After a couple of months of experiments (consulting, and building my own products) I started actively looking for a new FTE job as a senior engineering manager. I ended up having 3 offers! 🥳

What changed in the industry (from 🇵🇱 perspective) since my last job search?

Job offer differences

Just the way how job offers are phrased shows a different profile of expectations:

It can be summarized shortly: companies demand more, and it’s visible from the first contact.

• You have to be more experienced, be a narrower fit, and be focused more on successful delivery. Some offers explicitly declare they won’t accept candidates lacking experience in their domain or specific technology.
• Lack of visible salary brackets means that you will often realise that brackets are below your expectations only after the initial call and investment into the application.
• Negotiating terms of employment or remote work policy is also often out of reach. I’ve learned one tip: it’s good to identify if hybrid work requires you to visit the office every week or every month. Initially, I was immediately rejecting hybrid offers from other cities than my own. That was a mistake!

Getting noticed is way harder

To give you some context:

• I applied to 100+ companies, starting on February. I was looking for EM, head of and director positions.
• On average it took 8 days for a company to evaluate my CV.
  • My CV acceptance rate was around 18%.
  • 30% of companies didn’t reply at all.
• Some job offers for EM positions have 100+ candidates applied through Linkedin after 7 hours from the job offer publication.
• On one of the processes I was informed there are 500 candidates on 1 open position for this role.

With such insane numbers, it’s difficult to stand out.

For that reason, it’s way easier to get to the first interview if you know someone from the company and they will refer you inside. Meeting someone at the conference and exchanging contacts may be enough to give you an edge - especially if their company haven’t published a job offer yet - but they are planning to do so soon. Being a member of mastermind groups or professional forum/discord channels may also let you in via the back door. I had success just adding & contacting hiring managers directly on Linkedin, if they were specified.

I noticed that most companies who didn’t reply to me were the ones where I applied 7 days or more after the job was published. Later I started applying only to job offers posted in the last 48 hours. To do it, I had to make myself a shortcut for the top job boards, and notifications and build a routine to check it every day. I also stopped applying through LinkedIn and started doing it through company websites’ career pages. I figured out that it’s so easy to apply through LinkedIn that I may be in a “bucket” full of spam.

Finally, it’s worth discussing your CV with a professional headhunter. In my case, I consulted with Milena Makowska - my acceptance rate doubled.

New tooling/cheating methods

With such a large number of applications, you quickly notice that you waste a lot of time. Most career pages require much more than just a CV upload:

• Tailored motivational letter
• Explanation of why you decided to apply to this specific company (which is a required field if the motivational letter is optional)
• Evaluation of how you fit for basic job requirements (“Confirm that you have X number of years of experience in Y”)
• Open questions similar to interviews (“Describe the situation when you had to do X or Y…“)
• Salary expectation (yikes! - you won’t be able to wait for a company to propose a number first)
• Full job history and education history (for older companies with silly CV uploaders)
• Ethnicity/Gender survey (these are optional but I was informed once that I’m being rejected due to diversity reasons near the final interview…)

If you spend 15-30 min on each application, that sums up to 25-50 hours for 100+ applications. It’s not a surprise that tooling to streamline these processes started to appear:

• aiApply
• jobcopilot
• … and more, but their main goal is simple: AI bot to apply for job offers You’re likely a match with a custom-made CV and custom-made generated motivational letter.

I haven’t used any of these but I can imagine that it can easily contribute to overall spam and a need for hiring managers to also use AI to filter these out. So we have an arms race - AI for CV filtering VS AI for job applications… 😁 Oh, and there are also things like https://www.interviewcoder.co/, deepfakes, interview open-questions copilots and others.

Result? Aware companies become even more defensive and cautious.

Interviews are longer

Getting a job “quickly” is quite difficult - both due to the visibility reasons mentioned above, but also how lengthy the process is these days.

