This website is meant to provide some advice for Econ PhD students looking for industry jobs, advice that takes very little time to apply but can yield the greatest results in your job search. While I want it to be helpful for PhD students in all fields, I know from personal experience that there's an advice gap in economics programs about how to land a job in industry.
In late the fifth year of my PhD program, I felt like I just couldn't do another year of graduate school. I didn't want to go into academia, but I knew I had marketable skills. So I decided to conduct my own job search to land a private sector job.
I failed, to say the least.
In my spring 2014 job search, I applied to about 30 places. I got about 5 phone interviews which I converted into 2 flyouts at places I was excited about. Though I practiced for the interviews, I definitely did not know what to practice - or how - and I crashed and burned on the technical interviews at both firms.
Thus ended my first job search.
When I reviewed what had gone wrong, I saw multiple gaps in my approach and realized that a lot of the well-intentioned advice I'd received from people in my PhD program was dead wrong. Later, I discovered that I was actually lucky - most of my economist peers at Amazon received no advice for their industry job search.
I used the next year to change my approach. When I launched my second job-search in winter 2014 / spring 2015, I'd had more time to network, prepare my resume, and crucially - prepare for the type of interviews that are almost uniformly used across industry.
This time I applied to about 100 places, got about 35 interviews, and by February, I had my first choice job (Amazon). And now, in my four years at Amazon, I've conducted over 250 interviews, approximately 175 of which have been Economist interviews, the majority of which are students on the econ job market.
My experience on both sides of the interviewing table has led me to an inescapable conclusion: job interviewing is its own skill, and 99% of people need to practice it. Most people are not good at it; most of the candidates we interview at Amazon fall flat on their faces. These are intelligent, articulate, and diligent PhDs, so the failure is not one of inherent skill. It is a lack of preparation.
This website contains the most important tricks I used to find jobs and then crush the interviews. For the different topics covered as part of finding and landing the industry job you want, check out the subpages under the "Industry Job Finding Advice" section.
I hope this page, in however large or small of a way, helps you get the job of your dreams. And I hope that when you do, you'll drop me an email with new ideas about how to help the next wave of students do the same.