The Mental & Physical Toll of Job Searching
I have written this article to share the grim realities of job hunting long-term, and the tolls it can take on an individual, particularly during this ‘perfect storm’ moment in time for job seekers in tech. I share because I am a firm believer that stories help others, and I hope that after reading this and perhaps noticing similarities in your own life recently, can take some comfort that it really is not just you. I am also no stranger to openly talking about my mental health. I am Graham.
I write this in March 2024, and many around the world have been affected by layoffs, restructuring, strategic realignment and many other bullshit terms that all mean the same thing - people are suddenly out of work, often to protect the business from going into the red and keeping investors happy. Before the ‘great redundancy of 2023-24’, money was flowing like a scenic river; it had little value to many tech businesses who loved using terms like ‘hyper-growth’ and reaching ‘unicorn status’… until suddenly it did have value, pennies were being counted and heads rolled.
Whether to genuinely save businesses, keep investors happy or simply take the opportunity to save money (everyone else is, why not us!), the market became flooded with great tech professionals. As was I in October 2023 and since that time like all the others, I have been applying, interviewing and sometimes treated incredibly poorly in the process. With dwindling funds and my family to support, my mental and physical health has taken a big hit… this is the focus of what I want to share.
My Starting Position
In October 2023 I was told of the decision that I would no longer be with Cobalt. I was fairly upbeat. I loved working at Cobalt and to this day miss the people and work I was doing very much, but I genuinely felt confident of finding my next role soon. Perhaps there was some arrogance at work here - I have a decent reputation in the Product Operations community, and I felt that would help me secure my next position. In the past, getting my next role (while still employed) was never too difficult, if time-consuming.
I began applying for Product Ops roles that were advertised - there were only a couple, and I did not get far. My CV needed work. It was stylised from a couple of years previous when humans mostly reviewed resumes, not ATSs (Applicant Tracking Systems) which - even in 2024 - appear to need a specific format and layout to best ingest your information and give you the best chance of clearing thresholds and filters for automatic rejection.
For the remainder of 2023, I continued to be at my desk for the majority of the day - applying for roles, interacting on social media and professional communities & tweaking my profile. I also had FOMO - Fear of Missing Out on opportunities if I took too much time away in fast-moving recruitment. I began to miss out on time with my family - but we all understood that to be a sacrifice to get me back into a job. I had convinced myself that this was what I needed to do and was working so hard to achieve.
Fortunately, my severance kept the bills paid until the new year, but we were cutting back on everything we could to extend this - Christmas was very basic, particularly heartbreaking for my youngest who was just starting to appreciate what that time of year means to us. For the most part, I had very few roles to apply for, so the rejections were few, yet were the automated crap the ATSs all use.
This raised my anxiety about the career corner I felt I had put myself into. Product Operations is still somewhat niche and up-and-coming. The value is undeniable (THAT is a debate for another article!), but particularly in the UK, still niche. And undefined. Some roles proved to be Project Manager roles - one even admitted they changed the name to sound dynamic and attract a different kind of person.
Doubting Myself
I was constantly questioning myself - can I continue down this road of Product Operations? Do I need to return to traditional Product Management? Do I leave Product altogether and start over? Am I wedged into a lifestyle of being fully remote, away from major cities and tech hubs, and an income level that I will have to take a big step back from? What will be the impact on my family?
Growing up, my father - a carpenter, worked long hours and it would not be unusual not to see him many evenings. Despite never once resenting this, I have been adamant my children would never know this. For my oldest, early in her life I was working away a lot and missed so much of her growing up - and given my proximity to the likes of London I have not wanted to be FT commuting there and back every day. But these are the decisions I am now reflecting on and the greater good of retaining my home, having food on the table and heating in the winter.
As the weeks dragged on, most mornings I awoke thinking about money, how I could get more, is there a trick I was missing, and whether there was an angle I could try. FOMO kicked in, and I would be back in my office every day desperate to find a new opportunity. By now, I am applying for anything in Product, salary thresholds are not a thing and I’m looking at anything remote or hybrid for any sector. Sleep is difficult as I am awake at 1 am, scrolling job boards for anything I have missed. I am sporadically awake throughout the night most nights with stray thoughts of possible futures that have me overthinking, worried, panicking, and playing out scenarios again and again until the light starts to shine through.
My Health
I have recognised my signs of depression - something I have gotten to know over the years. Sleep is disturbed, days are fatigued, and I am obsessing over very specific things - job searching, money, the future. I am uninterested in anything or anyone including my family. Days go past without me leaving the house. My partner is rightly telling me to take a break from it all and spend time with our youngest. I do my best to drag myself away, but my mind is drawn back, obsessively, to job hunting.
I knew things were severe when I attended ProductCon in London, in February 2024. I met up with over a dozen peers and ex-colleagues I knew, some I had not spoken to in some time and should have been a lovely catch-up (it was of course, but I could have appreciated it better!). But I sat listening to the speeches on stage and being increasingly sad. Not because of the occasional self-congratulating tripe or paid product advertising on stage (though does bring a tear to the eye knowing many people paid to be here!), but because I wanted to take away so many ideas and go implement them into work… work I do not have. There was a sense of wonder from the audience at some things presented, and conversations on how they could, or have, do this or that. And I was not able to be part of that. The long journey home was a lot longer in my head. If we met on this day and I was not on form, I apologise!
