The 2023 Job Market: It's complicated
A guide on how to approach job searching in 2023
TLDR: As thousands of people from within tech and from outside tech look for new jobs at tech companies - in 2023 companies are not hiring as fast or as much as they were in 2021. Welcome to the new age of landing a job in the tech job market. How to land a job in tech in 2023… it’s complicated.
Let’s start from the beginning, what is a market in the first place?
In a very general sense, a marketplace is where sellers and buyers meet.
What happens inside a marketplace?
Forces such as Supply and Demand emerge to control the way goods and services are priced and also how competitive the marketplace is. Supply refers to the amount of goods and services available and Demand is the amount of interest in these goods or services.
These concepts are important, so keep them in mind as we peek into why the 2023 tech job market is so hard to navigate.
What is a job market?
The job market is essentially a marketplace that is exchanging people’s skills for a company’s desire for growth (and ability to pay people for their skills).
The faster companies want to grow, the more people they will hire.
More People = More Growth 📈
Different businesses have different needs for growth. Some rely on salespeople, developers, marketing, lawyers or designers, etc. Depending on the type of product or service, the kind of roles a company requires for growth will differ.
Ok, so we understand the basics of a market and the more specific idea of a job market. Let’s dive into what happened in 2020 to understand how the tech job market got to where it is today, in 2023.
Tech Job Market in 2020 (during Pandemic)
The pandemic hit the US in March 2020, which caused major changes in our daily lifestyle and how we work. These changes disrupted the norm of work for most of the US market, including the tech market.
What you want to remember is:
People staying at home 🛋 = More online shopping 📈
When people stayed home, more and more goods and services were bought online, so tech companies saw huge influx of consumers flock to their products. WAY more than in 2019 or ever before. These behaviors were analomies, NOT the norm in the avergage demand for using online services.
The age of WFH 🛋
Most employees that could work from home, started to work from home because of government mandates to close workplaces, including not only tech, but any non-essential businesses like cafes, restaurants, education, concert venues and other in-person gathering places. This policy affected tech workers even more than the rest because tech tools were already part of their daily work, thus, almost all tech companies went remote immediately. All interaction with coworkers AND friends AND family was on Zoom, Slack, GMeet, etc.
Fear of death by going outside 😱
MOST people around the world, and in the US, were forced to stay at home when possible. What happened?
Online shopping BLEW UP 🛍
Grocery delivery was the new norm 🥕
Happy hours turned into personalized gift boxes you get in the mail 🍫
People stopped going to the gym, malls, schools, restaurants and more - almost everything was ordered online and done at home.
So, given the extreme world events, people took full advantage of the convenience that tech offered, and they got everything they needed through the power of technology, online.
As demand for tech goods and services grew overnight, the amount of customers grew so fast, the need to service customers grew as well, which meant hiring new employees to support the demands of a growing company. New employees like salespeople, customer support, engineers, designers and more.
Tech companies themselves also started to ramp up their tech stacks like buying more seats for Zoom, Google services, Employee engagement tools, and more - to account for a newly fully remote workforce.
Services like grocery delivery (ex. Instacart), virtual meeting tools (ex. Zoom), and other goods and services powered by the tech industry, got very very popular now that people were STUCK in their homes…..
The point is - Demand for all things done online exploded, so the companies started to think of the pandemic era consumer habits will become a new norm instead of a blimp to account for the need to stay at home.
OPS. 🤷🏻♀️
This demand was not in fact the new norm. Come 2022, consumer behavior started to normalize back to 2019 levels - and while Instacart is convenient - it no longer was the ONLY way to get your groceries. Gyms started opening up. Concerts started to come back. And all other forms of social gathering started to come back.
When using sales data from 2020-2022, a lot of tech companies decided to base their sales and revenue projections on a ANALOMY instead of the average spending trends of all the years prior.
OPS. 🤷🏻♀️
Come mid 2022, the balance sheets did not look as expected and now….
Layoffs across most big tech companies
Fewer job openings per department
Trying to hire Sr people for less money
+ all kinds of behavior to shift from the over-hiring they did in 2020-2022 to leaner teams in 2022-2023. Not that the companies weren't making money 💰 most times they were doing just fine with revenue, maybe just not the billions they predicted.
Tech Job Market in 2023 (Post-Pandemic)
With tech companies tightening their budgets and no longer aiming for ridiculous growth projections, gone are the days of hiring anyone who fits some of the job descriptions.
TLDR: Companies are picky, and careful to hire the very best candidate for their particular hiring needs.
Who is in the job market? Everyone
First, there was the multiple rounds of layoffs, releasing 100,000+ people of mid through senior level back into the job market. Remember, the people coming from layoffs are mid-level and senior-level talent, not early career people.
Then, the bootcamp boom continued, with thousands of NEW early career talent entering the tech job market. Most of these bootcamps had very little job search support for their students, combined with the fact that large companies decreased or stopped their early career hiring pipeline.
