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The talk was five minutes long. Two people from a Boston edtech company found me afterwards. Three months later I was a UX researcher there.
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 has its faults, but the platform 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 never really used the platform actively 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.
The role didn't exist when we first met. It existed three months later because a conversation over a beer turned into something.
I was at a marketing meetup in late autumn. The kind of event where most people network in a way that's obvious and forced, and I'd mostly given up on those events being useful. 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. Not about jobs, not about hiring. Just 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.
I applied to about 80 roles over two months, and League was the only company that responded with a take-home before any call.
Most of the applications went through job boards. I'd built a small spreadsheet to track them, partly because I knew I'd lose count otherwise, and partly because I wanted to look back later and see whether any of it was working. The honest answer was: not really. About 12% of applications got an automated rejection within 48 hours. About 6% got a recruiter screen. Most of the rest just disappeared.
League's take-home arrived in week six of the search. It was a pleasant surprise. Most companies that don't reply for two weeks then ask for forty-five minutes of pleasantries before they'll talk about the actual role. League just sent a real anonymised dataset, asked four questions, and gave me a week to send back the answers in whatever format made sense.
The dataset was patient appointment data. A few hundred thousand rows, a handful of dimensions. The questions weren't trick questions. They wanted to know whether I could find the obvious thing first, whether I'd notice the less obvious thing after that, and whether I'd write up my findings so a non-analyst could read them.
I spent two evenings on it. About four hours total. Most of that was writing. The analysis itself was straightforward, but the writeup needed to be tight. I sent back a six-page PDF with the four answers, a few caveats about the data quality, and a one-paragraph summary up top.
They moved me to a video interview the next week. Two analysts on the call, both of whom had read the writeup carefully. The questions were about what I'd left out and why. One of them asked, gently, whether I'd noticed an outlier I hadn't mentioned. I had, and I explained why I'd left it out. He said that was the answer he was looking for.
Round two was with the head of analytics. Less technical, more about how I worked with PMs and how I'd push back if asked to produce a number that didn't tell the whole story. We had a real, slightly uncomfortable conversation about a project where I'd been asked to do exactly that, and what I'd done about it.
The offer arrived three days later. CA$66,000 base, at the lower end of the band they'd quoted in the recruiter screen. I asked for the higher end, citing the depth of the take-home process and a competing offer that was close in cash but worse on scope. They came back at CA$70,000. Accepted.
The thing I think mattered most: the take-home wasn't a filter for technical skill. It was a filter for how you communicate. The technical work was easy. The writeup was the test. Every analyst I've worked with since has said something similar about hiring. They're not looking for someone who can run the query, they're looking for someone who can explain the answer to a stakeholder who doesn't care about the query.
When the Microsoft offer came in for a software engineer role in Redmond, my instinct was to say yes on the spot. I'd wanted to work there for a long time, and seeing the number in my inbox gave me that rush of relief that makes people accept things they probably shouldn't. But I made myself slow down. Instead of replying that afternoon, I opened a fresh document and started logging everything: every email, every phone call, every number on the table. That habit alone changed how I handled the whole conversation.
The initial package was a 109k base, a 120k stock grant vesting over four years, and a signing bonus that looked generous but had room to move. I knew it had room because I had a second process running in parallel with another company. Not a bluff. A real, ongoing conversation. That concurrent interest drove everything that followed. When I told the Microsoft recruiter I needed time to think, it wasn't a line. I genuinely had something else to weigh. That credibility shifted the dynamic. The recruiter stopped treating the offer as a formality and started treating it like something that might fall through.
I went through five interviews total before reaching this stage, so by the time the offer landed I had a good sense of how badly the team wanted to fill the role. I used that quietly. I never named a number first. Never said anything like "I was hoping for at least X." I only shared that I had competing interest and that the current package made it a hard call. Over two or three rounds of back-and-forth the base moved from 109k to 117k, the stock grant climbed from 120k to 130k, and the combined signing and start bonuses reached 35k. None of those movements needed me to be combative or even particularly assertive. What they needed was patience, preparation, and a refusal to anchor myself low by speaking first.
I'd been passively open to opportunities for a few months when a specialist cloud recruiter reached out on LinkedIn with a role that was worth reading past the first line. A Dublin cloud company was rebuilding their Azure platform team from the ground up, and they wanted a senior architect who'd actually designed for scale, not just talked about it in theory. The recruiter had done their homework before messaging me. The pitch was specific, the timing was right, so I agreed to an exploratory call.
Within the first week I'd had an initial screen with the recruiter and moved quickly into the loop itself. Over the next two weeks I went through five rounds. The early stages were conversational: culture fit, broad technical background, how I handled stakeholder communication on large infrastructure projects. Then it escalated fast. The hardest piece was a 90-minute whiteboard session focused entirely on multi-region failover strategy. They handed me a realistic, messy scenario and expected me to reason through trade-offs out loud, justify my decisions, and push back on constraints that didn't make sense. It was hard, and I respected that. Right after came a written architecture document with a 48-hour turnaround. I spent most of those 48 hours on it. The whiteboard and the take-home together made it clear they were serious about hiring someone who could do the work. While all this was running, I kept a few other applications moving, eight in total across the month, partly to keep perspective and partly to make sure I had real alternatives if negotiation went sideways.
The initial offer came in at €105k base. I countered, walked them through my reasoning without being aggressive about it, and they moved to €120k. On top of that they agreed to a Dublin relocation package and a sign-on bonus, which mattered since I was moving cities. The equity was modest and I knew that going in, but the cash was the strongest number in my whole loop by a wide margin. I accepted twenty-eight days after that first LinkedIn message.
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4 weeksSearch length
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