How I'd recruit for a BizOps role in 2026 (Pt. 1)

Nov 11, 2025

It's no secret that the tech market is more competitive than ever. It seems like layoffs.fyi gets updated with a new headline every week.

It's quite discouraging honestly.

But this is what Bill Burnett and Dave Evans - the Design your Life guys - call a "gravity" problem. A constraint baked into the environment.

You can't fix it, so you might as well disregard it.

In other words, if it's not actionable, it's not a problem worth dwelling on.

A tough market makes landing a role harder.

But it doesn’t make it impossible.

So, if I were trying to land a BizOps job today, here’s what I’d do.

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The Job Search, Simplified

When you boil it down, landing a job comes down to doing two things:

1. Getting interviews
2. Converting interviews.

It can feel super complicated, but at the end of the day, if you can do just these two things, you're going to get a job.

So first - how do we get interviews?

You basically have two options.

Cold applying or talking to people.

Does cold apply work? For about 1% of people it does. If you did GTM at Instagram and are trying to do GTM for Snapchat, you have a decent chance of getting a recruiter screen.

But for most people, talking to people is the name of the game.

But before you go out and start sending a thousand "Hope you are well" messages, let's get clear on who you're actually targeting first.

Enter my favorite graph.

Plot every role you're interested in on this graph. The more specific the better.

If I were recruiting today, my graph might look like this.

Circle your top 3. These are the people you should start with.

So if I wanted to work at Notion, I'd start by making a list of every single person I know whom I'm even remotely connected with who is Notion-affiliated. Friends of friends. Alumni. Shared affinity or professional groups.

I'd also see if anyone at Notion or in the Community space posts actively on social media. And talk to those people.

Then finally, I'd do cold outreach to complete strangers, people whom I have no affiliation with at all but who do what I want to do.

Think of it like three concentric circles.

Now to get people to want to talk to you, you need to learn how to write effective cold messages and have a clear resume.

Most people know this. But they don't do it.

So if you do do it, you're already beating 90% of people who are just mass applying.

• If you don't know how to write cold emails, start by reading these 3 posts.​
• If you don't know what makes a good BizOps resume, go through this deck. I made it based on my experience of reviewing 100's of resumes while hiring at Adobe.

If you do all the steps above, now you have a list of roles/people you want, a strong resume, and a cold DM template you can recycle and personalize with little effort.

That's your system for generating interviews.

If this well runs dry, go back to the 2x2 and go down the list to the next roles you're targeting.

Now what the hell do you do once you get the interviews?

I'll get to that next week :)

Until then
Jacky "my favorite number is 2(x2)" Ye

p.s. I saw these adorable sticker at a coffee shop in Redwood City last week. I don't even like frogs that much but it's just so damn cute. If this is you, hang in there!