Job Openings At Okta - Inside The Sales Team
💎Check out the sales job openings at Okta! Watch the video to the end to learn all about working on the Sales team at Okta.
📼 Don’t miss the job openings at Okta if you want to kickstart your career in Sales. Meet Rachele Zamani, Business Development Associates Manager at Okta, who will explain why Okta is a place where you can thrive and what they are looking for in candidates.
📼Check out the job openings at Okta to kickstart your career in Sales! The Business Development Associate role is an entry-level role that does not require any sales experience. Customer service experience is a plus. Everyone is welcome to apply to any of Okta’s BDA (Business Development Associate), BDR (Business Development Representative), or SDR (Sales Development Representative) roles, even if you have a non-traditional background or if you do not hold a degree. While all of their positions are remote, Okta is finding out that each team is benefiting from spending some time in the office, so they want to make sure their talent can commute to an office with ease. And this is why they're looking for talent in the Bay Area, the Seattle region, the Chicago region, as well as their D.C. region.
📼 To apply for any of the job openings at Okta, it’s essential to understand the company’s mission to show how you align with it. As Rachele explains: Okta’s mission is to improve the connections between people and tools to make companies more productive and secure. Their vision is to be a platform that enables any company or any person to use technology. As sales representatives, you will be on the front line; being the liaison between product value and customers. So it's incredibly important that the sales teams bring a solution-based approach, a very friendly attitude, and an opportunity to create lasting relationships that Okta knows to make a huge impact with their customers.
Job Openings At Okta - Showing a Strong Desire Is The Key
Okta is always looking for folks who have a strong desire to be in tech sales, but perhaps they are unsure of where to begin. Rachele loves speaking with candidates who have diverse backgrounds and experiences, that perhaps have been in customer service roles, and are unsure of how to leverage their skillset; their customer service skillset, their relationship skillset, or perhaps their desire to connect with people. All of those skills transfer really well to sales, and you would be surprised at how well those folks do on their sales teams.
🧑💼 Are you interested in joining Okta? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get to Know Rachele
An experienced Program Leader, Coach, and "Talent Spotter" with over a decade of experience in leadership roles, Rachele has managed and developed effective teams of diverse leaders across multiple departments. As a coach, her goal is to empower individuals to reach their full potential and break barriers to elevate their careers. If you are interested in a career at Okta, you can connect with Rachele Zamani on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to mention this video!
More About Okta
Okta powers identity for the internet. They are a trusted partner to businesses worldwide and give their customers the confidence to reach their full potential. Since 2009, they've secured some of the world's most innovative companies.
Job Search Tips: What to Look For in Your Career Path
💎 During your job search, a lot of questions may arise. Maybe you’ve reached the final stages of an application process with a company that doesn’t quite meet your needs. Yes, the offer may seem attractive, but… Do you ever stop and think about what you shouldn’t settle for in your career?
📼 Play this video to get three top job search tips on what not to settle for in your career. You'll hear from Bhawna Singh, SVP of Engineering, Jillian Weber, Director of Business Operations and Chief of Staff, and Chitra Dharmarajan, Sr. Director of Security Engineering, all from Auth0 (now a part of the Okta family!)
📼 Tip #1: Don't Settle For a Position that Won't Offer Growth and Challenge.
In your job search, and when evaluating a role, as Bhawna advises, look for how you can make an impact and what you can learn. For example, is there a challenge for you or an opportunity to try something new? In Bhawna's experience, this has allowed her to lean on multiple decades of experience to drive success strategies for her team and enact necessary change while charting a forward vision. Plus, she continues learning from her team's active investment in new products and features to help their customers. As Bhawna says, "When you are learning, you're growing."
📼 Tip #2: Don't Settle For a Career That Can't Adapt to Your Unique Life.
In your job search, and when evaluating a company to work for, there are several ways that a company's operating posture and benefits can either support or sabotage your lifestyle. Two essential indicators for Jillian are the "where" and the "when." Regarding the "where," since she's doing her job remotely, Jillian can grow her career without anchoring herself to an area or uprooting her family to move to an office location. She can do the things she loves in the place she loves. As for the "when," there are times when you will need to focus on work and times when you will need to be there for your home life and family. Looking back on her experience at Auth0, Jillian says, "I'm so grateful to be at Auth0, where our generous maternity leave policy enabled me to spend those first months with my daughter. There was never the need to choose either family or a career." The flexibility should allow your future career to feel like it will add great experiences to your life rather than keep you from them.
Job Search Tips - The Last Thing You Shouldn’t Settle For in Your Career
📼 Tip #3: Don’t Settle For a Place Where Your Voice Doesn’t Matter. Take Chitra’s experience as an example. “Auth0 is a remote-first company. It has built its culture and processes so that all voices can be heard, regardless of the distance. In Auth0, your voice matters,” Chitra says, adding, “We work with a diverse cross-geographical workforce, and synergy is driven through virtual collaboration tools. One team, one score is our value. This empowers us to build stronger trust within our teams and create an environment for open conversation. We know that if we are not making mistakes, we are not making progress. We believe growth comes from asking for help, learning something new every day, and taking action instead of standing in the sidelines. Resonating with our value: n+1 > n.”