Finally, there is the average jobseeker with a few years experience, who simply wants to switch to a new role for various reasons.
All these elements combined with the fact that companies are hiring more slower and thoughtfully (or more picky, however you want to describe it), creating a job market when the matching mechanism is completely broken.
On top of that, most companies want first-hand experience working in SaaS and will choose candidates that have that over others who don’t.
This puts early career talent in a tight spot.
Given the long hiring processes of many companies, even senior-level candidates have a hard time getting to the right fit.
All of a sudden, the jobs are still there but they look far far away, since no company can interview 100 candidates or even 30, they usually choose 5-10 candidates to go through a round of interviews.
There is an ILLUSION of over supply for each and every role out there because jobseerkes are applying to any role they see, making the process of finding qualified candidates harder and harder for companies.
But the DEMAND for jobs and for new hires is holding strong, and even strong than ever.
Today there is an imbalance in Supply and Demand.
Companies THINK there is an endless supply, but there isn’t, because qualified candidates are not the same as someone who happened to apply on a whim.
Jobseekers THINK there are not enough jobs because they are not getting interviews or offers.
In 2023, Supply is simply outpacing Demand for early career talent - while for everyone else mid-senior, the demand is high but companies are taking longer to give offers than before.
So given that it’s common to get a thousand applicants PER application, especially for early career positions, the companies don’t have the resources to reply to everyone - while the jobseekers are baffled at not getting noticed, when they clearly qualified.
The 2023 tech market, to put it politely, is complicated. To put it in other terms, is like a toxic relationship where you keep imagining it’s better than it is.
No one is winning and all parties are having a shit time going through the process.
Don’t lose hope, the jobs are out there. You just gotta be seen!
Great news, there are still plenty of tech jobs out there - so will you be the one who gets them?
2023 is a more difficult year to pivot into a tech career, yes, however, the process is worth the effort, no matter if it takes a few extra months. On average most job seekers can easily land offers within 3-4 months, however in 2023, it may take up to 6 months for career changers to land their first offer at a tech company.
Like most job seekers in 2023, you don’t have an ‘experience’ problem, you have a ‘visibility’ problem.
Call it marketing, branding, confidence, whatever - the gap is likely not in your experience if you’ve done a bootcamp and then projects on top of that - it’s in the way you present yourself to your network, interviews, and generally online.
How are early career people landing jobs?
The two most popular methods early career talent get jobs are a mix of:
Referrals (people they know in their 1st and 2nd connections)
Cold-applying
But these are not the only ways to land jobs today… those include:
working on their portfolio through freelance work to continue growing their skills
posting on LinkedIn to share their skills and projects
reaching out to bootcamp friends
building a network of people in tech + staying in touch with them over time
engaging in the job search community on Liknedin and other smaller communities on Slack, etc
The possibilities are endless.
At the end of the day, if you sit there focusing on the reasons why you are NOT yet employed in tech, you are creating resistance to fixing the visibility problem for yourself.
Back when I was switching roles into Product management in 2014-2017, I kept at it every day, knowing that the opportunity that is perfect for me will come my way - and it did! In the meantime, I learned what I could about the job while practicing how to present myself as a Product Manager. It took me years, so today, I help others to make this shift in a few months.
How to approach job searching in 2023
Network, Network, Network. 🤝
Networking is key to landing opportunities that are just for you!
Stand out from other candidates
Find people who are willing to help and REFER you to jobs
Create connections with people who want to hire YOU
Meet people online BEFORE the interview to create trust with them BEFORE other candidates get into the hiring pipeline
Expand the number of career opportunities available for you
Learn from others to gain more understanding of the tech industry
Increase your confidence as you practice interacting with new people and sharing about your new skills in tech
Not to be repetitive - Networking in truly key 🔑 to creating the right connections that can unlock doors for jobs you didn’t think you could land.
Diversify your job search approach with networking, including social engagement on Linkedin.
What about cold applications? They matter, but not as much. Few jobseekers can handle the brutal process of cold applying without feedback for weeks or months before getting an interview request from 1 in 100 applications.
The top three ways people land jobs are Cold applications, Referrals and ‘Other’ - do you notice one method that’s also effective but isn’t being used as much?
That’s the method of ‘Social Engagement’ on Linkedin and other places. So… let’s get social!
If you want to stand out in the job search, while growing your confidence in your skills - using social engagement will be the best way to land a job. Yes, cold applications work and why not use both?
When you are growing a network on Linkedin, by combining cold apps with networking, you are increasing your chances of standing out to the right people - people who are looking for someone like YOU to hire.
Not sure where to start networking?
In summary, 2023 is a tough year to get hired, yes. However, the jobs are out there, people are getting hired. Focus on diversfing your job search approach and you’ll get results like interviews and job offers.
In your job search corner,
🌻 Anna