The MM Network

[Apoc]

I was often surprised just how little effort many hiring managers at Amazon put into their job postings. I recognize I'm supremely anal retentive about a lot of things, and my job postings are one of them, but if you search jobs in Amazon there are many that are pretty close to one another. I think a lot of HMs feel they'll sort it out during the resume review (after a recruiter takes a first pass); that also means it's harder to find the signal in the noise. At times, my recruiter and/or sourcer were working ~50 jobs at one time. I often went in to take the first pass at resumes myself, because that was faster, and even though I was pretty freaking specific about qualifications there were still... literally... hundreds of applicants that had no where near the right experience. Popular company problems, I guess.

G's right that they often don't understand the space. In my case, hiring analytics jobs in HR, I had to educate the recruiter about all the things that did or didn't matter on the resume. We usually gave them screening questions and told them what good and bad answers were, so the recruiter was asking more than "would you move to Seattle?". They starting hiring Economists from the central Econ team as a company-wide process and that was fantastic. I was able to hire a half dozen PhD Economists in about half the time it took me to find two PhD psychologists. The BI Manager I hired took me eight calendar months and 200 hours of my time (not including other people) to find. I had to escalate to two Directors (one was my boss) to get a temp housing extension for her because she wanted to move back home (family complications) and the money was inconsequential to what we'd already spent in a search.

My interview process at Amazon took nine weeks from first contact to offer. There was a break in the middle - I'm pretty sure I blew my final interview with a VP and the then HM worked to convince her. She didn't appreciate when I told her the need to study record level data at her level was a trust issue. Oops. The things you say when you're in your early 30s and think you know everything.

I applied for one internal transfer at Amazon - it was to manage an analytics team for Alexa in Luxembourg. That process took about 11 weeks, in part because it was Q4 and budgeting can get complicated. I thought I did well and had a strong written recommendation from my Director (and other internals), but the technical interview was WAY heavier in SQL than anticipated. It's been 12 years since I've used it and took refresher courses online, but I failed pretty hard because they wanted me to do statistics in SQL. I've done SQL. I've done statistics. I have not done them together. I found out after the fact they had changed the job from analytics manager to BI engineer AFTER my first four phone screens and interviews. They never told me and interviewed me to see if I was a fit anyway. I told them afterwards that I would have been upfront about me not being qualified had they explained the change. I found out I didn't get it three days before Christmas a few years ago. That was rough, as we'd started looking at rental houses and pre-schools in LUX.

[.RJ]

She didn't appreciate when I told her the need to study record level data at her level was a trust issue. Oops. The things you say when you're in your early 30s and think you know everything.

You can take the boy out of the east coast, but not the east coast out of the something something.  
I figure if they dont like hearing things like that then I'm pretty sure I dont want to work there, either.

[Senor_Taylor]

Started searching for jobs using "Product Analyst" instead of "Associate Product manager" and found a lot more hits, all for consulting firms.

Anyone have any suggestions on good firms? Getting more interested in getting a clearance and getting on that bandwagon.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[Jake]

Started searching for jobs using "Product Analyst" instead of "Associate Product manager" and found a lot more hits, all for consulting firms.

Anyone have any suggestions on good firms? Getting more interested in getting a clearance and getting on that bandwagon.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

Be careful with consulting, a lot of firms will want you to travel farther than "three blocks from your townhouse" even if you are on local client work.

[Apoc]

Knowing what I know of Taylor's preference and personality, I do not believe consulting would be a good option. It's very, very common to have to commute much farther than intended, work longer hours than intended, and have a stressful relationship with the client.

[Senor_Taylor]

Knowing what I know of Taylor's preference and personality, I do not believe consulting would be a good option. It's very, very common to have to commute much farther than intended, work longer hours than intended, and have a stressful relationship with the client.

That's a fair assessment. I've avoided the consulting scene for that reason. I guess a better thing to say is that I'm interested in getting into government contracting. I don't know much about it, but it seems a lot less fast paced and a lot more stable.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[Jake]

My ex worked for Booz Allen on a government project. Years of development with no 1.0 release was what he dealt with, and that sounded pretty common.

[.RJ]

gov contracting will make you want to jump off a bridge after working at product company

[G.Irish]

Knowing what I know of Taylor's preference and personality, I do not believe consulting would be a good option. It's very, very common to have to commute much farther than intended, work longer hours than intended, and have a stressful relationship with the client.

That's a fair assessment. I've avoided the consulting scene for that reason. I guess a better thing to say is that I'm interested in getting into government contracting. I don't know much about it, but it seems a lot less fast paced and a lot more stable.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

Stability depends entirely on the contract.  If you get in on the first contract year with several option years, you'll usually be ok.  Occasionally contracts get ended early but that's the exception not the rule.

If you come into a contract when a recompete is coming in a year or 2, you may find yourself either having to transition to another project, or looking for another job.  If you're not working for a shitty company and you're a good employee, most of the time you'll be able to switch onto another contract your company has.  If you work for a small firm that doesn't have many contracts or the ability to pay people on the bench, then you have a higher chance of getting laid off.

