- Jermaine Murray is a job recruiter who’s labored with corporations like Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
- As tech experiences a downturn, Murray says it is vital for job seekers to ask onerous questions.
- That is how Murray suggests job seekers navigate layoffs, as advised to reporter Jessica Xing.
This as-told-to essay relies on a dialog with Jermaine Murray, a recruiter for corporations like Google, Meta, and Microsoft. It has been edited for size and readability.
I am the founding father of JupiterHR, a recruiting agency that is helped place over 700 tech employees at corporations like Meta, Microsoft, and Google since 2019.
Only a month in the past, I noticed how candidates had an unprecedented quantity of leverage within the job market. Candidates got here to me with profitable gives and counteroffers from companies like Meta, Reddit, and Uber. In truth, most candidates had a number of gives, leaving corporations scrambling to differentiate themselves quick. If corporations could not do it with money, they tried different attractive advantages like four-day workweeks or everlasting work-from-home preparations.
But throughout the previous two weeks, I’ve seen how shortly issues modified. The pendulum has swung the opposite method, and now corporations are going through hiring freezes, layoffs, and making an attempt to determine the best way to make do with the expertise they’ve. Folks I positioned simply 5 months in the past have already been affected by layoffs.
Nevertheless, I do not assume this implies employee leverage has disappeared. Some employees have leveraged the abilities and the salaries they earned at earlier jobs to get high-paying roles at different companies. Others have circulated layoff sheets so impacted staff may be contacted by recruiters.
Many corporations are nonetheless hiring, and whereas some are much more cautious, the foundations of fine wage negotiation by no means change. You owe it to your self to ask the awkward questions, it doesn’t matter what the financial state of affairs is.
Listed here are the questions I have been telling candidates to ask corporations to land a job through the tech downturn and get forward of future layoffs.
How do I do know the corporate goes to be right here in 6 months?
Everytime you enter a brand new job, you could speak figures. Ask about income, how a lot funding they’ve, and the way properly the corporate is hitting its key efficiency indicators, or KPIs. Additionally ask about how they’ve handled staff when the enterprise wasn’t doing so properly.
Startups that when raised large rounds are shortly burning out, shedding workers that joined simply months earlier than being employed. So you could ask the onerous inquiries to make it possible for each you and the corporate will nonetheless be there after six months.
That is very true for startups, nevertheless it’s nonetheless vital to ask these kinds of questions at bigger tech corporations. Ask how the division is doing, how the workforce you’ll be part of is serving the enterprise, and extra importantly, what funding administration is keen to supply. All of those questions will no less than provide you with a greater concept of how viable your job shall be in six months.
What does your buyer base appear to be?
It is vital that an organization understands who its buyer base is. This query additionally provides you a very good alternative to see how invested purchasers are within the firm, in addition to if the shoppers themselves are worthwhile and keen to spend cash on the corporate you are becoming a member of. If a agency is bleeding prospects, it is a good indicator that one thing’s up.
If an organization cannot succinctly state how they’re serving their shopper base, or does not clearly know what market they match into, then it reveals that even management does not have a good suggestion of what the product really does, which may imply hassle sooner or later.
If traders let you know to tighten up, what plans do you will have in place with a purpose to retain your workers?
Firms spend much more to rent staff than to retain them. Which implies when instances are robust, many corporations begin trying to see who they’ll reduce first.
New individuals are scared as a result of they’ve the least quantity of tenure, center administration feels there is perhaps an excessive amount of redundancy of their work, and product folks is perhaps afraid that their product is stagnating. There’s been a false impression that tech was
recession
-proof, but latest pullbacks present that staff have to be ready for a downturn.
You need to use the backdrop of what is going on on just lately, and even the backdrop of what is going on on with the pandemic, to have these trustworthy conversations. You owe it to your self to ask robust questions, particularly when issues are so unsure.
