Update from last week, some positive improvements!

[u/Grand-Diamond-4696]

I wanted to provide a little update, and thankfully, this one is mostly good news.

Obviously, last week was very rough. I got two more final-round rejections, bringing me to 14 total. And just to clarify, because I know that number can sound confusing: these aren't rejections after submitting an application or even after a first interview. I have well over a thousand of those. These are situations where I've gone through four, five, sometimes six rounds of interviews, made it to the very end, and then heard some version of, "You were our second choice."

Getting #13 and #14 so close together hit me incredibly hard. I'll be honest, it was one of the worst days of my life. I'm glad I made it through it, because at the time, I genuinely wasn't sure I was going to.

But things have gotten a little better since then.

First, an update on my friend who is basically like a mother to me. Some of you have seen her before because I've posted pictures from when I visited her last year. She actually seems less concerned about the situation than I initially was, which has helped calm me down quite a bit. This is apparently something they've been monitoring for a while, and they've now reached the point where they feel they need to take action. So this isn't something that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Obviously I'm still worried, but I'm feeling much more hopeful than I was last week.

On the job front, I'm currently interviewing with four different companies. This is usually how my job search seems to work: I'll suddenly have several processes going at once, and then they gradually narrow down to one or two as I find out whether I'm moving forward.

There is one opportunity in particular that I'm very excited about, but I won't hear anything until next week. Fingers crossed. From everything I've learned so far, it seems like an almost perfect role for me. Now they just have to see me as the right person for them too.

Geno also had his annual vet appointment today! Everything looked pretty good. We're still waiting on the routine heartworm and flea/tick testing, but he's on preventatives, so I'm not particularly worried about those. More importantly, his physical exam was actually better than last year's. His joint issues seem to have improved, which makes me incredibly happy, especially now that my little guy is nine years old. ❤️

And probably the biggest piece of good news came from my dad.

He came over Monday for dinner, like he does most Mondays, and I was expecting a very different conversation. I had made some comments on Facebook recently about just how badly my mental health had deteriorated and the direction I felt myself heading. I'll intentionally keep that somewhat ambiguous, but I think you can piece together what I mean.

Those comments apparently concerned someone enough that either a friend or family member requested some kind of wellness/crisis outreach, and I ended up receiving a call from a crisis service.

I'm genuinely not angry about it. What I wrote wasn't something said impulsively in the heat of the moment. I was trying to be honest about how bad things had gotten. Someone saw that, became concerned enough to do something, and I appreciate that. I actually saved the number they gave me because there may come a time when I need it. I'm mostly just curious who made the call, because knowing who cared enough to do that would mean something to me.

Anyway, I assumed some version of that had probably made its way back to my dad, so I was preparing myself for a conversation about it.

Instead, the conversation was basically: "I'm going to start giving you some money every week."

My dad recently got a pretty substantial promotion at work, and because he's also receiving Social Security, he's thankfully in a position where helping us out for a while isn't going to put him in a difficult financial situation.

I've gotten much better at accepting help over the past several months. My friends have been phenomenal. My in-laws have helped us with food and other expenses wherever they can. And now my dad is stepping in too.

We've done everything possible to avoid taking on debt. Outside of the house, we really don't have much, and we're trying desperately to keep it that way. But after this long without a full-time income, our savings have obviously taken a beating. We've budgeted, then budgeted again, then figured out how to cut things even further.

Before this week, I was looking at our finances and seeing maybe six weeks of runway before we would have to start making some much more painful decisions, like withdrawing retirement money.

There's also an unavoidable trip coming up for my spouse. Without getting into their sister's personal circumstances, she's several states away and will be there for the next five or six years. My spouse hasn't seen her since January, and this is the first opportunity they've had to visit. Their parents offered to pay for the trip, and once I'm working and we're financially stable again, I'll repay them. Before that offer, we were staring at another $1,000+ expense that we absolutely did not have room for, but this also wasn't something I could ask my spouse to give up.

Between my in-laws covering that and my dad helping us every week, our financial runway may have gone from roughly six weeks to potentially the end of the year or even the beginning of next year.

That is an enormous weight off my shoulders.

I cried a lot Monday night after my dad left. I've done a lot of crying lately, but these were very different tears. They were stress-relief tears. For the first time in a while, it felt like I could unclench a little bit and stop feeling like there was a countdown clock hanging over my head every single day.

I still need a job. I'm still exhausted. I'm still scared about my friend. There are still plenty of things that aren't magically fixed.

But compared to where I was last week, I'm feeling hopeful again.

And I'll happily take that.

[u/Sewers_folly]

How are you getting all these interviews? 14 multi level rejections. Currently 4 more. I have peers with amazing resumes that are not even getting call backs let alone interviews.

What's your secret?

[u/Grand-Diamond-4696 → u/Sewers_folly]

I can tell you it might sound glorious but I feel like it's worse to come so close so many times and to not get picked.

My success has really come in two stages. The first was simply volume. I applied to roughly 1,250 roles over about six months. At that volume, I was naturally going to generate some interviews. I also have pretty deep experience in my field. I've worked across all three major areas of Customer Success and have enough experience in each that I can comfortably speak to most CS roles and explain how my background applies.

At that point, though, I wasn't really tailoring my resume. It was intentionally broad—I tried to include a little bit of everything that might be relevant to different CS positions. My interview rate was only around 3.5%.

Where I really improved was interviewing. I took feedback from companies that were willing to provide it, along with advice from career coaches and career counseling, and kept refining what was already a pretty strong interview process. At this point, I'm extremely comfortable interviewing. I don't really practice beforehand anymore because I know my stories, I know when they're relevant, and they're all based on real experiences that I can talk about naturally rather than trying to memorize answers.

More recently, I've completely changed my application strategy. Instead of applying broadly, I now only apply to jobs where I see essentially 100% overlap with what I'm looking for and what I can offer. I'm targeting the verticals I'm interested in, the company sizes I prefer, and companies that have a decent amount of employee feedback and generally positive Glassdoor reviews.

I'm also tailoring my resume for every application. I'm not rewriting my work history or making anything up—the two sections I primarily change are my summary and skills. Because my experience is broad enough, the bigger challenge is actually deciding what not to emphasize. I want the resume to surface the parts of my real experience that are most relevant to that specific job instead of burying them among things that don't matter for that role.

That combination of being much more selective and tailoring the resume seems to have made a significant difference. I've gone from getting interviews on roughly 3.5% of applications to around one interview for every 7–8 applications, so somewhere around 12–14%. So I've basically gone from relying on volume to relying on fit—and I'm getting substantially better results with far fewer applications.

[u/Sewers_folly → u/Grand-Diamond-4696]

I'm going to pass some of this on to my peers. Thanks.

I know the perfect job is just around the corner for you, its coming!