Career Tips from a PM (8/30) – Improve your job hunt by doing a churn analysis.
Taking a page from product management, a churn analysis is a process by which companies identify when they lose customers and why. This in turn influences future product decisions to maximize retention and keep customers on board.
We can take this concept and use it to improve our job hunt process.
Essentially, using SaaS as a metaphor, we frame first interviews as the initial onboarding of our customer, the following ones as them purchasing add-ons, and the job offer as them committing to a long-term subscription.
To do a churn analysis on your job hunt, first segment your job hunt process into logical phases. A past colleague of mine uses the pirate framework (AARRR) for this: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue.
Acquisition: Are you getting seen by recruiters and hiring managers?
Activation: Are you getting past the screening interview?
Retention: Are you making it through the interview process?
Referral: Are people you interview with advocating for you?
Revenue: Are you getting offers?
Second, using all the data you have, evaluate your performance at each phase of your job hunt.
– What version of your resume did you use?
– What industries and roles did you get call backs for?
– What answers did you give to what questions?
– How did you deliver said answers?
– Etc.
And finally, prioritize improvements in where your customer (the company you’re interviewing for) churns (rejects you). For some, this could be a matter of improving the phases with the greatest churn first. For others, it could be increasing the volume that gets into the lifecycle in the first place.
If you want to maximize your odds of landing your next job, especially your dream job, you’ll need to regularly review your process and acknowledge where things drop off. Only by being honest to ourselves where our weaknesses lie can we begin to make an already difficult job market a bit easier to manage.
Improve your job hunt by doing a churn analysis.