The Parts of a Job Search We Don't See

TL;DR

We usually see a job search as applying, interviewing, and hopefully getting an offer. But there is a lot happening around those steps that we rarely get to see.

I recently read Notes on the Industry Job Search by Alisa Liu, a researcher at OpenAI on the pretraining team, where she shares what her own industry search looked like after a six-year NLP PhD. Reading her experience made some parts of the job search much clearer to me, especially the things that are easy to underestimate: timing, interview stamina, preparing differently for every process, getting help from people around you, negotiation, and the emotional side of it all.

These are the things I took away from her experience.

The full article is linked in the References section at the end. Please read it if you want the complete picture, because there is much more detail in her post than I can cover here.

And if you have been through a job search yourself, I’d love to hear about your experience too. What did you learn along the way? What helped you? What do you wish you had known earlier? Feel free to share it in the comments so others can learn from your experience too ❤️

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Table of Contents

• What I took away
  • The job search is much bigger than the interview
  • Timing your interviews is not as simple as it sounds
  • Your first interview may have been prepared for long before you knew you needed it
  • Having the experience to get the interview and having the skills to pass it are two different things
  • "Technical preparation" is not one giant category
  • You can know something and still not be ready to demonstrate it
  • The interviewer may be tired too
  • Your preparation should change depending on the opportunity
  • Interview stamina is a real thing
  • Writing down what happened after an interview can become part of your preparation
  • The studying can change you beyond the interview
  • Behavioral interviews can be harder precisely because they look easy
  • Getting an offer can create another kind of uncertainty
  • An initial offer isn't necessarily the final conversation
  • A lot of career decisions are made without enough information
  • The emotional side is not a side note
  • There is a difference between preparing for the next chapter and missing the current one
• Please take care of yourself
• I'd love to hear from you
• References
• Let's Stay Connected

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What I took away

I don't want this to be a summary of Alisa's article. Her original post already does that much better than I could.

Instead, I wanted to share the parts that made me stop and think, especially the things that I don't usually see talked about when people talk about job searching.

Some of these are practical, like how you prepare, how you approach different interviews, and what happens after an offer. Others are much more personal, like dealing with uncertainty, comparison, exhaustion, and remembering to take care of yourself through the process.

So, here are the things I took away from her experience.

1. The job search is much bigger than the interview

When someone says, "I'm job searching," I think we often picture a very small part of what is actually happening.

Apply, hear back, interview, get an offer.

But Alisa's numbers gave me a much better sense of what can actually be behind that process. She interviewed at 11 companies across 57 interviews. On top of that, she had 46 additional recruiter calls, 16 post-offer conversations, and many informal networking conversations.

That is a lot of work that you would never know about if all you saw was the final sentence:

"I interviewed with 11 companies."

There is deciding when to start each process, preparing for each interview, talking to recruiters, keeping track of different companies, recovering between interviews, making decisions with incomplete information, and then potentially doing all of that again after an offer.

The interview is only one visible part of the job search.

And I think seeing that more clearly changes how we look at our own progress too. Sometimes what feels like "nothing is happening" may actually involve a lot of work that simply isn't visible from the outside.

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2. Timing your interviews is not as simple as it sounds

This was one of the less obvious things I took from her article. There is common advice that says you should use a few companies as practice and then try to time the companies you care about so that the offers arrive around the same time. That sounds very neat when written as a strategy.

Real life is obviously messier. Alisa points out that companies can have different hiring timelines, different amounts of headcount, different teams hiring at different times, and different levels of urgency.

So sometimes the timing of your process is influenced by things that have nothing to do with how prepared you are. That was a useful reminder for me because job searches can sometimes make us believe every outcome is a direct reflection of our own decisions.

It isn't always. There are things happening on the other side of the table too.

And even offer deadlines can have more flexibility than candidates might assume, while some offers can have much tighter deadlines. Knowing that these things exist can help you ask better questions instead of simply accepting every timeline as fixed.

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3. Your first interview may have been prepared for long before you knew you needed it

This was another part I found interesting. Alisa talks about doing good work during the PhD, making friends, collaborating, going to conferences, and building relationships. Then, when the job search started, some of those connections could become helpful in getting that first interview.

That made me think about networking differently. Sometimes we treat networking as something we have to suddenly start doing when we need a job. But a relationship built through a project or collaboration years ago can become useful much later.

