Tales From My Salesforce Job Search Journey
Or: How I Landed My Dream Role by Leveraging All Possible Opportunities and Connections, Including My 3rd Great Grandmother. And How You Can Too!
My wide variety of real-world examples and experiences will be informative and entertaining. This won’t be a dry and emotionless sermon on how to achieve results as quickly and efficiently as possible; it will be a real-world description of my journey and what I learned.
In this session, I will tell the audience about actions they could take and experiences they could expect when preparing for a career or position transition in the Salesforce ecosystem. This could also be useful for hiring managers, to consider what kind of experience they provide to potential future employees and what methodologies for eliciting information from candidates may be useful.
How do I know all of this? Because I was unexpectedly and abruptly let go from my job as a Salesforce admin / business analyst in state government in October 2023 – I was told I was no longer needed and should just go home one day after lunch – and it took until April 2024 to start at a job I really wanted. During that time, I applied for over 100 jobs, interviewed 29 times with 40+ people at 13 different employers, worked at 3 different side hustles, and had many days (I chose not to count how many) when I was too emotionally drained to think about yet another possible direction my professional life might take. I even worked for six weeks at a new full-time job I didn’t particularly want while continuing to apply and interview, until I received a job offer I did want. And if I hadn’t done all of those things, I wouldn’t have had the experience and stories and confidence to bring into the final interview that mattered, when I was offered a job on the spot.
