Flutterby™! : Life on Mars

As some of you know, I was laid off last year. It's been 14 months during which time I have applied for about 200 positions, had about 20 interview, and zero offers. The way the current tech job market works, you rarely get any actual response from recruiting. Due to the massive tech layoffs, the job of the "talent acquisition engineer" in HR has changed. Before the spate of layoffs, TA would reach out to top candidates via LinkedIn or email. Now, TA gets 500-1000 applications per day while the position is posted. So, now, instead of fostering a relationship with a candidate (like me) the TA has to filter several thousand applications down to about 10 to give to the hiring manager, who will further filter that list to about 3 candidates who will be interviewed by the team. This means instead of relationship building, TA engineers (or recruiters) have to focus on how to quickly sort through thousands of applications.

I have had a few recruiters using the older methodology reach out to me. The advantage here is I don't have to worry about the initial culling. Unfortunately, this has not had good results, as I see it I have 3 strikes against me:

1. I am a transgender woman, when people see my name on a resume that evokes a particular image. When I am seen, they feel "duped" or at least that there is some discrepancy which results in a strike against me. TBH, I encounter far less outright hatred than expected.
2. I have been working in tech a very long time, Dan and I worked together (1990-1992) in what was actually my second job as a professional developer. I've been turned down 3-4 times with comments like "we intended the position for a more junior person" which means either they are afraid I won't work for how little they want to pay, or the hiring manager has trouble with someone reporting to them who has more experience than they do. I'm thinking of restricting experience to just the past two decade (which means removing a lot from LinkedIn).
3. I am mostly interested in working in Berlin and my German language skills are only at an A2 level (demonstrated at Goethe Institut in Berlin), and I don't yet have a work visa in Germany. These two factors get me culled early in the process when I apply in Berlin.

A 4th strike is that my resume references DEI a lot. I was active with DEI at Netapp and have continued since being laid off (mentoring with Out in Technology and participating in Unicorns in Tech in Berlin). Evidently DEI might be the next big target for the right-wing now that being transgender or advocating critical thinking about history has slowed. Evidently even Microsoft is crapping on DEI.

I am currently in London and will be return to Berlin at the start of September.