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I'd been applying to technical writing roles across Europe when I found a listing on the careers page of a Lisbon software company. Nine applications in, and this one felt different right away. Not because of the job description, but because of what they asked for upfront. Before any call, before any recruiter screen, they wanted a writing sample. Take a 600-word section of their live public documentation and rewrite it. Submit it before the first video call would even be scheduled.
I almost talked myself out of it. A 600-word rewrite sounds simple until you open their docs and see that the section they'd picked was dense API reference material with inconsistent terminology, passive constructions stacked three sentences deep, and a structure that assumed you already knew what you were trying to learn. I spent four hours on it, which was exactly what the brief told me to budget. I respected that they'd said so plainly instead of pretending it was quick. I restructured the whole thing, tightened the definitions, introduced consistent naming, and added a short summary table I thought would help skimmers. I had no idea if that last bit would land or just seem presumptuous.
It landed. They moved me to three video rounds over the next two and a half weeks. The first was a recruiter going through the basics. The second was the lead technical writer and an engineer who asked pointed questions about how I handle conflicting input from SMEs. The third was a short panel that felt more like a working conversation than a formal interview. Twenty-two days after I submitted that first application, I had an offer: a full-time hybrid role based in Lisbon at 28,000 EUR. I accepted without much back and forth.
They asked me to start within ten days of accepting because the team was down a writer and the gap was showing. I cleared my schedule and made it work. Worth it.
An Instagram DM became a freelance project, and the freelance project became a full-time role three months later. I wouldn't have predicted any of those steps.
I'd been working as a freelance brand designer in Buenos Aires for two years. The work was inconsistent. Some months were fine. Some weren't. I'd been thinking about going back to a studio environment for the routine and the team, but most of the studios I wanted to work at were either based in São Paulo or paying in pesos at rates I couldn't make work.
One Buenos Aires design studio was different. They were small, six people, and they paid in USD via Deel because most of their clients were US-based. They had a public Instagram where they posted their work for a specific recurring client, a US-based health tech company. I'd been following them for about a year.
I had a thought. What if the studio would be open to a small spec project? I picked their main public client and rebuilt three concept variations of how I'd reposition the brand. I was honest with myself about it: this was speculative, the studio almost certainly hadn't asked for my opinion, and I was just going to send it as a portfolio piece, not a job application.
I DMed the founder. The message was three sentences. I'd been following the work, I'd built three variations of how I'd approach a brand refresh for the public client, did she have ten minutes to look at it? I attached a single Figma link.
She replied two hours later. The variations weren't what they were going to ship, she was direct about that, but they were the kind of work she wanted to be commissioning, and was I available for a one-off project they'd been needing to outsource? I was.
The project was a brand refresh for a different client. Three weeks of work. Five-figure fee, paid in USD. I shipped it on time. The client signed off without revisions, which is rare.
A month later the founder asked if I was open to a longer engagement. We agreed on a three-month rolling contract. After two months she asked if I'd consider going full-time. The role was permanent, paid in USD via Deel, and would mean working with the studio's existing six-person team rather than continuing as a contractor.
The offer was US$30,000 base. A number that doesn't look like much in dollar terms but works at the current exchange rate and is meaningfully better than what I'd have made independently. I asked for US$36,000, citing the depth of the work I'd already shipped and the cost of switching from contractor to employee structure. They came back at US$36,000.
I accepted. I'd sent two real applications during the entire search. Both went to job boards and both went unanswered. The Instagram DM was the application. I keep telling other designers that the studios you actually want to work at hire from their DMs, not from their job listings. They mostly don't believe me until they try it.
I'd been applying selectively, only four applications over those two months, because I didn't want to waste time on roles that weren't actually interesting. Most of my search was quiet and slow, and honestly a little discouraging. Then I came across a Substack post by the CTO of a New York data company about their decision to refactor their entire data pipeline around dbt and Snowflake. The post was technical, specific, and honest about the tradeoffs they'd made. It wasn't marketing. It read like someone who actually lived inside the problem, and I recognized a lot of the same pain points from my previous role.
I spent a couple of evenings on a cold email. I didn't pitch myself generically. I referenced specific paragraphs from the post and linked a public GitHub repo I'd built for stream-to-batch reconciliation. The repo wasn't perfect, but it was real work: documented, tested, and directly relevant to what he'd described. I figured if he was the kind of engineer who wrote that post, he'd at least look at the code. Three days later he replied. No recruiter, no application portal, no automated acknowledgment. Just a direct response asking if I wanted to jump on a call that week.