More recently in my life, I have developed a tricky relationship with food, made worse by poor mental health periods. I skip meals - often breakfast and sometimes lunch too, and then binge on whatever is easily available in the house. I am lazy in even the simplest of food preparation, and the lack of balance in food type and intake is causing me to tire very quickly throughout the day, which then pushes me to quick food solutions. And without anything near decent or regular exercise, the cycle of slowing down, tiring, bad eating and poor self-image continues to revolve.
It would be wrong to blame my poor eating on just this period - for the past few years I have known this is a struggle for me with noticeable lapses into bad habits, but the combination of little to do (that I want to do) or occupy my mind on exacerbates the situation. I do eat when I am bored, I don’t eat when I’m anxious - and while my current situation should mean they would comically balance out - they do not.
My Experiences with Job & Interviews
Into the new year, some roles have begun to open up in Product Ops. But my excitement quickly turned sour, with a heck of a lot of ghosting, roles on hold, and weeks and months of waiting on feedback and decisions. Roles have been reworked, new hiring managers have come in with new demands, ranging from altering remote to hybrid to FT onsite, to ‘I only want staff from big tech companies (i.e well known brands, FAANG+)’. Feedback has been sporadic with one business refusing to provide feedback when I was in the final 3. I have been told I sell myself too much and am buzzwordy by one recruiter (I thought I was supposed to sell myself in the interview!), too experienced as a first hire by another, and all the while well over one hundred automated rejections with no ability to ask why, to ask what criteria I failed on.
I’ll pause here to note I edited this section before publication to remove much more detail about some scenarios, but on reflection know that this would be held against me in my career and my continued job search, as shameful as that is on hiring managers that would do that.
I also want to balance this out by stating there have been some genuinely great talent managers (they do exist) who have explained the reasons, explained the criteria. Recently, for example, a talent manager spent significant time on their personal (and good) values in recruitment and how they were going to show them in my process. I do not want to tar every recruiter with the same brush, because I know some fantastic individuals who do work hard on the candidate’s be half as much as the business, and ultimately are limited by the hiring manager.
Overall though, none of this is sour grapes at not getting any particular role - the decision, for whatever reason, has been made and nothing will change that. I believe that the right role will come for the right person, and the right professional will be the best first for the roles on offer. The experience along the way, however, varies wildly, from great, to meh (most automated responses) to the downright laughable, if each time I was not broken inside. Less from the rejection, but more from the fact I have to start a month-long process all over again elsewhere - where likely another hurdle, contradictory to my failures previously, will stand before me.
The Guessing Game
What makes things more difficult is the constant guessing to understand what the next hiring manager wants to see from you, or not see, differently from the last one. Of course, this is the very essence of the interviewing process - are you a cultural add to the business (or unfortunately, more likely, a cultural fit), but so much of the process seems to be shrouded in mystery - what does the business REALLY want?
Like so many other candidates to whom I have spoken, we come away bewildered and mentally exhausted from each process, having little understanding of what went wrong and how or where to improve our sales pitch (of sorry, I should not be selling myself too much!) for next time, assuming we get feedback at all.
I go into every interview as me - chatty, confident, experienced, and collaborative me. I always have and that seemed to serve me well. But now, I find myself questioning if ‘being me is the problem’. With my depression hitting peak at times since the start of 2024, it is a struggle to ‘be’ anyone - ‘real me’ or the ‘fake me I think interviewers want to meet’.
Product Professionals & Imposter Syndrome
I resisted stating this because it has been used so much in the past year, but the job market is horrific for candidates. It is saturated with great professionals all scraping for the few roles available, allowing hiring organisations to pick the very best, and in some cases, pay them less knowing they need a job. Numerous conversations with others have mentioned some known brands low-balling when it comes to pay. Businesses are hiring less too, if at all, so there are even fewer roles available for a much larger pool of candidates. Other sectors have faced similar challenges over the past 20 years, this is Tech’s (latest) stint.
But Product Management in particular is also facing a crisis at the same time from within; from consultants, book authors and course peddlers telling the masses that ‘their way is the right way, the way to success and the promised lands, and anyone else is second-rate/should quit/should be expelled’. You can get a flavour of this ongoing cold war here:
Product Mind Community’s own Beks Yelland also brilliantly outlines the ‘Product Guru Complex’ concept largely on the same lines.
Now, on top of anxiety and depression focused on getting into a new role, there is imposter syndrome and a lack of confidence in my abilities even if I were in a role. If it were not for said individuals openly disregarding the wider professional community as a ploy to sell their material to business leaders, one would question the timing of this run on their product profession!
Imposter Syndrome is something we talk a lot about within the Product Mind Community
What now…
I am not going to end this with a conclusion, nor with advice on what to do if you feel the same. I do not know what to do, and I am still battling my personal demons. I have a great deal of experience from years of these sorts of internal struggles - and while I fully appreciate messages of support, I wrote this to be a supporting asset to others. For me, this is just a trough of the rollercoaster & I am comfortable managing myself.
I will not offer the usual tripe either, of ‘you will get through this’, ‘let’s have a chat (and somehow things will be different by the end)’, ‘focus on yourself during this time’. Because you know all of this already, and none of those gets you a job, pays the bills or changes the causes of why you are feeling the way you are. The reality is you have to keep trying, and you will continue down the road you are on - but you are not doing it alone. If you have seen similarities with yourself here, know that it is not you - it is the world. And we do not get many opportunities to say that!
Having said this, seek help where you can, particularly from those who may also be in the same position as you. While not at ad for the service, the Product Mind Community has so many great members who can, and do, talk about their own situations similar to this. Again, not changing your situation, but you are not alone.
Graham
So well written. Thank you for the honesty and openness - and no tripe!