Published June 2020 by Ben Erez

After being laid off earlier this year, I spent April and May in full job search mode. Many interviews later, I recently joined Facebook as a product manager. With 42 million Americans filing for unemployment over the last few months, I thought it might be good to share some tips and tools I used during my job search while it's all fresh in my mind. I hope this is helpful and good luck with your search!

How to use this doc

I recommend using this document as a resource. It's not a guide that guarantees any kind of outcome. My hope is that this helps you create a basic working mental model of one way to structure your job search. I encourage you to use what resonates and discard the rest.

The sections in this doc roughly follow the chronological "happy path" of a full job search cycle: preparing→ finding roles → getting in the door → phone screens → onsites → meeting hiring manager → offer. Each section in this doc will include relevant tips and tools that I found helpful for that stage.

Over the two months of my search, I went through the full cycle continuously; I was interviewing with 3-5 companies at any given point in my search. I was always engaged in a mixture of preparation, discovery, seeking intros, having phone screens, etc.

Rather than seeing my search as a linear progression from one step to the next, I treated it as a collection of individual processes with companies, each of which followed a linear progression.

Some caveats

• Everything in this doc is solely based on my own personal experience. What worked for me might not work for you. Treat my experience as simply one more data point.
• Since I only interviewed for product manager roles, this document is heavily skewed towards the product management job search. That said, I hope much of this doc will be useful for people interviewing for other positions as well.

Table of Contents

I. Before you start 🧘🏻‍♂️

II. Identifying Roles 🕵🏻‍♂️

III. Getting in the Door 👋🏻

IV. Phone Screens 📞

V. Onsites 💻