She also mentions reconnecting with people she had not spoken to in years. That is something I don't think people talk about enough. You don't necessarily have to know hundreds of people. Sometimes it is simply about not being afraid to reach out to someone you already know, even if it has been a long time.

And there is another part here that I loved. She also says networking does not come easily to everyone and that people should take care of their own energy and comfort levels. So this isn't about forcing yourself to become the most social person in the room.

Build relationships in ways that feel possible for you.

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4. Having the experience to get the interview and having the skills to pass it are two different things

This was a very useful thing to notice in her experience. Alisa says that technical skills and knowledge were evaluated much more heavily during her interviews than research experience, while her research background probably helped get her the interviews in the first place.

That is an important difference. Your background can make someone interested enough to talk to you. But once you are in the interview, you still have to demonstrate what you can actually do.

Those are two different stages. And I think that applies beyond research roles too.

A strong resume can open a door.

It doesn't replace being able to walk through it.

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5. "Technical preparation" is not one giant category

Alisa's interviews included ML coding, general coding, technical discussions, research discussions, behavioral interviews, math, and a job talk.

What I found useful here is not just the list itself. It is what the list tells us.

Being technically strong does not necessarily mean being prepared for every way someone can ask you to demonstrate that strength.

One interview might ask you to implement something. Another might ask you to explain why a particular approach works. Another might ask you to design an experiment. Another might ask you to discuss your own research.

Another might ask you to solve a math problem on paper. Another might ask you about a situation where you disagreed with someone.

These are very different things.

So preparing for "the interview" is not really enough. You need to prepare for the kind of thinking the interview is actually asking you to demonstrate.

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6. You can know something and still not be ready to demonstrate it

This is one of my favorite practical points from the article. Alisa describes taking notes, drawing diagrams, practicing problems, implementing things from scratch, and spending entire days making sure she understood fundamental ML concepts deeply.

But she also specifically recommends practicing coding with AI assistance completely off when preparing for interviews. That feels especially relevant now.

In everyday work, using AI can be completely normal. We can ask for an explanation, check an approach, debug something, or get unstuck. But if the interview doesn't allow those tools, practicing with them every time can give you a very different picture of your readiness.

You might understand a concept very well while still finding it difficult to produce the solution yourself under pressure.

So there is a difference between:

"I understand this when I have help."

and

"I can reason through this myself when someone puts the problem in front of me."

Both are useful skills. But they are not the same skill.

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7. The interviewer may be tired too

This is a small point in her article, but I thought it was surprisingly practical. When talking about her research pitch, Alisa mentions tailoring it to the role and making it easier for interviewers to see why her background was relevant.

Part of her reasoning was simply that interviewers are tired. That sounds obvious once you hear it, but it changes how you think about communication.

You may know your work extremely well. You may have spent years on it. But the person listening to you may have a long day of interviews, meetings, and other responsibilities.

Making the relevant part easy to understand isn't about making your work less sophisticated. It is about helping another person understand it.

That is a useful communication skill far beyond interviews.

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8. Your preparation should change depending on the opportunity

Alisa describes looking at the interview description, topics the company cares about, information from recruiters, and what she knew about the company to understand what she should focus on.

That sounds simple, but it changes the question you ask yourself.

Instead of:

"What should I study for interviews?"

it can be:

"What is this particular interview actually trying to find out about me?"

That second question is much more useful.

You might need more coding practice for one role. You might need to review fundamentals for another. You might need to prepare your research story. You might need to spend more time on behavioral examples. You might need to brush up on math.

There is value in having strong foundations, but there is also value in not spending your limited preparation time equally on everything.

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9. Interview stamina is a real thing

This is something I rarely see discussed when people give interview advice. Alisa talks about using some companies as practice, but also warns that stamina is finite.

That matters when you are interviewing with several companies at once. You are not just solving problems. You are switching between topics, remembering different processes, talking to recruiters, preparing presentations, studying, and making decisions. And then you are expected to show up and think clearly again.

She also shares that she once went into a technical interview after sleeping only 2 hours because she had been cramming. The knowledge she had tried to put into her head at the last minute did not end up helping her.

Instead, she spent time making a simple mistake because she was exhausted.

That made one thing very clear to me.

More preparation is not always better preparation.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do before an interview is sleep.

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10. Writing down what happened after an interview can become part of your preparation

Another small detail from her process that I thought was useful was recording notes after interviews. That makes sense for a reason beyond remembering the questions.