📨 Are you interested in joining Auth0, now part of the Okta family? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
More About Okta and Auth0
Okta powers identity for the internet. They are a trusted partner to businesses worldwide and give their customers the confidence to reach their full potential.
The Auth0 Identity Platform, a product unit within Okta, takes a modern approach to identity and enables organizations to provide secure access to any application for any user. Auth0 is a highly customizable platform that is as simple as development teams want and as flexible as they need. Safeguarding billions of login transactions each month, Auth0 delivers convenience, privacy, and security so customers can focus on innovation.
Debunking 3 Interview Myths and Misconceptions With Recruiters from Okta and Auth0
💎 Preparation for a job interview is surrounded by many myths and misconceptions. Listen to these recruiters' advice to debunk the myths and prepare for landing your dream job!
📼In this video, you'll hear from Trudy Curto, Senior Manager of Talent Marketing at Okta, and Lisa Semerdjian, Senior Recruiter at Auth0, now part of the Okta family, as they reveal the truth around common interview myths.
📼 So what exactly are the most common interview myths and misconceptions? For starters, there's this one that goes "if you don't hear back from a recruiter in a certain amount of time at any stage during the interview, it means you didn't get the job." This is a total myth. Application processes are not the same for every company, so there's not an exact period of time when you'll get your answer. Just be patient!
📼 Another interview myth, or misconception, is that the interview process is a one-way street. If this were true, the interview would only be about the recruiter or interviewer asking questions and gauging if you're a fit for the role. This is a total myth. It's really important to make sure that the role (and company) are the right fit for you. So remember, you're interviewing the company as well.
Interview Myths - Last, but not least
The last myth or misconception is that if you apply for a role and you don't get the job, you can never work at the company in the future. This is a huge myth. Okta has a talent community that you can opt into at any time. Check out their career site and join the community for the latest news, job alerts, events, and ultimately to stay connected with Okta.
🧑💼 Are you interested in joining Okta? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get to know Trudy and Lisa
Trudy is a proactive self-starter by nature and has a proven track record of delivering results in high-pressure situations. She provides leadership with a pragmatic approach while being resourceful and creative. She manages multiple priorities efficiently and has very strong project management and communication skills.
Lisa is a Senior Recruiter at Auth0, Co-founder of LibberX and occasionally takes on clients as a Career Coach on the side. Needless to say, she loves working with people, is passionate about recruiting, building better and more efficient processes, and ensuring a positive experience for all. She thrives on seeing people do well, and it brings her great joy to provide support where needed.
More About Okta
Okta powers identity for the internet. It is a trusted partner to businesses around the world and gives its customers the confidence to reach their full potential. Their vision is, accelerate a world where everyone can safely use any technology. They bring simple and secure access to people and organizations everywhere. They promise to not only protect the identities of their customers' workforce and users, but to ask, "what more can we make possible?".
How Okta’s Erika Messerschmidt Builds Confidence at Work
When Erika Messerschmidt was 12, she joined a soccer team that was way out of her league. (Literally—she had come from a division three team, and this team was division one.)
"The level of play was just so much higher than what I was used to," says Erika. "Every single day, my dad would pick me up and I would cry on the way home because I felt so inadequate."
Erika didn't give up. She laced up her cleats and put on her goalkeeping gloves and showed up, day in and day out, to practice. She drilled, she did speed work, she studied plays, and overall, she pushed herself. And then she was just as good as everyone else.
"It just took practice, time, and repetition," says Erika. "I experienced exactly the same situation when I joined [Okta] and started a new job. It's painful at first, because you don't know the technology as well as everyone else, and you have to ramp up and get confident."
Erika applied the same dedication and focus she did to sports to her new role, and now, almost a year into being a Solutions Engineer at identity management company Okta, she's comfortable, confident, and constantly learning. We sat down with Erika to hear more about why she joined Okta, what else in her history has set her up for success in the field of solutions engineering, and what advice she has for others who are looking to build their confidence at work.
Pursuing the right kinds of challenges
Erika wasn't always confident that she could find the right space for her to succeed. She went into college thinking that she'd never study anything in STEM because she lost confidence in her math skills in high school. She tried a neuroscience major, but realized she didn't like the lab environment.
But then she found cybersecurity engineering. While it was a technical field, she was able to find ways to understand it that lined up with the ways she liked to learn.
For instance, she took a computer networking class where she realized that the protocols behind those networks were based on how the U.S. mail system works."I was able to relate it to something that I had tangibly understood my entire life—and that's been the way that I've learned technology throughout my career—I try to relate it to something that is physical and easier to grasp," says Erika.
