Anabell Jimenez

When I first started my job search, the market was very dire and that was hard for me to digest. For the first time in my career, I wanted to be strategic — I didn't want to just land any job. But beyond having that north star, I felt very stuck. As a textbook extrovert, the loneliness of the job search was overwhelming.

My biggest aha moment was humbling. A coach told me during a mock interview, "Where's the drama? Your answer was kind of boring." Those are two words nobody would ever use to describe me. That feedback snapped something in me: I wasn't showing up the way I see myself. About eighty percent of my time for the next couple of months was dedicated to mindset work.

For landing my role at Relay, the turning point came when a coach suggested I go talk to actual customers. I lined up nine small business owners and interviewed them. When I showed up to the hiring manager interview and mentioned I had talked to customers, we drove into the conversation with so much confidence. For the case study, I had already validated my concepts with real users through surveys. When I presented and said I had already tested my hypothesis, they were stunned.

For the first time in my career, I walked out of an interview absolutely knowing I was moving to the next round. This program is the support system to level up, but there's no shortcut — you have to put in the work.