Hiring often feels like a black box, and it hurts when you never get the feedback for the role you really wanted. Having spent over a decade as a hiring manager, I  want to reveal why good candidates get turned down and what practical steps you can take instead.

Phase 1. When you don't get the interview

1. The recruiter or the hiring manager is the bottleneck

Recruiters have been hit by the layoffs too. For over a year now, I've had a different recruiter on every role I've hired for. Earlier this year, when I complained about a week with no update, the recruiter revealed they were managing more than ten roles simultaneously. Every hiring manager was competing for their bandwidth.

It can be the hiring manager as well. If they're slow to give the recruiter feedback, the recruiter is slow to come back to you. From the outside, both look identical: silence.

• What to do instead: Reach out directly to the recruiter or the hiring manager if you can find the name. On my last hire, my recruiter was overloaded and hadn't passed me new CVs for over a week. Several candidates messaged my manager and me directly, and I booked interviews with the ones who looked like a fit.

2. Your CV isn't tailored to the role, or the experience gap is real

Applications are running at least ten times the volume they used to. Only the strongest profiles get through. I used to consider more junior EM candidates; now only the genuinely experienced ones get prioritised. If your CV doesn't earn attention in the first 30 seconds, it doesn't get a thumbs up.

• What to do instead. If the gap is seniority, build that experience where you are now, assuming you want the role enough to wait for it. Otherwise, rewrite the CV for this specific role: the right keywords, real numbers on your impact, and a format that passes ATS. More companies are using AI to scale screening, and having the right structure increases your odds of being seen.

 

3. Logistics: location and money

Relocation is getting harder everywhere. In my company, we used to provide relocation to every level before covid time, and now we only limit it for higher roles. A salary expectation outside the band might end your application. Sometimes the recruiter is more acceptable for higher salary, but an imbalanced salary level is a nightmare for the hiring manager, as something remains to be resolved, so usually they are less open. 

• What to do instead. Prioritise your local market. Put a salary expectation in writing that matches what the market you're applying to pays today, or express your flexibility in salary when talking to the recruiter(if you really want this job).

Phase 2. When you interview and don't get the offer

The rejection almost always comes from the hiring manager. If you meet them during the loop, use that time to understand what they actually want from this hire, and to build some personal rapport.

1. Someone else is more enthusiastic 

Two candidates can be equally capable, and the one who makes the panel believe they are more enthusiastic gets this job. In my experience, I’ve chosen candidates who showed enthusiasm specific to the team over candidates who have a general interest in the company or simply just want a job after a layoff.  

• What to do instead: Research the specific product, team challenges, or domain beforehand. Express why this specific work excites you.

2. You couldn't go deep on your own past work

A great CV raises the bar for the interview.  If you can't discuss the technical detail of a system you claim to have led, it looks like either thin preparation. Both cost you the offer. 

• What to do instead. Make sure to revise your past projects. Be ready to detail key technical decisions, specific struggles, how you resolved them, and what you would do differently.

3. Someone else was more qualified

They saw your potential, but someone else was simply more qualified for what the role needs now. This is the case when the recruiter refuses to brief you for several weeks, sadly, because the process with the top pick hasn’t finished yet. 

• What to do instead. Tell yourself that you are doing a very good job already, keep pushing and your next job might be even a better fit for yourself. In some cases, back-up candidates do get a call from my own experience.

4. You're overqualified, or you want something they can't give you

It happens when your previous role was higher than the current one, or your career ambition makes the company feel that you won’t fully commit to the role. 

• What to do instead. Address potential worries directly in the recruiter screen and be ready to repeat with every interviewer. Clearly articulate why taking this specific role makes sense for your current career stage and life priorities.

Hope this is useful, and happy to answer questions in the comments about any specific topic above or how to navigate through the challenges in job hunting today!

Seven years ago, I started as an Engineering Manager. Over the next six years, I was promoted three times to become an Engineering Director.

I wanted to share my journey with this community, especially what worked, what didn't, and a few hard truths I learned along the way. Hopefully, this provides actionable insight and inspiration for your own career path. As this is not a general post about how to be a good manager, I kept the essentials for the promotion topic. 

What worked

1. Riding favorable business tailwinds

Let’s be honest: it’s much easier to get promoted in a growing, healthy business. When company resources are constrained, fewer people get promoted, receive important raises, or get fair review ratings.

