Coming in Fast

How one Tortugan got his J2

Not the way to get a job

First contact to offer took one week. I'm still not totally over it.

A LinkedIn recruiter cold-contacted me, I had one call with her, and a day or two later I was in front of the hiring manager, talking up my data engineering skills. Within an hour of finishing that interview, they’d booked me with the department VP for the next morning. I had an offer by that afternoon. For all that we shit on LinkedIn — and I include myself in that — it was pretty insane. They moved REALLY fast.

I was coming up on a promotion and raise at my current job (call it J1) and I was trying to get some leverage to jack up whatever they were going to offer me. So I started doing market research to figure out what my skill set was actually worth.

I started by applying to a few jobs on hiring.cafe — love that website, everyone in Tortuga should be using it. Maybe 10 to 15, and I was shooting for the moon: Dropbox, Netflix, companies I had no business applying to on paper. Every one came back cold or auto-rejected. Not one led to an interview, but what did I expect? I was a stranger in a pile of strangers.

What actually worked was when I stopped trying to pile in with everybody else and made myself findable instead. I secretly toggled my LinkedIn to “Open to Work” — not the loud version with the green banner everyone can see, but the recruiters-only setting: no banner, nothing your feed or your boss can see, you just quietly surface inside the searches recruiters run. One caveat — LinkedIn tries to hide that flag from recruiters at your own company, but it doesn’t guarantee it, so if your shop runs LinkedIn Recruiter, mind that. I flipped it on in late fall, and the recruiters came. Something like 10 this calendar year alone.

The toggle only works if there’s something worth finding when they look. By the time these recruiters reached out, I’d built out my LinkedIn so the experience section was almost exactly like my resume: comprehensive detail, but not word-vomit paragraphs (I keep the actual resume to one strict page). My J1 title was right there. All the relevant stuff was on the profile.

Then the other half: I responded fast. Always had an up-to-date resume ready to send, always made myself available for calls and follow-ups, replied inside the hour whenever I could. A recruiter who has to wait two days for a reply just moves on to the next name. I had to be discoverable and ready.

Now here’s the part I can’t take full credit for. I know some of what was happening behind the scenes, because the VP told me later. The Friday before that recruiter reached out, they’d posted the job on their own job board. By Monday they had hundreds of absolutely dogshit applicants, just from the weekend. That Monday, the VP made an executive decision and killed the requisition. Then he called an account manager he knew at a staffing firm (someone he had a relationship with from a previous company) and told her to just find him someone. I think she found me literally the next day.

My luck stacked. They’d advertised it as a regional posting, which shrank the pool a lot. I’m in an LCOL Midwest area, and data engineering isn’t exactly the hottest field around here. Because they’d pitched it as a hybrid-office position, they had to geographically bound the search, and my location was sitting right there on my profile. If they’d posted it as “remote” from the start, the pool would’ve been national, and with my relatively low years of experience I’d have been passed over completely.

When they asked me how I’d do something, I never gave just one answer. Data engineering has somewhere between 270,000 and 6 million ways to solve any given problem, so I’d say: “There are a lot of ways to do this — here are two or three I’d consider off the top of my head, and obviously I’d adjust once I had more details.” I walked out thinking I’d put in maybe a 70–80% performance. It was clearly higher than that, because within an hour they’d booked me with the VP.

I also came with one hard, concrete example. I had a SQL query I’d optimized at J1 copied into a note on my second monitor, and when it came up I pasted it straight into the Teams chat and walked the interviewers through my reasoning. I could say flat out that it was saving J1 about $1,200 a year — from that one optimization. I had something real to back up my resume.

When I asked the manager later why she picked me, she said my answers showed her I thought similarly to the way she did, and she really liked that. I think that’s the multiple-answers thing. Laying out options and reasoning instead of pretending there’s one right answer is how she works, too. That’s what set me apart.

I still can’t believe the payoff. This job is over an hour from where I live. It was pitched to me as hybrid: roughly two days a week in the office, with the first three-plus months fully onsite. By the time I got to the VP, he said, completely unprompted: “Just to put your mind at ease, this is NOT a hybrid position. We’ll have you in the office on an as-needed basis, maybe once a quarter or less. We can do fully remote for you.” I don’t know if that was always the plan, or if they wanted me badly enough to restructure the job on the spot. They knew from the start I was over an hour out, so maybe they liked me enough out of that first interview that the VP decided he wanted me and was going to do what it took to keep me. My recruiters did some negotiating on my behalf too. Once the VP floated remote, I told them it was now non-negotiable, make it happen. I ended up with a 65% increase, but I'm going to negotiate again upwards.

So far, there’s no catch. I’ve been running the new job and finishing out J1 for about three weeks now. It’s an adjustment, but I think I may have genuinely lucked out. Not counting my chickens yet, though.

The front door — the apply-to-Netflix front door — is jammed. Hundreds of applications pile up there, and mostly they just get ignored while somebody with authority makes a personal call. The doors that open are the ones on the side, and they come and go quickly. All you can do is decide where and how you’ll be standing when your opportunity comes. You make your own luck.