How engineers can stand out from the applicant pool
keyvalues.com
keyvalues.com
In my experience there is this huge pool of unqualified applicants applying for every job no matter what the actual job requirements are. The applicants that got a call for an interview 1) looked at the technologies listed in the job requirements and 2) put their experience with these technologies on their resume.
Also important, once you get called in for an interview make sure you can answer the most basic questions about what is on your resume. If you put Linux experience on your resume make sure you can explain how to list the contents of a directory from the command line. If you put MySQL experience on your resume make sure you can explain how to get a count of the total number of rows in a table.
Are there really companies out there where the difference between getting an offer and not getting an offer is spending a few hours making a bespoke "please hire me" website?
No, but it can jedi mind trick your way past HR screeners. And that's the only thing that it can do.
If your only way into a company you want to work for is "through the front door" and you aren't a perfect on-paper candidate for them (same role at a direct competitor) then it could be worth your time doing this...
I did this once while applying to a fully remote company and it got me the interview (hey, it's hard to compete against hundreds of applications per day) but did not end up with an offer.
Can it? Frankly, I'd think any application that deviates from the normal procedure in a quirky way is a demerit for most companies.
I was trying to get a support engineer role that would have had me demoing to clients, so I whiteboard-animated and filmed my pitch for why I was a perfect fit for the company. It went over.
It probably suffers from the usual problem: people want to work at a place that is too good for them (whatever that actually means) and companies want to hire people that are too good for them (again, whatever that means).
Most mediocre devs overestimate their abilities - while many of the truely top devs severely under estimate themselves.
The recruitment process/chain at many companies severely overestimates their desirability as an employer ("If selected, you'll be given the privilege of working at this traditional corporate bank, working on 6 year old Windows desktop development machines, under overpaid architecture astronauts who's suits cost more than your weekly take-home, on strictly waterfall projects. But we'll still expect you to be in the office at 9am for the mandatory "Agile Standup"!!!)
Too many people are playing a numbers game, which creates a lot of noise. The noise makes it easy to miss good connections.
Inexperienced people (on both sides) are looking for the wrong things and just like it is w/ love, a lot of us need to learn the hard way. Wanting to date the most popular guy/girl in school is the equivalent of wanting to work at a "company everyone knows."
A few years later, we want to meet someone who is "ambitious, interesting, and has a good sense of humor," which is maybe like wanting to work at a company in an industry you can get behind. It's less superficial, and we have some direction here, but it's still too vague. (A lot of people are drawn to health and education not because they're truly passionate about either, but simply because it'll be easier find purpose/meaning.)
After a heartbreak or two, we finally figure out what our deal breakers are. Examples: I can't date anyone who cares a lot about fashion. I'm very attracted to people who dress well, but it turns out prioritizing it means attention and money is spent in ways I can't get on board w/. Similarly, I can't work anywhere that has a lot of mandatory meetings. Counter intuitive because I'm very extroverted and social, but meetings destroy my productivity. I would have never known these things 10 years ago.
Resumes and "dating profiles" don't give us a full picture. What we really want to know is: "Are we truly compatible? Are our goals and values truly aligned?" Those things take time, introspection, and research. However, it feels like job searching/sourcing/recruiting is going in the complete opposite direction (ie. "let's email 1k engineers every day, maybe 1% will respond").
This creates the noise that makes it hard for people who've figured out what they are looking for to find it.
The noise looks like noise. It's the guys who say "Sup babe?" to every girl on dating-app-de-jour.
Standing out from the noise isn't hard. But it does mean at least writing a cover letter for each job app that shows you've done more than just copy/paste your generic details and cv into every role on $jobSite's new listing page this morning before you left for work.
Saying "Hey, I see you like live music, wanna go see $coolBand next Thursday? Oh, and I really like your hair in your 3rd pic :-)" isn't gonna "win you the girl", but it's going to be much less likely it be insta-deleted than "Sup babe?" sent to everyone.
"Sub babe?" instantly works of you have a hot pic in your profile.
100% agree on this point. But it’s a hard problem to solve. How do you go about finding the best candidates? Just like in the dating world, the best candidates are already taken.
There is still that 1% that are looking...
I think this is a result of the (frankly) BS practice employers have been using for years of inflating the qualifications required for positions. I can't count on one hand how many postings I've seen for mid-level developer roles that require 5+ years of experience writing Python, C++, C#, Java, and JavaScript; oh yeah, you've also got to know Angular and React, and "bonus" if you know Vue.
Even before I became a developer(I first tried to get into animation), the advice from older folks and career specialists was to "just apply to all the positions you want even if you don't meet all the qualifications", and I'd bet good money that a lot of people are still hearing this advice from various channels.
Now that everyone is just shotgun applying to everything, the advantage is largely gone. But because everyone is doing it, and individual must do so or they'll be drowned out in signal noise.
I don't want someone that's built a bloody todo list in Angular, React and Vue. I want someone that's generated revenue by building quality software in one of them.
I think one of the biggest technical advantages you can get over your competition is to hire good specialists. Almost everywhere I've worked (especially anywhere HR or non-tech people are involved in the hiring) has just hoovered up the "jack of all trades" types and I suspect their tech has suffered for it.
