Originally Posted by NorCalAthlete
I'll add a tweak to this a bit -
Everything so far has been largely targeted at getting TO the interview / getting the call back.
However, once you're there, it's entirely on you to prove your chops. So I would split your time between job hunting and continuing to learn - pick up new skills, add a certification or three, review / refresh your weak spot courses, refine your strong point courses.
I've done all of the above and gotten an interview within a matter of days and still gotten declined because I fumbled the technical portion of an interview. It happens. Keep pushing and learning and never stop.
Decades ago this may not have been as crucial, though still important. These days you are competing globally for just about anything, even in the middle of Nowhere. Additionally, as evidenced above, with the amount of resumes getting shotgunned out to every position and company, there's a lot of noise to sift through which makes it even more difficult to stand out. Lots of people bullshitting on their resumes, hyping up their skills or outright lying about expertise - "fake it till you make it".
Anything you put on your resume is fair game for an interviewer or recruiter to start grilling you on, and you never know what's going to become their test to see how much you're bullshitting. At the bottom of my resume, partially just to fill space and partially to help with culture / personality fits, I dedicate a portion to listing hobbies / interests / current reading list / volunteering. That portion, taking up maybe 1 square inch of my resume, has come up sooner or later in every single final-interview-before-the-offer and sometimes in the initial interview.
I had a 45 minute interview that, 5 minutes in, turned to discussing the broader points of Starcraft strategy. I didn't have Starcraft listed, but I had included that I liked video games, and the interviewer was a competitive Starcraft player. We discussed everything from rush strategies to the broader eSports market, PC "Bangs" in South Korea, dynamics of casual fans to serious players, social media followings, and pay scales for the athletes. This was like the 5th interview in a series where I'd already covered other aspects of the job, and was in a 2-on-1 interview with the manager and senior manager who'd be over me. I got the job.
Point being, you need to be up to date on everything you throw on there, don't just fill it with buzzword bingo unless you actually know every aspect of that buzzword - or at least enough to keep a conversation on it going for 45 minutes. Granted my example may not be typical - I work in tech so I anticipated there would be a higher likelihood of gamers - but the overall strategy still hails back to my first post of "figure out what the people interviewing you may be into."
It may seem like a "good old boys" club, but at the end of the day there will always be 1,000 other people who can do the technical aspects of the job. As long as you can pass that hurdle it will come down to "can I stand to be around this person for hours every day, every week, for years? Will they be toxic to the team or a benefit? Can they communicate well? Can they think on their feet? Can I see myself sharing a drink with them and trusting them with conversation when I'm drunk?"
Lastly, keep in mind interviews are 2-way streets. Have questions ready to ask at the end. For example you've already sussed out that 55+ hour work week expectations may not be for you, at least not long term. That's a good data point to learn early. But take that train of thought and chase it down the rabbit hole - WHY are there such long hours? Is it just the rest of the team is THAT enthusiastic about what they're doing? Is it due to crunch deadlines? Ever-changing business requirements? Problems with the product development cycle? Market pressures like annual cycles? Leadership that has grandiose ideas but corporate dementia, constantly forgetting what they'd already planned and attempting to implement things that contradict or conflict with earlier plans? What are the advancement opportunities like? Travel opportunities? Relocation opportunities? Growth of the company / future prospects?
Don't be afraid to interview the interviewer. Any good interview will tend to reserve at least 5-10 min at the end for that kind of stuff usually, though sometimes you can get caught up in hashing something out together and lose track of time (which can be a good or a bad sign depending on things).
Edit - You mentioned
Ok, WHAT experience? How did you lay that out on a resume? What did you actually do? Did you throw up a drop shipping website, buy some ads, and wait to see what happened? Did you actually turn a profit? Did you play around with different approaches to marketing / selling / acquiring / distributing and compare / contrast them to see which got you the best bang for buck? Did you do any analysis on which kits sold better on what platform? Did you draw up a business plan? Pitch investors for additional funding? Crunch the numbers on how to expand? Look into improving the kits? Do any market research on your competition? How many employees did you have? How did you handle payroll? HR? Did you ever have to fire anyone? Hire anyone? What software did you use to keep your books? Which ones did you try / end up not liking? What processes are you familiar with? Ever used Tableau? Excel? How good are you with statistics? Etc.
Additional note on that - learn the FUCK out of Excel, I'd say 99% of people in a corporate environment barely scratch the surface of its capabilities. My data analysts are fucking wizards and even then I've seen a huge disparity between analysts using it. Business courses give you a starting point - expand on it. It has enough within it you could damn near make a master's degree out of learning it, though most companies will only need a fraction of that for any given role. Still, it can be a very powerful tool and skillset to have when you're going for business roles / sales roles. Also, brush up on your statistics. That's probably going to be your most important math class, far beyond calculus, when it comes to business / sales roles. Dunno if you picked up any coding skills along the way but it would probably also behoove you to learn some flavor of SQL.
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