The big challenge in government contracting is that your experience largely depends on the customer and the culture at the customer site.  I've worked with great government customers and I've worked with tyrants.  The biggest frustration for me is just the inertia and stubbornness.  A lot of the time it's not the technical solution that is the problem, it's that it is difficult to get people to change how they do business.  And incompetent government people rarely get fired, so you can only hope they move on, retire, or die.

[Senor_Taylor]

I have no idea what I'll like doing...

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[Deceus]

Yeah government contracting can be hit or miss. My last project was a god damn dream job at first. Fully remote, no real hard deadlines, no one trying to hold meetings every day. Just get shit done and be flexible. 2 years later our PM/Tech lead left and the government decided they needed total oversight. They hired someone to basically be a yes-man/punching bag who didn't know a thing about programming to be PM and then promoted the least competent developer to "tech lead". Then they made us pick-up the shittest laptops I've ever had the misfortune of using. Took 20+ minutes just for it to boot up. Thank god it took them over a year to get the dev environment setup for them, so I never had to use it for more than JIRA. Went from a chill start-up vibe to having to type up 2 word documents to do anything overnight. Things that used to takes us 30 minutes were now taking days.

One of the final straws was they replaced all the Customer Managers that were basically running the show at this point with their people who by their own admittance didn't know anything about the system or it's users. Couldn't picture anyone running a project into the ground better than they did. Before I left things had derailed so bad we were still trying to close the last ticket of the person who left before me 3 months earlier. We were also getting tickets coming that were already past their "due date" some how or at best a day or 2 before them.

Long story, short: working for the government can be nice if the government really isn't involved but I imagine that's some rare window for most projects. They seem to all eventually devolve into a trainwreck for some reason or another because this is exactly how my first job felt. The kicker is there was no real reason for them to do any of this. We were consistently delivering things ahead of schedule before all this shit hit the fan.

If you can get over having a complete idiot in charge of your project and timelines that suffers no consequences since it's ultimately all taxpayer money, then it might be a good move. The sheer inefficiency of every little thing you have to do ensures fast-paced environments are pretty rare.

---

Good news: the person that ended up with Ryan's referral was a lot nicer to talk to. She seemed pretty thrilled to see someone with a solid Java background and some Spring experience. She didn't get caught up on the lack of AWS experience and said I'd probably just pick it up really fast. She was pretty confident they could match my current salary and even mentioned a signing bonus without me bringing it up so that's pretty sweet. Gonna brush up on the Spring framework now, it's not as sexy as all the JavaScript stuff I've been doing but I'm also a lot more familiar with it.

[Senor_Taylor]

pls critique https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-johnson-6405b398/

I'd change your cover photo to something either more generic, or less busy looking.

First sentence or two should be something more about where you are now and where you are looking to go, something like "Currently an Application Support Engineer in Tyson's Corner, looking to transition into a Product Management role." This line about "I love problem solving and working with my hands. I love to lead and organize people and and my goal every day is to make other people's lives a little easier." is good and can go right after. Put the car stuff in a paragraph below that and shorten it a bit. I don't think you need your resume as an attached file given your LI profile is basically just that.

List MM in your "experience" section and change title of "Worker" for NASA to something more specific.  You are one of a relatively small group of staff that is tasked with ensuring the safety and success of a 300-person event at a racetrack once per month. Remember that you can impress non-car people with that kind of part-time/hobby work experience. Drop that from your LI and resume once you have more career experience.

In general, look at your keywords that are interspersed throughout your profile. Recruiters will search on things like "Agile" or "SQL" or whatever and you need to have anything relevant in there.

FWIW this is my profile. I recently added GLASS and Out Motorsports to it as both are fairly significant as my career develops: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakethiewes/

made some changes

[Apoc]

Focus on accomplishments with data, not responsibilities. The current structure doesn't really differentiate you from someone else doing the same job, except the last bullet.  I pasted an example below from my profile. I get it's your first job, but I'm sure there are things you can point to after two years. 

I, personally, don't think your new cover photo is a good one. The car-related experience makes sense, because it shows you can be a leader, but I think it should be something relevant to your job search or a generic picture. Maybe a picture from the job fair where you represented your company? Save the car pictures for facebook and instagram. Yes, you want to enter the car industry, but putting a car photo there and saying "preferably" in the industry may get you excluded on the first pass. I would rework it to say you are excited to learn new industries and also have a special passion for automotive.

Your first summary line has a typo. It may not matter to everyone, but given two similar candidates I'm inclined towards the one who doesn't have mistakes on their resume/profile.

Manager, HR Analytics
I managed the fast growing organization composed of Scientists, Economists, and Analysts known as the HR Analytics team. By hiring the best talent and establishing continued patterns of success, I oversaw the team's 500% growth in three years. We provided answers to big questions and access to the intelligence Amazon leaders need to attract and retain the world's most effective workforce. We changed the way Amazon consumes and digests people analytics and we did it from top down.

