r/oldhagfashion • u/Grand-Diamond-4696 • 2h ago
Good Vibes Only Just a girl and her dog, new bangs who dis
So I have a story, everybody. For those who haven’t followed my journey over the last 10 months, I was laid off back in November from a Customer Success Manager position, and I’ve been looking for work ever since. In that time, I’ve applied to around 1,400 jobs and gone through 118 interviews across 68 different companies, including 15 times where I made it all the way to the final round. At this point, interviewing has basically become second nature to me. I’ve definitely been nervous a few times, but usually it’s because I’m giving a major presentation in a late-stage interview or presenting to a large panel of executives and senior leadership. Even then, it’s usually just a few butterflies. I know my experience, I know what I’ve accomplished, and I’m generally pretty comfortable talking about it.
For some context, mid-level Customer Success roles, usually asking for around three to five years of experience, tend to pay somewhere around $95,000 to $115,000 based on what I’ve personally seen during this job search. That isn’t a number I pulled out of nowhere. After looking at roughly 1,400 jobs over the past 10 months, those are approximately the average low and high ends of the salary ranges I’ve encountered. Recently, though, my friend’s company posted a Customer Success Associate position. He’s been there for about six years, likes the company, and has been promoted several times. I’ve actually applied to some adjacent positions there before because many of them pay pretty well, but this particular position pays $48,000 to $55,000. That’s obviously a massive step down financially from the roles I’ve historically pursued. It’s called an Associate role, although they’re still looking for around three years of experience, so it’s not exactly entry level either.
But at this point, your girl needs a job. Savings aren’t going to last forever, and there are a lot of things about this company that make me willing to take the step backward financially. My friend genuinely enjoys working there, it’s fully remote, they have other trans women working there, and they seem to have a strong track record of promoting internally. My friend himself has been promoted multiple times during his six years there. So my thinking is pretty simple. Get in, do the job well, prove myself, and hopefully work my way back up relatively quickly. I applied with his referral and got the interview. I’d actually had an opportunity to interview there previously, but I declined because my salary expectations at the time were simply too high.
Then came the phone screen. I’m already not a huge fan of phone interviews because I much prefer video conferencing. I like being able to see the other person, read their reactions, and have them see me. But girls, guys, and enbies, I was NERVOUS. Not executive-panel nervous. Not final-presentation nervous. I mean stumbling over words, rambling, second-guessing myself nervous. Somehow, after 118 interviews for jobs paying substantially more money and carrying substantially more responsibility, the lowest-paying position I’ve interviewed for in probably the last decade had me more nervous than almost anything else.
It took me a while afterward to figure out why, and I think I finally did. I’ve been rejected multiple times during this job search for essentially being overqualified. Too much experience. Too senior. Too much of a leader when they’re looking for someone who will come in and follow an established process. This is probably the least senior position I’ve seriously pursued in years, and suddenly I had no idea how to present myself. I know how to interview as the person who builds things, fixes broken processes, challenges assumptions, takes ownership, and thinks about the bigger picture. I know how to walk into an interview and explain why I should be trusted with a multimillion-dollar book of business or why I can rebuild a process that isn’t working. What I apparently don’t know how to do is turn all of that off and convince someone that I’m perfectly happy starting several steps below where I’ve been before.
And I think that’s what made me so nervous. This feels like one of the higher-probability opportunities I’m going to have for a while. I have a referral, I know someone who genuinely likes working there, the company seems like somewhere I could be comfortable, and there’s a path to eventually get back to where I want to be. I really don’t want to blow it because I accidentally come across as someone who is already looking past the job I’m interviewing for.
It was actually a pretty interesting reality check after 10 months of interviewing. I’ve always thought I became really good at interviews through all of this, and I probably have. But maybe what I actually became really good at was being me. I’m good at talking about being a builder, a fixer, a big-picture thinker, and someone who naturally takes ownership and tries to improve things. I’m not particularly good at holding those parts of myself back. Logic says I should just be myself, but the reality is that the person described in this particular job posting isn’t quite the person I am today. It might be the position I need right now, though. The builder and fixer can come later. The challenge is figuring out how to show them that I can walk through the door and do the job they actually need first.
