What did those data people who successfully changed jobs in 2024 do right?

In recent years, the employment situation has become increasingly severe, and the recruitment software of major manufacturers has been sought after by many college students and young people who are ready to change jobs. Is the human resource of the enterprise really saturated? How should we find a job that suits us?

Now it is July 2024. A summary of the job hunting situation in the first half of the year can help students better understand the overall market environment and better plan their career development and ability improvement. Many students will feel that 2024 is very competitive and it is difficult to find a good job, but the truth behind it...

1. Let’s start with a question

As early as March this year, a student asked a question on the Star: "Teacher, our company is a well-known recruitment platform. We found that the company's sales performance has declined sharply in all regions and channels..."

When the question came out, I was shocked and broke out in a cold sweat. What is going on? It's only March and companies are not hiring. Isn't the employment situation dangerous!!!

Fortunately, there are classmates from various factories in the planet, and we can verify it from multiple sources. After collecting information, we found that it is not that companies are not hiring, but in order to save cash, companies no longer buy large packages, and do not want to pay annual fees, but instead change to small packages or quarterly payments.

Soon, the financial report data of BOSS Zhipin also indirectly proved this point:

• Due to the sharp increase in job seekers, we proactively lowered our C-end advertising investment
• The total number of paying companies has increased, but the payment per company has decreased
• This trend is seen in almost all industries, especially in large companies that used to be generous in hiring.

Companies have a need for employees but they have to control their budgets. This theme runs through the first half of 2024. Coupled with the impact of some large companies laying off 20,000 employees, the problem of "shopping around" in the help market has become rampant, directly causing various problems that students have personally experienced, such as:

• Resume screening is very picky, looking for industry experience, project experience, and stability
• The difficulty of analyzing the HR department's test papers requires a "deep analysis method"
• I've finished the interview, but was suddenly held up during the salary negotiation. The other party is waiting for a cheaper one.
• It is difficult to get a salary increase. The average salary increase is reduced to 10%~20%. If you don't accept it, you will be replaced.

However, even under such difficult circumstances, our students in Knowledge Planet have achieved good results. Here are some replicable experiences summarized for your reference.

2. Choose the right track

Attention! In this year's internal competition environment, it is difficult for SQL boys who only do support to find salary increase opportunities. All sub-tracks are in competition. The better tracks are:

• User growth direction: promotion/delivery, new user retention, customer acquisition efficiency and other topics
• Product strategy direction: search strategy, recommendation strategy, product function optimization and other topics
• User operation direction: user activation, repurchase, dormant user recall and other topics

It is easier to get an interview if you list your relevant project experience and put it on your resume. It is very important to sort out your experience carefully, especially for those who are in the middle office and have access to reports. You must accumulate more relevant experience to make it easier to jump to a better position (the direction list is shown in the figure below).

3. Clarity of focus

Many large companies are laying off employees this year. At the beginning of the year, a large company in Hangzhou laid off 20,000 people, which directly made it extremely difficult to find a job in the local area! Especially in the 300,000-400,000 yuan annual salary range, there are too many people with backgrounds in large companies competing. Therefore, this year is particularly not suitable for "only recognizing large companies, not departments".

If you don’t choose the right department, not only will it be difficult to get a job interview, but you will also be a cannon fodder if the business changes. Many companies recruit people and pull you in for an interview if they see that you have a good background or some experience, which directly leads to an increase in the number of “cannon fodder interviews”.

Most of the students who have successfully landed a job do not stick to "big companies", but instead identify their own areas of strength. For example, if they are good at commodities, they will look for cross-border e-commerce, and if they are good at commercialization, they will look for a commercialization department.

As for other interview opportunities, just treat them as a lottery. You will be happier if you win, but won’t be discouraged if you don’t. This way you won’t lose your direction and will become more and more confident.

4. Expand your knowledge

There are many people to choose from for interviews this year. It is said that the recruitment-to-application ratio of a certain popular factory has reached 1:200, which directly leads to everyone preferring people with more experience.

At this time, it is particularly important to expand your knowledge. Even if you are doing data collection work on a daily basis, you can communicate more with the business to find out what the data is used for, what business scenarios are using it, and whether it is easy to use. When the interviewer asks: "What is the use of what you do?" "Does what you do have any practical effect?", you can answer fluently.

Moreover, as long as you have data at hand, you can analyze many topics yourself even if your leader doesn’t assign you to do so (as shown in the following figure).

The most vulnerable here are those with a background in a large company + the middle office department. They are far away from the business and have a narrow knowledge base. In the past two years, the leaders of the middle office have been busy with the so-called "AI products" and "Chatgpt+BI", which has made the middle office students further away from the business.

When people see your background in a big company, they think you know a lot. But during the interview, they actually look down on you for lacking practical experience and only knowing how to run numbers... In short, it is necessary to prepare more in combination with the business, because the next question is also related to this.

5. Rich details

Some students have very limited daily work content because the company's division of labor is too detailed (especially in large companies). For example, when doing AB testing, they are desperately testing the amount of coupons issued and the difference between new and old product versions. They lack overall thinking and are beaten up in various ways during interviews: "Have you ever done strategic analysis?" "You are too detailed. Have you ever thought about the overall situation?"

Although the division of labor in the company cannot be changed, students with good performance will take the initiative to think about:

• How are the regular data trends and what indicators are being optimized to improve?
• How many conventional optimization methods are there? Which one did you choose this time?
• What are your peers doing? Are they doing it consistently?

In this way, you can easily pass the interview by summarizing and filling in the gaps in your background. Please note! In most cases, the interviewer does not care about the actual data of your previous company, but your analytical logic and the integrity of your thinking. Therefore, if you do not take the initiative to package yourself at this time, you are reducing your chances of getting a job (as shown in the figure below).

6. Repeated polishing

Under so many difficulties, it is normal that good things take time to get them. In particular, many interviews with good companies often end in failure. The first and second interviews went well, but in the end, there was no job after that...

In most cases, it is the other party who is selecting people, either those with more suitable experience or those with lower salaries, in order to control recruitment costs.

It is very important to keep a good attitude at this time, record the interview situation, polish your project experience, and supplement your knowledge. This year, almost none of our friends who got good offers were successful in the first interview, and they all went through many adjustments.

Pay special attention here and don’t hastily adjust your direction just because of one or two failures.

As mentioned in the second point, some interviews may be destined to be cannon fodder interviews. For those factories with a ratio of 1:200 and those interviews that are not based on your main abilities, you should just let them go. On the contrary, if you are questioned about your main abilities, such as insufficient thinking and shallow project development, you must come back and polish your work more to improve the quality.

Author: Down-to-earth Teacher Chen

Source: WeChat public account "Down-to-earth Teacher Chen (ID: gh_abf29df6ada8)"