In my case, I joined a newly established team unifying operational tools across hundreds of games, contributing to a business scaling from $1M to $10M/day. A year later, the company transitioned fully to GCP, bringing a massive budget with it. These tailwinds gave me the headcounts and product portfolio necessary to demonstrate my impact.

2. Dare to lead beyond your official scope

This might be the most important point I want to share here. I never constrained myself to the narrow scope of my job title. 

On my second day in the office, someone approached me and asked: “Are you the new line manager here”? However, I never wanted to be a pure people manager, so I replied, “I have just started by leading the Unified Platform team and looking forward to working with you. 

Leading a team means a lot. In the next few years, I acted as product manager multiple times when there was no fixed product manager. Over time, the team has grown from 1 to 3 teams with a much bigger product portfolio. While I eventually hired 3 PMs, doing the product work myself early on expanded my skill set and portfolio rapidly.

3. Create a strong and positive identity for your team

Your team is your biggest asset. If your team delivers strong results, then you share the credit as their leader. If they struggle, then it hurts your credibility. I intentionally cultivated a culture that was collaborative, high-performing, and candid. Of course I needed to hold myself to the exact same bar I set for them. My team and I were shaping each other in this journey. 

4. Become visible in the EM community

This was literally what my manager told me when I asked him how to reach senior EM. I listened to him and acted on it: organizing EM summit, facilitating meet-up sessions, actively sharing learnings and building personal relationships in the community. Very few people actually have the energy and motivation to maintain a community, but it is an incredible leverage point for leadership visibility. 

Lessons I learned : 

1. Good performance doesn’t get you promoted automatically, especially in higher leadership roles. “Build your own case”, my manager told me when I expressed my frustration. 
2. Proactively seeking feedback reveals blind spots. I wasn’t naturally good at asking for feedback, and not everyone I asked actually delivered. But once I realized that peers and leadership exchange feedback about you behind closed doors during promotion rounds, it became clear: you need to ask early so you can fix gaps before calibration starts.
3. Rejection is often where real growth happens:

Moving from Senior EM to Director was much harder than previous promotions. For over a year, I pushed for the Director title, but my manager didn't feel I was ready. Every quarter brought another "not yet," which was deeply frustrating at the time.

Looking back, that period was my biggest growth phase. To bridge the gap, I

• Led a cross-department initiative involving over 20 teams, which improved my visibility among top executives
• Successfully merged two competing backend teams
• Resolved some long-standing underperforming issues.

 

The delay forced me to operate at a Director level before I got the title. 

4. External offers demonstrate your true market value

Instead of just waiting for the internal process to play out, I interviewed externally and received several offers, including a Head of Engineering role at a large company.

Presenting the external validation changed the dynamic: I received a retention bonus to stay, and a few months later, my Director promotion was finalized.

For folks here: What have been the most effective for your career progression? And for those feeling stuck, what’s currently holding you back? Happy to answer any questions in the comments!

I understand that many people are burned out by their interview journey or angry at the current job market. I have a lot of empathy for that, and I plan to write a separate post about mental well-being soon. However, this post is specifically for those who are actively job hunting and looking to refine their strategy for getting interviews. Here is my mental model for landing an interview without being burned out: 

Step 1: Assess your motivation

Only target roles you genuinely care about and can see yourself doing for a few years. Whether you are driven by a pay raise, a move to a new city, or a passion for a specific product area, having a clear objective increases your resilience. When you actually want the job, doing the hard work, I’m going to share in the following steps feels much more natural.

Step 2: Identify skill gaps

Research the company and the hiring team to get to at least a conversational level about their products. Look honestly at the job requirements and identify gaps in your own experience(You can get help from AI). For instance, if you are applying for an AI engineering role, you need to understand AI engineering principles. If you want to step up from an EM to a Director role, you need to know what a successful director looks like. If you aren't ready to close those gaps, reassess your motivation or pivot to a different role. 

Step 3: Tailor your CV to the job

Do not broadcast a generic CV to every company since recruiters and hiring managers assess candidates based on how well their experience matches the role. Make sure your resume highlights the right keywords and articulates your past achievements to match the job requirements. For example, if you are a technical lead applying for an EM role, add a bullet for your impact on team health by making good tech decisions or how you coach team members to remove a major blocker. Again, you can scale this with AI or many existing tools on the market for formatting and advice, but make sure to use your own wording that reflects the best of yourself without exaggerating. 