• Hired as the first data analyst in all of Amazon’s HR organization; a function I have helped grow to 50+ analysts worldwide
• Promoted to manager of newly chartered HR Analytics team in 2013 and grew it 500% over three years, including internationally
• Managed a diverse team of Research Scientists, Economists, BI Engineers, and Analysts responsible for answering senior leaderships’ questions about talent and unblocking HR teams in their pursuit of workforce intelligence
• Lead the team that designed and deployed five global HR dashboards; covering subject matter including workforce movement, employee performance, recruiting efficiency, diversity representation, and regulatory compliance
• Routinely trusted to present metrics packages to two different heads of HR without oversight from my management chain, including research papers on predictive workforce modeling, capacity planning, and operational efficiency
• Our team has been repeatedly called upon to quickly prepare data for Mr. Bezos’ public comments and press releases
• Devised a mathematical methodology to predict Recruiter and HR Business Partner needs to inform global HR staffing plans
• Managed the design, build, and deployment of a big data platform; enabling machine learning and econometric modeling
• Participated in 300+ interviews over four years; assessing talent for teams internal and external to my organization

[Senor_Taylor]

Focus on accomplishments with data, not responsibilities. The current structure doesn't really differentiate you from someone else doing the same job, except the last bullet.  I pasted an example below from my profile. I get it's your first job, but I'm sure there are things you can point to after two years. 

I, personally, don't think your new cover photo is a good one. The car-related experience makes sense, because it shows you can be a leader, but I think it should be something relevant to your job search or a generic picture. Maybe a picture from the job fair where you represented your company? Save the car pictures for facebook and instagram. Yes, you want to enter the car industry, but putting a car photo there and saying "preferably" in the industry may get you excluded on the first pass. I would rework it to say you are excited to learn new industries and also have a special passion for automotive.

Your first summary line has a typo. It may not matter to everyone, but given two similar candidates I'm inclined towards the one who doesn't have mistakes on their resume/profile.

Manager, HR Analytics
I managed the fast growing organization composed of Scientists, Economists, and Analysts known as the HR Analytics team. By hiring the best talent and establishing continued patterns of success, I oversaw the team's 500% growth in three years. We provided answers to big questions and access to the intelligence Amazon leaders need to attract and retain the world's most effective workforce. We changed the way Amazon consumes and digests people analytics and we did it from top down.

• Hired as the first data analyst in all of Amazon’s HR organization; a function I have helped grow to 50+ analysts worldwide
• Promoted to manager of newly chartered HR Analytics team in 2013 and grew it 500% over three years, including internationally
• Managed a diverse team of Research Scientists, Economists, BI Engineers, and Analysts responsible for answering senior leaderships’ questions about talent and unblocking HR teams in their pursuit of workforce intelligence
• Lead the team that designed and deployed five global HR dashboards; covering subject matter including workforce movement, employee performance, recruiting efficiency, diversity representation, and regulatory compliance
• Routinely trusted to present metrics packages to two different heads of HR without oversight from my management chain, including research papers on predictive workforce modeling, capacity planning, and operational efficiency
• Our team has been repeatedly called upon to quickly prepare data for Mr. Bezos’ public comments and press releases
• Devised a mathematical methodology to predict Recruiter and HR Business Partner needs to inform global HR staffing plans
• Managed the design, build, and deployment of a big data platform; enabling machine learning and econometric modeling
• Participated in 300+ interviews over four years; assessing talent for teams internal and external to my organization

Thanks for the insight. I appreciate it. Reworked some stuff.

[Deceus]

Soooooooooooo anyone looking for a roommate in Richmond? Or have suggestions on where to stay? Capital One got back to me super fast. Housing is about the only real issue with accepting the offer. Only have one more option to explore, but at the rate at which they're moving I may not get the chance to actually get through it before Capital One expects a response.

[rherold9]

Soooooooooooo anyone looking for a roommate in Richmond? Or have suggestions on where to stay? Capital One got back to me super fast. Housing is about the only real issue with accepting the offer. Only have one more option to explore, but at the rate at which they're moving I may not get the chance to actually get through it before Capital One expects a response.

Hehehe. It was a trap. You are going to have to see me every day now. Feel bad for you

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[Deceus]

Soooooooooooo anyone looking for a roommate in Richmond? Or have suggestions on where to stay? Capital One got back to me super fast. Housing is about the only real issue with accepting the offer. Only have one more option to explore, but at the rate at which they're moving I may not get the chance to actually get through it before Capital One expects a response.

Hehehe. It was a trap. You are going to have to see me every day now. Feel bad for you

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

Beats being homeless. (probably)

[Senor_Taylor]

Congrats!!!

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[JustinG]

You could call around for 6 month leases close to the office til you figure it out.

[Kaan]

craigslist ... that's how we used to do it.