If you are doing several interviews, you can quickly forget what you struggled with, what you explained well, what you wish you had answered differently, or what you learned.

Writing those things down turns one interview into information you can use for the next one.

Instead of every interview being an isolated event, you start building your own feedback loop.

And that is especially useful when the process stretches over weeks or months.

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11. The studying can change you beyond the interview

This was probably one of the most meaningful parts of the article for me. Alisa says that studying for interviews gave her a wider breadth of knowledge, improved her confidence in technical conversations, and even helped her become more effective in her research.

That is a much bigger benefit than simply passing an interview.

Sometimes we think of interview preparation as temporary studying. Learn this because they might ask. Practice this because it might come up. Memorize this because it is on the list.

But deep learning does not disappear when the interview ends. Understanding something properly can change the questions you ask, the problems you notice, the conversations you can participate in, and the ideas you can come up with.

That made me think about interview preparation less as studying only for a test and more as a chance to find gaps in my own understanding.

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12. Behavioral interviews can be harder precisely because they look easy

Alisa shares that she failed her first behavioral interview because she had not prepared for what she thought would be very simple questions. I can see how easy it is to fall into that trap.

You might think:

"I know myself. Of course I can answer a question about myself."

Then someone asks you for a specific example from your experience, and suddenly you are trying to remember what happened three years ago while also figuring out how to answer the actual question.

Her solution was to think through memorable stories from her PhD and map them to common behavioral questions so that she could retrieve the right example more easily.

That doesn't mean memorizing fake answers. It means knowing your own experiences well enough that you can talk about them clearly.

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13. Getting an offer can create another kind of uncertainty

I think this is one of the easiest parts of a job search to overlook. We usually imagine the offer as the finish line.

But in her experience, it opened another stage. There were conversations with future teammates and managers, recruiter calls, visits, more communication, comparing options, and negotiation.

And negotiation was not something she felt naturally prepared for. She says that unlike interviews, it was not something she could simply study her way through.

She was also very honest about the imbalance of experience. Recruiters negotiate these things regularly. Most candidates don't.

That is why she leaned on friends for advice and for more data points.

That was a useful reminder that sometimes preparation means recognizing where you don't have enough information yourself and finding people who do.

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14. An initial offer isn't necessarily the final conversation

This is another point that can be easy to miss if you have never been through the process. Alisa says recruiters sometimes explicitly told her that they did not expect candidates to simply accept the first offer.

She also talks about how putting effort into negotiation for a few weeks can have a very meaningful financial impact.

I don't think the takeaway is "always negotiate aggressively." It is more basic than that.

If you receive an offer, you are allowed to ask questions. You are allowed to understand what is flexible. You are allowed to think about what matters to you.

And you don't have to assume that the first number you see is automatically the only possible outcome.

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15. A lot of career decisions are made without enough information

This may be one of the hardest things to understand until you experience it yourself. Alisa talks about making decisions with incomplete information and how even small choices, such as who to contact and when, can feel like they have much bigger consequences than they should.

There often isn't a perfect answer. You don't know exactly what a team will be like six months from now. You don't know whether another opportunity will appear. You don't know whether waiting will help or hurt. You don't know why one company moves quickly while another goes quiet.

And sometimes you have to make a decision anyway.

I think that is an important part of a job search to accept. You can prepare carefully without being able to control everything.

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16. The emotional side is not a side note

This part of her article is very honest. She talks about comparing herself with peers, dealing with people's opinions about where she should go, managing a huge number of decisions, and feeling stressed and miserable for months.

That is very different from the usual career advice where everything is reduced to a list of things you should optimize.

Real people don't experience a job search like a spreadsheet.

You can prepare properly and still be scared. You can get an interview and still wonder whether you're good enough. You can receive an offer and still not know what you want.

You can watch your friends move ahead and feel like you're falling behind even when you aren't. And sometimes the uncertainty itself is exhausting.

I think there is value in saying that out loud because someone going through it might otherwise assume they are the only person finding it difficult.

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17. There is a difference between preparing for the next chapter and missing the current one

I really loved where Alisa takes the article at the end. After writing about the stress of the job search, she talks about how sad she was to leave her PhD and how special that period had been.

There is something very human about that.

We are constantly preparing for whatever comes next. As students, we prepare for jobs. When we start working, we prepare for the next role. Then the next promotion. Then the next move.

