You need to work on meeting people in your field, at the companies where you want to work. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Go out to meetups. Be a friendly, helpful person. Make friends, lots of them. One of them will make the connection for you at some point.

I've got my first job in the states because a recruiter called me. Same for the second job. The third one was through being acquired. The fourth one, you could call networking if you call showing up for a recruiting event networking. 5th one? You guessed it, recruiter called. Sixth one? Yep. Exactly.

Before that, I worked in Germany. 1st job, applied cold. Second one, applied cold. 3rd one, applied cold. 4th one was working with a friend, so there's that. 5th one, applied cold for contract work, converted into a job. So half networked.

So, if we're generous, 2 out of 11 were networking.

As far as I'm concerned, work on the things you care about, build your skills, and when you switch jobs, make sure it propels you forward in some way. If you're a social person, by all means, enjoy meetups/meeting people because it's something that works for you. But don't force yourself to yet another meetup just because everybody says you should.

So I think part of the answer is clearly saying what you want. I don't know if that holds for positions like Director /VP at large tech companies - these are always somewhat political - but it seems to hold up to pretty much right before that.

YMMV, of course. For all I know, I accidentally have the right magic keywords in my LinkedIn or something. (I don't know. I only update it every few years, so I certainly am not paying enough attention to tell :)

That’s probably safer for them. IME many recruiters doesn’t really have enough knowledge about the role they are trying to recruit for, so it would probably be very risky for them to try to find a ”rough diamond” since they are not really able to make such a judgement call with high enough chance of succeeding.

Define "recruiter".

When I hire the first thing I do is also reach out to my personal network to see if anyone is looking for work or know anyone who is.

My wife did just manage to land a job with a cold application, though, so it's not like either way doesn't work.

I suspect that to be more the case in very large companies. Luckily I have never worked in one.

About half of my interviews started with an HR phone call where they spew their laundry list of technologies and ask me to disclose the years of experience and how do I rate my skills from 0 to 10 for each element in the list.

You can't call yourself anything lower than a 9 lest they move on.

I usually rate myself from 7 to 8. Probably 9 if I have 5+ years of experience or I would be confident consulting.

Once I rated my skills as 10 for a technology I know quite a lot about. I was then told that I was showing off and that I need to work on being more humble.

They absolutely will ask for the exact years and months if you haven't listed them, and they'll think you're hiding something if you prevaricate.

So hold off on start/end dates at jobs then? Since those could be used to figure out experience?

I tend to find such polemics unhelpful. Usually when someone tells me "just don't", I end up really wanting to know the mechanism behind what is causing such a stern warning.

For example, if I asked someone, "should I jump out of an airplane with no parachute",...

and someone says...

"just don't, because unless you have lots of luck and can defy lots of laws of physics, you will most likely be killed"...

then they have revealed a very clear and concrete reason, which strengthens their assertion of "just don't".

I see no such evidence for or against using the word "pivot", and I can imagine scenarios where the word even resonates with certain types of people.

Pivoting your career can be construed as having failed somewhere and needing to find something else.

In the context of a career, phrase it as evolving your skills to match market demand. The very people who "pivot" resonate with will immediately associate it with failure.

Yes, it's an overused term but it's NOT a sign of failure.

For me this is not something negative at all

When interviewees are asked "So why are you looking to move from your present job?". Saying that you need a new challenge sounds very different than "needing to pivot".

However, interview gives one a very limited time to impress. Better use it to discuss your strength and the future, not invite archeological queries.

There isn't anything more concrete than that. YMMV. In this particular case, it rings true to me.

Independent of that, I think using the word 'pivot' here is fine. We all know what he means. There might be a different word with a different connotation that some people may be more receptive to. But, pivot is well within the realm of reasonable words to use here.