After graduating and spending three and a half years at her first job, a place she'd been since a summer internship during college, Erika realized she was ready for another challenge. "I was really focused on finding a technology to sell that I know I love, that I've used, and that ubiquitously, everyone I know is happy with as well," she says.
When an Okta recruiter reached out, Erika was immediately intrigued. She'd used Okta's single-sign-on solution and knew it was a great product. What she didn't know was how at home she'd feel when she interviewed—when she felt that personal connection, her decision was made.
"Walking away from [my old company] was definitely a risk, and difficult, but I knew that Okta was going to be the best decision for me," says Erika. "And I haven't looked back. I absolutely love working for Okta. I love how it's just as I had imagined—the product is very easy to use, and it's had such a big impact on our customers."
As a solutions engineer, Erika gets to see that impact firsthand, working throughout the sales cycle to show clients what Okta could do for them, adapting Okta's products to their needs.
Finding success in solutions engineering
While Erika had a learning curve to catch up to her new coworkers' understanding of Okta's products, she came up that curve pretty quickly. Only three months into her role, she was working on the largest deal her team had ever done.
The deal was for a community college with more than 20 campuses and a need to create a unified identity experience across them, and Erika and a fellow sales engineer were able to close it.
Since then, Erika has worked on several other big deals, and throughout them, she's reminded of the importance of her soft skills.
"People assume that when you get someone with a good personality who's also good with technology that they'll just know how to engage with a customer, but there are a lot of nuances to what you need to think about as a sales engineer when you are working deals day in and day out," she says. From learning the ins and outs to the sales cycle to navigating relationships with clients and coworkers alike, it's a lot to master, says Erika.
That sometimes weighs heavily on her, especially as a woman in a very male-dominated field.
"I catch myself thinking that I'm a representative for womanhood when I give a presentation or answer technical questions," she says. "I had to coach myself to get away from that mentality. I used to think, if I didn't know the answer to something, 'Oh, I just improperly represented female sales engineers; now that person is going to develop a bias against women and it's my fault.'"
Erika has addressed that by leaning into the good aspects of that pressure, like using it to aid in her preparation and to drive her sense of accomplishment, while not letting herself be swallowed by it. "I want people to have a good experience with me, and to change the way they see the potential for women to succeed in my role," she says. "But at the same time, not be so hard on myself to where if I make one mistake, I worry that I've damaged the reputation of others who are going to come after me."
5 tips for building confidence at work
One of the ways that Erika has found success at work is leaning into what makes her different. "I leverage my differences to make them into strengths that set me apart from others who are doing the same role I am," she says. Whether that's making genuine connections with clients or coming up with frameworks that help others understand, finding ways to apply her strengths has given Erika a lot of professional confidence.
Here are the other tips she has for women looking to do the same:
1. Recognize that confidence can be learned.
"One of the biggest misconceptions about confidence is that people are born confident," says Erika. "While some people are definitely more sure of themselves just based on their upbringing, confidence is something that is built through overcoming obstacles in life. And it's also built through the relationships that you have and people who build you up."
Erika credits her parents for giving her a solid base of confidence—"I've been really fortunate in my life to have had parents who were always extremely supportive of me and always built up my confidence, and that's had a big impact on my level of self-assurance," she says—but says that work mentors and friends have also been big contributors to that.
2. Remember that being confident doesn't mean never having self-doubt; it's knowing how to work through it.
"I have self doubt all the time, even though I consider myself to be a confident person," says Erika. "You develop over time a playbook for how to shut that voice down in your head that tells you that you're not good enough."
Her playbook includes telling herself out loud that she made a mistake but will learn from it; catching up with a friend who can be a rational partner to talk through what might've gone wrong; and meditating on the positive side of getting a chance to improve.
3. Find your own best methods.
Erika says she was coached on how to become a better public speaker by a well-meaning person who focused so much on memorization that Erika ended up losing her own personality and preferred delivery style. Now she takes advice, but makes sure to adapt it in line with her own method.
"I'm the only person who knows what the best way is for me to prepare, to give a presentation that conveys information in a way that's engaging," she says. "A lot of that is just me being able to be myself, to make little jokes, by not focusing directly on the information I have written on the slide but by telling a story."
4. Discover how you learn best.
"Technical skills don't really have anything to do with personality, they just have to do with acquiring information. But knowing the way that you learn best, that's an example of an asset that is related to your personality that you can then use to accelerate your learning at a quicker rate," says Erika. "Even if you don't know where you excel in the workplace, you've definitely exhibited strengths in other areas of life, so you just have to work to understand how to learn and apply those strengths in other situations."
5. Recognize that age doesn't matter.
Erika is still fairly early in her career, but that hasn't stopped experienced career veterans from asking her for advice.
"If you show that you have knowledge in a certain area, people don't care how old you are. They just want to learn from the skill that you have developed in a different way," she says. "Most people honestly don't care about age. I always thought that that was going to be a big deal in my career, especially when I'm talking to customers who are usually very experienced. But honestly, as long as you know what you're talking about, people tend to respect you and want to learn."
