How Krishna left a toxic workplace for a Director of Data Engineering role in four months

Krishna wanted out. Her workplace had turned toxic and she was after something with better work life balance. Her search ran four months, right across Q4 2024, and she landed a Director of Data Engineering role at Brown & Brown Insurance.

The quarter everyone writes off for hiring

Her search ran October to December, the stretch most candidates assume is dead. It was not dead for her, and it usually is not for our other clients either. If anything it helped her, because a good chunk of the competition stops applying over the holidays.

The questionnaire made her think about things she had forgotten

She keeps coming back to this part, and it is not the part most people would guess.

“Resume building and the whole LinkedIn profile building, all of that, was really a good experience. When I was answering all the questionnaire, the amount of things that I should have thought about, I hadn’t thought of in the past.”

That is what a good intake really does. Someone asks you careful questions about your own career, and you start remembering things you had stopped noticing years ago. That is where a genuinely stronger resume comes from. You remember what you actually did, and the wording takes care of itself.

Two of our clients, one job

Here is a detail I like. Another of our clients had been offered the exact same role and turned it down, because he wanted somewhere faster paced. Krishna wanted the opposite, which is why it fit her so well. The same job was right for one of them and wrong for the other. Volume alone would have pushed both of them at it and been wrong half the time, which is really the whole case for calibrating a search to the person.

The search in numbers

• 4 months, across Q4 2024
• Director of Data Engineering at Brown & Brown Insurance
• Level: Director. Function: Data and Analytics