was room on the base. They came back at €56,000.
I accepted because the comp was meaningfully better, the team had been the most direct with me throughout, and I'd liked the partner.
If I were doing this over I'd update the profile sooner, not later. The platform did the matching. I just had to be findable.
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 quite directly. 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 interesting part was the last fifteen minutes, 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 JD 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. What worked was a thirty-minute conversation at an event I almost didn't go to, with someone I didn't know, about a project I'd run a year earlier.
The lesson, if there is one: 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.
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