What takes longer? A full-stack guy trying to figure out how to work around some obscure front-end quirk (like the restrictions on overflow-x/y resulting in unexpected computed values, or the fact you can't transition to or from computed heights?) or a front-end specialist learning some basic dev-ops, or how to change a few Django models?
"Building something" in a language/ecosystem should be easy for any competent dev. I've never touched Obj-C or Swift in my life, and if you asked me to go release an iPhone app on the app store in my spare time in 3 weeks I'd be 100% confident that I can do it; but if you asked me to go and take a job as a senior iOS dev straight after that, I wouldn't even be confident to put myself forward for it. I probably wouldn't even put iOS on my resume.
I think as a senior tech person involved in the hiring process, I should be doing a better job of identifying exactly what I need and finding the right person than just going on the hunt for 6 "good devs" and hoping everything falls into place.
HR is a compliance function. By some strange fluke, it gets inserted in the hiring process in large companies.
Someone's got to do it and if it's not HR then it's generally a recruitment company. For the price of hiring 4 devs through a recruiter the company could afford a full time HR person (ignoring stupid accounting tricks).
As is now, rational behavior is to apply even if you are unqualified and hope it works, unfortunately.
The only thing that really does stand out is when you get a CV that says the person has done all the things that your org wants to do. (Yes that's bad for recent grads.)
Hired a couple of people recently, and guess what. They tick all the boxes. Worked for firms that did low latency cpp, wrote apps that did what we wanted ours to do, and using the tools that we wanted.
From the other side I got an offer a few months back, and same deal. I ended up not taking it, but it was just "have you written xyz kind of code for another firm?" And the questions were all geared towards that. And since I ticked all the boxes, everything went forward.
If your CVs don't contain that unicorn who's done the exact thing that you need, you have a lot of awkward conversations. Is Minotaur close enough? What about this other language, it's pretty similar, right? Maybe the OS isn't such a big deal for this project. They'll get used to finance, it's not that different from...
No personal projects. No libraries no-one-else uses. Real 1K+ stars projects in the niche/ecosystem you are targeting (Elixir? React Native?).
Go for breadth rather than depth. Demonstrate you can get 20 PRs merged to 20 different top-tier projects, adapting to their needs, standards, understanding their codebases of course. Interacting with them in a polite, optimal manner.
Mental exercise: think of one such contributor. Would you hire her? Of course you would, in a blink. No CV needed.
I know it's easier said than done, but executed well, it will be level-up whichever salary you were making previously.
(what to PR? Simply solve one of the many issues listed in a given project's tracker)
This would be very impressive... but would also require _months_ of effort. I don't know any successful engineers who have that much time on their hands.
And that's after the dev work, just convincing someone to care about your PR and its associated use-case or bug.
Neither is the notion of investing in one's skills beyond on-the-fly self-learning.
Some devs are able to save quite some money, or to work far less than 8h/d. I'd invite those to reinvest that time/money. Perhaps you can do it once every few years and ensure a truly remarkable career.
This might become more and more important as the market gets saturated with bootcampers, hustlers, or simply people who are junior today but will compete with you tomorrow.
I really have a skepticism that many people, whatsoever, can get 20 _non-negligible_ PRs in 20 _top-tier_ projects in any meaningful time frame.
I'd take it as a matter of patience, habits and of course excellence.
Probably will execute this plan myself at some point.
Anyway, my intent was to give an advice to developers rather than to employers.
Conflate them at your own peril. Our experience with trying to make things work with this candidate was not very successful, and it was one of the two (out of dozens) of hires we made that we had trouble with.
Candidates should find sane companies that test based on competence and not on glorified SAT like algo teasers. Companies should find sane candidate who are competent at doing the job they need done. Many parties in both camps flop at this search process.
Personally I have witnessed an ex-employer hiring a truly world-class framework contributor. Of course we didn't give him 'feature development' tasks. In fact he was out of our scrum process.
Instead, he was given high-profile bugs, code analysis/refactoring tasks, and was given the freedom to create some cool abstractions.
That's precisely my kind of dream job! True consultancy.
(and yes, you can get those kind of gigs investing much less beforehand... you'll just get fewer, lower-profile ones?)
Giving refactoring task to someone who is new strucks me as odd.
Also, why are not people doing feature development tasks not allowed to create abstractions where appropriate? Or high profile bugs etc? That is another odd thing. If I would be hired and it turned out I don't have that freedom and the interesting bugs, I would leave the company fast - especially if someone new would suddenly get these normally learn-a-lot tasks and freedoms.
And own people experienced with your system not fixing high profile bugs but those instead being assigned to someone new is extremely odd decision.
I specifically remember this guy who was really good debugging the 'undebuggable'. Perhaps more business-oriented bugs would indeed be assigned elsewhere, but more elusive stuff concerned with 'mechanisms', setup code, etc would be perfect for him.
I also have performed a similar role myself (just at a humbler team)
2.) Why would many shallow contributions be better then deeper involvement with one project? I don't get this one at all. Why would high-profile project be an advantage over less known one? Another thing I don't really see.
