An insider’s guide for tech professionals in Australia and New Zealand Reading time: ~30 minutes for the core guide, plus optional appendix if you want to go deeper.
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Everything in this guide is based on more than a decade spent inside technical recruitment across Australia and New Zealand, combined with coaching hundreds of experienced tech professionals through real job searches.
This is not a theoretical model of how hiring should work. It’s a practical description of how it does work when time is short, risk is high, and decisions have to be made.
You won’t find statistics for every claim. Hiring managers don’t publish playbooks on these topics. If this feels familiar, it’s probably because you’ve been doing reasonable things in a system that no longer responds to them.
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Most people don’t start a job search expecting it to be demoralising.
They expect it to be inconvenient. A bit awkward at first. Maybe slower than they’d like. But manageable. After all, they’ve already done the hard part. They’ve built careers. Shipped products. Solved real problems. Earned trust internally. Many haven’t had to look for a job in years. So when they finally do, they behave like responsible professionals.
And then something strange happens. Nothing.
Or almost nothing. A screening call that goes nowhere. A recruiter who sounds interested and then disappears. Long stretches of silence broken just often enough to keep hope alive.
This is usually the moment people start blaming themselves.