• On average, companies would plan for 6-7 interview phases.
  • I had 45+ video calls in the last 2 months (system design, algorithms, leadership, soft skills, culture fit…)
  • 8 home assignments (change rollout, RFD proposition, senior leadership presentation, surveys, code reviews, async video recording…)
  • 1 onsite full-day interview
  • I estimate that it totalls to 100+ hours spend on interviews for my 100+ applications. However, if we take into account the preparation time (understand the company you’re applying to, refresh your technical knowledge on system design & algo, and prepare for typical experience-related or soft-skills-related questions) this number will likely increase to 150-200 hours. Did I mention the time spent on communication, emails, and scheduling? 😄
• Interviews span would usually be planned to take 4-6 weeks and be sequential - usually I had to wait a couple of days after each phase to know if I was passing to the next one. Important - if national holidays or a vacation period happens to be during your interviews, take into account that hiring managers take vacations too.

Due to this intensity and high number of candidates, it was very rare for companies to provide any feedback, even to home assignments.

Overall, in April I ended up in 9 active interview processes, which was not planned.

• In some cases I was contacted with an interview invitation 35+ days after applying.
• In other cases I thought I was ghosted, but after 2 weeks of silence, I was invited to another stage of the interview. I guess I was not the top pick initially.
• One company announced a hiring freeze after 6th interview phase, affecting my process.
• Some of the processes were so lengthy I had to cancel them once I got the first offers - I had to commit or reject the offer in a limited timeframe. It was possible to extend the offer by 1 week, but if processes are so long, it would have to be 2 to 3 weeks in some cases.

In other words, prepare for a lengthy road!

Did the IT market shrink in the EU?

In the past it was quite easy to leverage geoarbitrage in Poland - especially from the UK, a little harder from the US. Now it seems to be much harder - I was often rejected immediately based on my location. It didn’t matter if the job offer was full-remote and how I would plan my work hours. My perception is that it may be related to at least two regulations:

• Overseas R&D expenditure in UK in 2024 - link
• Section 174 & 15 years to amortize costs of foreign research expenditures - link

Additionally, I see two environmental factors:

• With every year salary gap between Poland and the UK becomes smaller. We can safely assume that in Poland the average hourly rate is 3-4 higher compared to 2015.
• Many US companies observed difficulties related to the execution of reductions in the last years in the EU - EU is highly regulated and pro-employee, so it’s riskier to offshore here.

If you take into account both R&D/tax offshore regulations & salary gap shrinking, Poland is no longer a place to find talent cheaply.

What about the EMs market, specifically?

EM’s are in a weird position. I see positive and negative factors, at least in 🇵🇱:

What makes it easier to get a job as an EM in 2025 vs 2020?

• More mature companies realising a need for an EM role, especially in scale-ups. As a result, more job offers targeting EMs specifically.
• EM as a role has more great resources (newsletters, books) making it easier to prepare for EM interviews if you invest the time.

What makes it harder?

• Reductions in many companies affected middle and senior management, resulting in a large pool of experienced managers being available to hire.
  • Example: In one of the processes for EM of a single team of 8 people I was informed that I’m one of the least experienced candidates in the current phase (I was 10-11 YoE).
• Many companies want to grow EMs internally noticing a need in their staff. As a result, they have a policy not to hire EMs externally, instead - they invest internally in leadership training.
• Pressure on being a leaner and lighter organization, focus on delivery - it means fewer EMs per headcount. We are making a circle again (Google experiment with no managers).
• Some companies hire Software Engineers on B2B contracts but not managers due to their interpretation of the law in 🇵🇱 and risk reduction. It’s a trouble for candidates like me who offer services to more than a single entity and may be a reason to abandon the offer altogether.

Summary

All in all, getting a job as an EM in 2025 is harder than it used to be.

Skills, experience, and fit into a specific company are all important but not enough. A lack of visibility in a huge crowd is effectively ruining your chances. That also means you have to understand that little luck is necessary - you may do everything right and still be rejected.

In total, I guess that in the last 2 months, I had to commit 250+ hours to the interview process alone. It feels like I committed more - maybe because the process is draining and stressful and I was also picky in my choices, treating the next job as an investment.

If you’re looking for a job right now - stay strong! You’ll get there.