The process ended up being four rounds over about nine weeks. The first call was conversational, more mutual vetting than a formal screen. The third and fourth rounds brought in the broader data team and covered system design and past-project deep-dives. But the second round was the one that stuck with me. It was framed as a live SQL pairing session, and it started that way, but somewhere around the thirty-minute mark we were both heads-down on an actual production query they were struggling with. We went ninety minutes. I didn't solve it completely, but how I reasoned through it mattered more than any clean answer would have.
The offer came in at $145,000, hybrid in New York. I accepted without hesitation.
The freelance piece I pitched in March became a full-time role in June. The thing that made it work was that I never asked them for a job.
I'd wanted to write for a Madrid magazine since I moved to the city four years earlier. They were a serious publication, long-form, edited, careful about facts, and they paid their writers, which is increasingly rare. I'd read every issue I could find for a year before I tried to do anything about it.
When I started job-hunting, it didn't go well. I sent thirty applications across three months, mostly to content roles at SaaS companies that wanted "blog posts" rather than journalism. I got two interviews, one of which was the most depressing forty-five minutes of the search. A content marketing manager told me, plainly, that the role was generating SEO content with the help of an LLM and that the human writer was there to "make it sound better".
I went home that night and decided to stop applying for content jobs and just write the kind of piece I wanted to be paid to write.
I picked two ideas I thought the magazine would actually publish. One was about a small Madrid neighbourhood that had been gradually transformed by remote workers. The other was an interview with a local food cooperative. I wrote three-paragraph pitches for each and emailed them to the editor.
She replied to one. The neighbourhood piece. She liked the angle, she'd been considering pitches on the same beat, and she was willing to commission a 1,500-word draft on spec. The fee was €200, paid within thirty days of publication.
I wrote it. Took ten days. The edit was thorough, she pushed back on three sections and I rewrote them. The piece ran in the May issue.
In late May, two months after the freelance piece had been agreed, the editor emailed me. They'd opened a permanent staff writer role and she wanted to talk before posting it. The shortlist was already her, the editor-in-chief and the publisher. The "interview" was a forty-minute conversation about the work I wanted to do, what I was reading, and one piece in the magazine I'd have edited differently.
The "test" was a 600-word writeup on a topic she gave me the next day. I had two days. I wrote eight hundred words, cut a hundred and fifty, sent it. They sent the offer two days later.
The offer was €26,000 base, which is staff-writer money in Spain and is fine. I asked for €30,000, citing the freelance work I'd already done for them and the fact that I'd be running their newsletter as part of the role. They came back at €28,000 plus a small monthly stipend for assignment travel. I accepted.
What worked: writing the kind of piece I wanted them to pay me for, before they were paying me. The freelance work was the interview. The actual interview was a formality.
I'd been working in QA for three years, splitting my time between manual testing and building out automation suites, mostly in Selenium and then Playwright once that became our team's preferred tool. When I decided to move, I wanted something fully remote and ideally a step up in responsibility. I set a rough target of around 25 roles and spent about two weeks working through listings on Indeed and LinkedIn Jobs, filtering hard for remote positions in the UK. Some ads were clearly outdated or vague about the actual stack, so I skipped those and focused on companies where the listing gave me enough detail to write a genuinely tailored cover letter. By the end I'd sent out 24 applications and was bracing for the usual silence.
The Manchester software company that hired me was different from the start. They replied within 48 hours, which honestly caught me off guard. I'd already half-forgotten applying. Instead of a recruiter call, their first reply came with a take-home task attached. They sent over a Figma file of a checkout flow and a staging URL, and asked me to write structured test cases covering the key scenarios, then build a small Playwright suite to automate the critical path. It was a realistic, well-scoped brief, not one of those tasks that quietly expands into eight hours of work. I spent an evening on the test cases, thinking through edge cases like empty cart states and failed payment responses, then wrote the Playwright scripts the next morning. I kept the structure clean and added a short README explaining my decisions.
Two video calls followed. The first was technical. A senior engineer walked through my submission with me, asked why I'd prioritised certain scenarios, and we talked through how I'd scale the suite as the product grew. The second was a team-fit conversation with the engineering lead, much more relaxed, focused on how I collaborate with developers and product when bugs surface late in a sprint. At the end of that second call they offered me the role: QA Engineer, fully remote, £38,000. I accepted without hesitation. Start to offer was nineteen days, which felt almost unrealistically fast after some of the drawn-out processes I'd heard about from friends.
