Thank you to the ResearchOps Community for inviting me to their monthly community call to discuss all things job search strategy! The recording is now available on Vimeo.
A quick list of topics we covered at the event:
What is a job search strategy, and why is it important?
How to design your strategy using a SMART goals framework.
Why the job search is like dating (counter to popular belief, it's not a numbers game, but a fit and discernment game).
Should I take a risk and quit my job in this market?
Why beating the ATS is not a thing.
Getting past the shame and fear of talking about yourself after a layoff or deciding to quit your job by embracing the truth and knowing it has nothing to do with you as a person or a UX practitioner.
How to tell your story and stay true to yourself while playing the game, telling people what they want to hear, and mitigating biases in the interview process.
How to manage overwhelm in the job search process and stay balanced and composed during a stressful time.
Given the pretty awful job market and high competition for limited jobs, is it still ok to negotiate? (short answer, yes).
And so much more!
More about the ReOps community
If you're not familiar with this amazing organization, ReOps is a global community focused on advancing the practice of research operations, which they define as "the people, mechanisms, and strategies that set user research in motion. It provides the roles, tools and processes needed to support researchers in delivering and scaling the impact of the craft across an organisation." They are concerned with the development of some of the most crucial aspects of doing effective user/design research, including administrative activities, budgets, tools and infrastructure, participant recruitment and privacy, ethics, legal, knowledge sharing, and scaling research and its impact.
I reflected at the beginning of the event that "back in the day" when I was an in-house UXR (which was not all that long ago), research operations wasn't really a thing and was pretty nascent. I want to say it started being a thing in the mid- to late-2010s (I left eBay at the end of 2018). As a researcher for 10 years (up until early 2021), it was pretty common for researchers to have to do all of the operations activities themselves in addition to projects and other responsibilities.
It wasn't until I got to eBay where I had partners on my team to take some of that stuff off my plate, but it was mostly around the recruiting side of things, and none of the other important activities that needed attention. It's been cool to see this specialization flourish. It's something I would even consider doing in the future if I were to go back into UX as a practitioner!