My Advice For Engineers and Engineering Leaders to Get a New Role Faster
This is what I would do if I would be looking for a new role in the current market!
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Intro
The current market for engineering roles is quite competitive, and a lot of companies are a lot more cautious when hiring. You can see how big a difference it is from 2022 and today (late 2025) in this chart:
The market has sort of stabilized, but we all know and understand how competitive it can get when looking for a new role, both as an engineer or an engineering leader.
In today’s article, I’ll share my advice and my approach on what I would do if I would be looking for a new role.
Let’s start!
Pre-Work That Makes Your Chances Higher
Before we get to specifics of how I would approach looking for a new position right now as an engineer or engineering leader, it’s really important to understand a couple of things.
I am sure you are already aware of them, as we mentioned a lot of these in previous articles before, but I think they are really important not to neglect.
If you haven’t focused on some of these yet and you are looking for a new role, make sure to do that asap.
Now, we won’t spend a lot of time on this section as I’ve written about these things extensively before, so I’ll be more or less doing an overview and sharing the link to the relevant articles.
To summarize all of these, we can say that you want to increase your credibility as much as possible. Credibility is a cheat code for making things easier for you → more offers and overall opportunities.
Let’s start with the first one:
1. Make sure that your CV is on point
This is very important. It’s normally the first impression that a recruiter or a hiring manager gets of you. And if that impression wasn’t the best, they won’t look at anything else further.
Here are 2 articles that would help you with this:
This one is a bit older and less extensive, but still has some solid advice in there:
I may do another article in the future to write about optimizing your CV, so stay tuned.
Here is also a CV that I recommend taking a look at as a good example. From my friend Jordan Cutler: LINK TO RESUME.
2. Make sure that you update and optimize your LinkedIn profile
For me, personally, LinkedIn has been huge for my career, as almost all the roles I got were through LinkedIn. Either people contacted me directly, referred me, or I applied to a specific role.
And having a good profile that makes a good first impression goes a long way.
Here are 3 great articles for that:
3. Writing online will increase your chances further
This is very important to understand, as any proof of what you know or what you did will increase your chances substantially. It gives more confidence to the hiring manager or recruiter to move further.
Writing a blog or a newsletter is always a good idea, and I highly recommend it. It has done wonders for me.
When I was a full-time CTO, and I was writing online for some time, I saw the difference with the stakeholders, my fellow leadership team, and my team as well. It was much easier for me to get the buy-in on certain decisions and approaches.
This is also a good article to read:
Now, let’s go to the next one.
4. Focus on building your network
Referrals are the best way to get a new job these days, especially if you are looking for an engineering leadership role. The higher the position is in the company, the more important the referrals become.
The thing is that the higher the position a person has in the company, the more potential impact they can have on people inside the company. And you want to de-risk the decision as much as possible.
It’s a much riskier decision hiring someone that you just know through the interviewing process, instead of someone that was recommended by the person that you trust.
Read more in this article:
And also David Weiss mentioned in this article, that his network was the biggest reason for him getting a new role faster. Read the article here:
Now, let’s get to the last but definitely not the least.
5. Prepare for Interviews
Very important to do at least some research on the company, prepare questions, and most importantly, prepare for specific interviews.
If you have a technical interview, make sure to go over some of the most common questions and prepare your answers. And also very important to prepare your introduction.
In most interviews, you’ll be asked to tell a bit about yourself, and it’s important to do that well, as it’s some sort of first impression of you on the interview.
If you’ll be doing a behavioral interview, you can do a lot of things to prepare to do well on the interview. You can prepare the stories and structure your answers.
To help you with this, make sure to read these articles:
Also, check out this GitHub repo with a list of questions I have been asking on the behavioral interviews I have conducted:
Now, let me share a bit about how I got my first full-time role as an engineer. Even though that’s not completely ationable for you, I promise that it’ll all make sense reading the whole article!
How I Got my First Full-Time Role as an Engineer
This is what I have mentioned already in the article How I Grew From Engineer to CTO.
After my first two student jobs as an engineer, I started to apply for my first full-time engineering position.
How did I get my first full-time role? I remember it like it was yesterday. I’ve applied to the role and the first interview went well. I was invited to the second interview.
Before that interview, I designed + coded a new website for them. I designed it with Photoshop and built it with HTML + CSS + JS and a bit of PHP. They liked it and gave me good feedback, and they offered me the position. I was ecstatic.