Eighty-seven applications. Three interviews. One offer. The most boring job search you'll ever hear about, and that's mostly the point.
I was an accountant with seven years of experience in Berlin. I was looking for a senior role in industry, finance lead at a scale-up, after spending most of my career in mid-tier accounting firms. I knew what I wanted, I knew the salary band, and I had a clear picture of which kinds of companies would have the right mix of structure and chaos.
I sent eighty-seven applications across nine weeks. I tracked each one in a spreadsheet: date, company, role title, source, response. The response rate was 38%. Most of those were polite rejections. Twenty-one moved to a recruiter screen. Six moved to a hiring-manager interview. Three moved to a final round.
A Berlin scale-up was one of the three. I'd applied through their careers page. The role description was clear and specific in a way most JDs aren't. They listed the team, the systems, the current pain points, and the salary band. The salary band is what pulled me into the application. Most German JDs don't list one, and the fact that they did made me think the company was probably more sane to work at than the median.
The recruiter screen was forty minutes. The recruiter had read my CV carefully. She asked specific questions about a transition I'd run at my last firm and what I'd learned from it. The conversation was professional and unremarkable, which is the highest compliment I can pay a recruiter screen.
The hiring-manager interview was with the finance lead I'd be reporting to. Sixty minutes. We walked through three real situations they were working through: the integration of an acquired company's books, a multi-currency reporting question, and a deferred-revenue policy question. I had real opinions on all three. We disagreed on one. The conversation got better at that point.
The second hiring-manager interview was a more technical screen, a cash-flow modelling exercise on a real anonymised dataset. Two hours, take-home. I sent back a clean model with assumptions documented in a separate tab. They asked about three of the assumptions. I had an answer for each.
The final round was with the CFO. Thirty minutes. He wanted to know what I'd been wrong about in my last role and what I'd done about it. I had a real example.
The offer was €50,000 base. Below market for the role. The JD had listed a band of €48,000 to €60,000, so I was on the lower end. I asked for €55,000, citing seven years of experience. They came back at €54,000 plus a remote-first arrangement, where the JD had said hybrid two days a week. I accepted.
There's no clever lesson here. Sometimes the boring approach works. The thing I'm proud of is that I tracked every single application from start to finish, knew where I stood every week, and wasn't surprised when an offer came.
Two weeks. Three rounds. One offer. The fastest hire I've ever been involved in, on either side of the table.
I wasn't job-hunting. I'd been at my previous company for two years as the second DevOps hire. I liked the team. The infrastructure was a mess, but a manageable mess, and I'd been making it less of one every quarter.
A former colleague, someone I'd worked with five years earlier at a very different company, had moved to a Dublin cloud company eight months prior as the engineering manager for the platform team. We'd stayed loosely in touch. On a Monday morning in late autumn he pinged me on Slack: "we're hiring a senior DevOps person for my team, you'd be perfect for it, can we talk?"
I said yes mostly out of curiosity. I had no plans to leave, but I was happy to hear what they were doing.
The first call was him, forty-five minutes. No formal recruiter screen. He walked me through the team, the stack, the on-call rotation, the salary band, the team's biggest current pain (a Kubernetes upgrade that had been deferred for six months), and what they hoped to ship next quarter. By the end I had a clearer picture of the role than I'd had of any role I'd interviewed for in the previous year.
Round two was the head of platform and one other senior engineer. Sixty minutes, structured as an "infrastructure design" conversation. They presented a real problem they were working through, how to handle blue-green deployment for a stateful service with a managed database, and asked me to think out loud. I'd thought about variants of it before. We disagreed on one specific point about traffic shifting, and the conversation got more interesting there.
Round three was an "incident response" round with two engineers. They walked me through a real outage from two months earlier, slowly, runbooks open, and asked what I'd have done at each decision point. There were a few places I'd have gone differently. I said so. They were pleasant about it.
The final round was twenty minutes with the CTO. He asked two real questions: what would make me leave a company, and what would make me leave this one specifically. I told him.
The offer arrived the next morning. €82,000 base. Same as their advertised band, no negotiation needed, because they'd told me the band on the first call and asked specifically whether it worked for me. I'd said yes then. I said yes again now.
The whole process, from first Slack message to signed offer, was fourteen days. It worked because every round was someone who'd actually read about me, had a clear question they wanted answered, and respected my time. The recruiter screen never happened. No take-home. No gimmicks. It was the best interview process I've ever been through, and I think the only reason it worked was that an internal person was vouching for me from minute one.
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.
80Applications
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2 monthsSearch length
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