Step 4: Leverage Your Network

Check if anyone in your network currently works at the target company. When I was hiring for an EM about 4 months ago, people around me were all introducing their friends to me and it got my attention much more quickly. In addition, many companies offer referral bonuses, so employees are usually highly motivated to refer strong candidates. If you know who the recruiter or hiring manager is, send them a thoughtful message on LinkedIn explaining why you are a fit. Knowing that most CVs get buried in the ocean of CVs received on the other end,  a warm introduction largely increases your chances of being noticed. 

Step 5: Manage Your Expectations

Have realistic expectations about the timeline of your application. Sometimes you will get a recruiter screen within a week. Other times, you might be waiting weeks just to hear back, so try not to stress. Once, I had a recruiter who checked my LinkedIn profile multiple times for a month before he actually contacted me for a call. If you don’t hear back from them, it could be that there are already a lot of candidates waiting, and the recruiter might be the bottleneck in this process. So do this instead: 

Step 6: Keep Building Momentum

Keep doing great work at your current job, or focus heavily on a personal project. Continue learning and closing the skill gaps you identified in step two. For people who are still in their current role, I know that it’s hard to keep your motivation if your mind is somewhere else, but staying active makes your mind sharper, keeps your skills fresh, and stops you from overthinking.

What has actually worked for you in getting interviews lately?

Hey everyone. I've spent over a decade in building and scaling engineering orgs, and I've interviewed a lot of Engineering Manager candidates along the way. Hiring seems like a black mystery box, and I feel the need to help more succeed in today’s highly demanding and competitive market. 

I put together a list of the most common anti-patterns I see from EM candidates. Hopefully, this helps some of you who are currently in the market.

1. Because I got laid off" isn't an answer to "Why us?
This is coming more and more often in today’s market. It’s completely fine to say you were impacted by a layoff. However, that only explains why you are looking for a job, not why you want this job. If you haven't researched the product or the hiring team, and you can't articulate why you actually want to manage this specific team, it’s a red flag.

2. The "People Leader Only" trap
I have rejected several candidates because they only showed interest in being people managers. Yes, 1-on-1s and team health are critical, but an EM is still responsible for technical execution and delivery. If you only want to be a pure people leader (very valuable for sure!) but shy away from the technical scope of the team, you won't pass, as the market is becoming more and more demanding in tech and delivery skills.

3. Ignoring the specific context of the role
This usually stems from a lack of research. For example, I was hiring for an internal product team, and candidates showed up completely unprepared to talk about internal adoption, stakeholder management, and those specific metrics. 

4. Underpreparing for the technical deep dive

Some candidates completely fail to revise their past projects before the interview. If you can't smoothly answer technical questions on systems you previously managed or the core technologies required for the job, it shows either a lack of preparation or a massive knowledge gap.

5. Vague impact and rambling
Too many candidates give vague answers that completely hide their personal impact behind what "we" (the team) did. Furthermore**,** it's seen as a red flag when a CV presents massive impacts on delivery and revenue, but the candidate doesn't show that same depth in the interview. If you claim to have driven a massive win on paper, you must be prepared to talk deeply about it. When candidates fail to elaborate on their biggest listed achievements, it makes me wonder if they actually drove that impact.

6. Not asking the right questions at the right moment

Some candidates ask too many questions when the interview just gets started; Some skip or do not ask enough interesting questions at the end. It's all about timing and quality in those questions.

An interview is indeed a chance for both sides to evaluate each other,  but if you don't leave time for the interviewer to dig into your answers, you're hurting yourself. So, leave your biggest question to the end.

When it’s your turn to ask questions, if you aren't asking high-quality questions, for example, about the engineering culture, the product roadmap, or the team's biggest bottlenecks, it reads as a lack of motivation, curiosity, or knowledge. It happened to me several times that I passed a candidate to the next round because her questions were spot-on despite previous pitfalls in her answers. 

Let me know in the comments below if that helps, and what else I can help!

Today I noticed that my chrome extension Calibrd made it to the first page for various search keywords, like AI Interview coach (3rd), AI Interview Prep(7th), and Interview Prep(10th). Would it change anything in terms of user impression?

https://preview.redd.it/yxs8mqjmw36h1.png?width=2354&format=png&auto=webp&s=44721732779b2c74808cb94b109c0ade9f8be904

Initially, I built it for myself because I couldn't find a reliable interview preparation tool that tailored to my experience, and I was tired of prompting Perplexity. Would others find it useful? chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clhgbjgmfhpdeadlinkibiakhiffamph

https://reddit.com/link/1tr71fe/video/y4jntmqlt44h1/player