This is how the site looked like:
As a self-taught engineer, I knew I needed to show something more than just sending a CV and hoping for the best, as I didn’t have a lot of experience.
And this is my exact advice for finding a new role faster:
Try to do something to stand out when you apply to the role or when you are already in the hiring process.
I like to call this having an unfair advantage, because you automatically stand out from others, assuming they don’t do something similar.
And yes, even though I did that 10 years ago and it was much easier to get a role back at that time, I still didn’t have a lot of experience and no university degree.
I would compare that to what most engineers and engineering leaders are facing these days. There are just a lot fewer roles today and more competition, so you need to showcase yourself a lot better in order to get the role.
Now, let’s put this advice into practice.
This is What I Would Do to Get a New Role Faster
So, now that we understand the concept, let me share the exact step-by-step process I would take if I would be looking for a new role.
And yes, it’s very important to understand that focusing on all of the 5 things we mentioned above (pre-work section) will make your chances a lot higher.
So, assuming we have focused on that already, let’s go to the first thing I would do.
The first thing I would do is to find 3-5 roles that resonate the most with me and makes the biggest sense
The reason for this is that the strategy called “spray and pray”, where you just send infinite CVs to infinite companies, normally doesn’t work so well, as companies receive a LOT of submissions.
Especially, the reason for this is that there has been an increase of “AI products”, where they offer automatic submissions to the roles, and a lot of people are using that, so that has even decreased the odds of this tactic working.
So, very important to find the top 3-5 roles that make the most sense to you. Let’s go to the second step next.
Find the hiring manager or recruiter, responsible for the role
Normally, a person who is hiring will be listed in the job ad, especially if you are looking at the job submission through LinkedIn.
I would contact that person through LinkedIn, and ask them a few questions about the role. Something that would be interesting for me to know and that would give me a better overview of what I can expect.
Also, this is a good way to know if the role is still available.
Now, we wait for their response, and after we get the response, if we are happy with it, I would proceed with the following.
Especially for Engineering Leadership roles, I would try to stand out in this step already
What I would do here is (depending on the role). I would record a video, it can be a Loom video or anything else, where I would share some improvements (suggestions) to the product or service related to the company I am applying to.
That can be technical, organizational, process-wise, UX, or something else. The key here is that you show that you did good research on the company already + you have taught deeply about the product or a service, and that you want to make things better.
I would look to map that suggestion as close as possible to the expectations listed in the role.
Now the only thing we need to do is to send the video, together with the CV
What I would do here is the following. I would do the full submission, together with the CV, and then I would also include the video in the submission.
At the same time, I would send the message to the hiring manager that I have submitted the CV for the position and that I have also recorded a video with potential suggestions for improvements.
That’s all! Definitely try it out and let me know how it works for you. Always keep in mind that you want to look for the unfair advantage in anything that you are focusing on. It’s how you’ll get much better results.
Doing This Will Make you Stand Out From Others
Even though this takes more time, especially if you are doing this for 3-5 companies, it’s a LOT better approach than just sending CVs and hoping for the best.
As a hiring manager who has hired many engineers and engineering leaders → that kind of submission would definitely stand out for me, and I would take that candidate a lot more seriously when evaluating for the fit for the role, no matter if their experience is not 100% fit for the role.
Last words
Finding your next engineering or engineering leadership role in today’s market isn’t easy, but it’s absolutely possible if you approach it with intention, effort, and a willingness to stand out.
Most candidates only do the minimum: submit a CV, hope for a response, and wait.
But the people who consistently get offers faster are the ones who take ownership of the process. They optimize their credibility, they show proof of their skills, they build real relationships, and they’re not afraid to go the extra mile.
Your goal should be simple:
Make it impossible for a hiring manager to ignore you.
The market may be competitive, but the bar for effort is still surprisingly low. If you’re willing to show initiative, think creatively, and do more than what is expected, you’ll get your next role not just faster, but on your terms.
Now go apply this, stand out, and get that next opportunity. You’ve got this!
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You are more than welcome to find whatever interests you here and try it out in your particular case. Let me know how it went! Topics are normally about all things engineering related, leadership, management, developing scalable products, building teams etc.
I agree with doing some research and finding out who the hiring manager is. This 100% helped me land my current role. Not only that, but allowed me to get to know their personality before I even applied, chat messages and a phone call were exchanged before I even applied.
I’m currently applying for jobs abroad, so I’ll be using these tips in my own journey—thank you for sharing them.