Stop Applying, Start Getting Hired: A Career Coach's Tips for 2025
In this week’s edition, we talk to Mandy Liu, a career coach and former lead data scientist at Meta and Nextdoor, about a challenge that’s harder than ever: getting hired into big tech.
Getting a job in tech right now is brutal. Layoffs seem never-ending. AI is raising the bar across functions to a point where I do believe it’s actively eliminating jobs (for now, at least). Gone are the days of hiring excesses; it’s all about profitability in 2025.
But that doesn’t mean people are not getting hired. Mandy Liu, a career coach and former international student who eventually landed jobs at Meta and Nextdoor, knows a thing or two about getting hired on hard mode.
She uses her lived experience to coach others on how to get hired into data science in big tech. The results speak for themselves: she’s gotten 10 clients hired, and on average they’ve secured an extra $20-50K in compensation as a result of her coaching.
We discuss:
AI’s impact on hiring
Practical tips for job seekers
How to prepare for the future of work
AI’s impact on hiring
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AI has ruined hiring. As soon as a job gets published, there’s a flood of AI-written resumes and cover letters in a recruiter’s inbox. I’ve heard of hiring managers getting up to 2000 applicants within a few days. Most candidates are trying to optimize their resumes for applicant tracking systems to the point where their resumes are no longer appealing to a human reader. The result is a recruiter being inundated with junk.
It's ironic. These tools promised to save time for both sides and make it easy to find a match. So far, they’ve done the opposite, creating a flood of noise that helps no one.
So if optimising for an ATS isn’t the answer, what is?
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My advice is simple. Talk to people. Those in your chosen industry, those who work in companies you admire or have jobs you’d want. Understand their day-to-day, and use that to learn the skills you need to showcase on your resume.
Practical tips for job seekers
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Mindset is the number one thing holding people back from getting hired. Given how hard the market is, it can be easy to fall into a rut. But when I speak to clients, the first thing I do is to change their mindset and get them to believe they can land that dream job.
It may seem simple, but helping people out of a rut is hugely valuable. Spending months applying with no results can be heartbreaking, so having someone walk candidates through what they could be doing better is invaluable. And no, it’s not something AI can do yet (human empathy is what’s making the difference here).
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If your one-page resume doesn’t do you justice, everything else is unlikely to count. Make it enticing to a human and not an ATS. You get one shot.
I spend a lot of time advising startups on their growth and go-to-market. I help founders realise that their website is confusing to someone landing on it for the first time without context. The trick is to figure out what outcome website visitors are trying to achieve and how the product being advertised can help.
The exact same logic applies to a resume. A hiring manager will have a problem. They will be looking at a resume, trying to evaluate whether a candidate is the solution to that problem. They will scan it for 10-20 seconds and then move on to the next one.
Whether it’s a resume or a homepage, delegating this task to a large language model (LLM) will likely lead to a bad outcome. The trick is figuring out how to use the LLM to assist in coming up with an asset that’s appealing to a human reader.
How to prepare for the future of work
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I encourage everyone, even employees, to think of themselves as businesses. When I started creating content, people reached out asking for coaching, advice, job offers, etc. When I started investing in myself through coaching, my business reached new heights. Nobody knows what the future holds with AI, but thinking of yourself as a business is a good way to prepare for an uncertain future.
I could not agree more. I believe the lines between full time employee and a services business will become blurry, so thinking of yourself as a business can be hugely beneficial (see our previous post on fractional work to read more on this topic).
As AI tools become ever more powerful, the bar for a human employee will be raised across the board. But for those at the top of their game? - they’ll be more in demand than ever. Those employees will have all the leverage, as Mandy discusses below.
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When you’re looking for a job, it seems like the company has the upper hand because there are more applicants than jobs. But you need to know your worth if you’re the right candidate. The average employee at Meta creates an incremental $1M revenue per year. So if you’re a top applicant, they should be begging you to join, not vice versa. When my clients realise that they tend to become more confident in their interviews
Wrap up
To say that AI is raising the bar for white collar work is an understatement. The hiring game has changed forever. But that doesn’t mean candidates should despair. Working the network. Finding career coaches. Continually upskilling. These are things that candidates can do to stand out from the crowd.
The change might seem scary, but even scarier is the thought of candidates and hiring managers aiming to one up each other through crude uses of AI. I for one look forward to the day where “AI first” applicant tracking systems and AI generated resumes and cover letters are behind us.