There is always another thing waiting.

Preparing for the future is important. But it should not mean that the present becomes something we are only trying to get through.

If you are learning something right now, there can still be joy in learning it. If you are working on a project, there can still be joy in building it. If you are studying, you don't have to turn every minute into career preparation.

You are allowed to enjoy the chapter you are currently living too.

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Please take care of yourself

I wanted to make this a separate section because this is something I tell people all the time, and I really mean it.

If you are currently searching for a job, please take care of yourself with the utmost love.

I know the job market is hard. I know how much pressure can come with searching. I know rejection can hurt. I know seeing other people get offers can make you question yourself. I know how easy it is to feel like you should always be doing one more application, one more problem, one more certification, one more interview, one more thing.

But please take care of yourself too.

Your physical health matters. Your mental health matters. Your sleep matters. Your food matters. Your relationships matter. Your time away from the screen matters. Your peace matters.

Because if you are not okay, what are all those other things for?

A job is important. An offer is important. Your career is important. But none of those things are worth losing yourself over.

I don't mean this as a reminder to "balance" everything perfectly. Life does not work that neatly. There will be days when you have more energy and days when you don't. There will be days when you can study for hours and days when even opening your laptop feels difficult.

And that is okay.

You don't have to feel guilty for resting. You don't have to feel guilty for having a life outside your job search. You don't have to feel like every hour that you are not applying or studying is an hour wasted.

You are a person before you are a job seeker.

Please don't be cruel to yourself because the market is difficult. Please don't decide that someone else's timeline is proof that you are behind. Please don't measure your entire worth through responses from companies.

Sometimes things simply take longer than we hoped they would.

And I know it can be very hard to believe that everything will be okay when you are in the middle of it. I know there can be bills to worry about, family expectations, loans, uncertainty about the future, and so many other things that make "just stay positive" feel impossible.

So I am not asking you to pretend everything is fine.

I am just asking you to be a little kinder to yourself while you are going through it.

Do what you can. Keep going when you have the energy. Rest when you don't. Ask for help when you need it. Talk to someone you trust. Take a break when you need one.

And please remember that a rejection is not a measurement of your worth. A delayed offer is not a measurement of your potential. Someone else's success is not proof that you are failing.

Your life is so much bigger than this job search.

There will be things to celebrate that have nothing to do with a job offer. There will be people who love you regardless of what is written on your resume. There will be mornings when you wake up and realize that this difficult chapter did eventually pass.

So please keep going, but please don't forget to live while you are going.

You matter in this process too.

And if you are reading this while going through a difficult job search, I really hope you are being gentle with yourself.

Please eat. Please sleep. Please step away from the screen. Please talk to someone. Please let yourself laugh. Please let yourself have a good day without feeling like you should have been applying instead.

You do not have to earn the right to take care of yourself by getting a job first.

And if today was a difficult day, that's okay.

Try again tomorrow.

With the utmost love, I hope you are okay. I hope you are taking care of yourself. And I truly hope something good finds you soon ❤️

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I'd love to hear from you

If you have already been through a job search, or you are currently going through one, I would genuinely love to hear from you.

Maybe you have a preparation method that helped you. Maybe there is something you wish someone had told you earlier. Maybe you learned something from a rejection. Maybe you have a networking tip.

Maybe you learned something about interviews, negotiation, choosing between offers, or simply getting through the difficult parts.

And if you are comfortable sharing, please do.

There are people here at very different stages of their careers. There are students, new graduates, early-career developers, experienced professionals, people changing careers, and people looking for their next opportunity.

I'm early in my own career too, so I would genuinely love to learn from people who have already been through some of this.

Maybe we can make the comments section into something useful for someone who finds this post months or years from now.

Share whatever you feel comfortable sharing.

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References

Notes on the Industry Job Search by Alisa Liu

This is the original article I read, and I really recommend giving it a read if you have the time.

I have only written about the parts that I personally took away from her experience, but her original post gives a much fuller view of the journey. She goes into her timeline, the different interview formats, how she prepared, how she approached different interview processes, recruiter conversations, negotiation, the emotional side of the search, and the resources she used to study.

There is much more detail in her post than I can reasonably fit here, and reading the full thing gives you the context behind all of these points.

For me, it is a very good read, especially if you are preparing for an industry job search or simply want to understand what the process can look like from the other side.

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🤝 Let's Stay Connected