This sounds more like a dream of how it should work then reality I see around.
I have witnessed a number of companies throwing whatever money was needed to have language/framework/library authors working with them. I see no reason why the same principle shouldn't be more general.
2) Not necessarily shallow. You can create 1-2 big PRs per project (plus a few small ones), which amounts to 1 week of work per project.
The point of going for a variety of projects is that you demonstrate:
- proven skill/interest in a whole ecosystem (e.g. Elm)
- ability to read/maintain code (going for just one codebase is comparatively easier)
- ability to adapt to different standards and people
Lastly, high-profile projects have harder barriers-to-entry (therefore you demonstrate better skills), and are more likely to be known by the employer.
Isn't ability to maintain code better proven by maintaining one codebase longer? Mostly because that is what maintennace is?
Probably as a freelancer/consultant breadth is better than depth (proves you can solve whatever problem you may have with technology X), and vice versa for employees (depth shows commitment and an emphasis on maintainability).
So what can you do? You can create targeted websites like suggested in the article, but that takes a long time and likely isn't worth the effort. I've gotten ignored many times doing this.
Here's what has worked best:
1.Skip the resume even if the company insists on it.
2. Find the hiring manager's email (or anyone involved in hiring)
3. Send a well put together cover letter email selling your skills with concrete links to projects you can show. GitHub, Codepen, Blog links work very well here.
Here's a blog post focusing on remote jobs that I put together that goes into more depth in case you're interested: https://remoteleads.io/blog/proposals-that-win-remote-freela...
Why does this work? You're reaching an real human and have a higher chance of getting looked at for your skills instead of getting your resume scanned by a resume-reading machine. This works well when you don't already have connections with the company.
Step 3 is reinventing the resume.
For the last 3.5 years I've been doing automation, control, logging, and data science projects for a memory card manufacturer in Taiwan. Now I want to move to New Zealand (possibly Australia or Canada).
Although my parents are British, I've had more work experience in the relational culture of East Asia (China, Korea, Taiwan). I feel uneasy just bragging about myself on a cover letter/résumé, and instead prefer to write about how "we" could work together. I'm worried that individualist cultures might not understand that, though. Should I change my writing style?
But yes, people who code all the time can be interesting. I just don't want the industry to demand we all do it.
Skills, projects etc. are for your resume (CV)
I never apply for a job blind or through an applicant tracking system. I always use local recruiters that I've nurtured relationships with.
I also don't negotiate salary. I know my market and tell the recruiters up front how much I want to make. They don't waste my time submitting me to companies where I am above the salary range.
For a contract job, where the company pays the recruiting agency and they pay you, yeah you can get a larger hourly rate by going straight to the company.
I welcome employees who know/can articulate their value and negotiate in good faith to take home in salary roughly 1/4 to 2/5 of the value they create for our company every year.
That doesn’t extend to paying cash bonuses because our in-house team found them nor to pay cash in lieu of relocation benefits just because they already live here.
To answer GP’s question where candidate A had a slight edge but wanted 20-30% more, first I probably wouldn’t know that at decision time (it’s not like I’m shopping cars where I can go pretty far down the negotiation path with two Honda dealers and one Toyota dealer or an Amazon purchase where I can use camelcamelcamel or something; these are human beings contemplating upending their lives in some way). Second, talent is the key element of this game. Candidate A has a (perceived) edge and I’m going to pursue that candidate first, realizing that the pay is capped by some proper fraction of the business value they can create. Where it’s a software IC role, I will likely pursue both A and B individually, intending to hire both.
Where it’s a one-off role (I’m not going to hire two CISOs or two tribe leads for one tribe), I pursue A first. If I hear “I want more salary/shares because you’re not paying a recruiter”, that’s a terrifically strong signal that maybe they’re not going to create as much business value as I thought because they’re prone to thinking shallowly or outright wrongly about what matters to the business. “I want more money because of my X, Y, and Z talents/skills/ability/dedication/other options”? Great, I’m interested; let’s talk about that.
I've never been in a position to ask for the highest salary in the range. Any job for which I would be able to ask for top dollar would imply that I meet all of the qualifications perfectly. That would mean that I won't have the opportunity to grow and after two years, my resume and skill set won't look any better than when I first started. I've always aimed for jobs that are a slight stretch, meaning I have all of the "must haves" but not many of the "nice to haves".
That gives me the opportunity to be exposed to new to me technologies.
This is a highly underrated attribute. Crucial to getting anything done effectively in a team.
I'm personally a very competitive person, and I love being part of a team that wins. The collaborative vs competitive mindset feels like a false dichotomy to me.
I just like to make a pitch for competitiveness being a positive trait whenever this comes up!
In [218]: female_founders = 0.17 # https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/in-2017-only-17-of-startups-have-a-female-founder/
In [219]: male_founders = 0.83
In [220]: female_founders ** 6
Out[220]: 2.413756900000001e-05
In [221]: male_founders ** 6
Out[221]: 0.3269403733689999
How do you differentiate passion for the work they'll be doing from a complete willingness and competency to do the job because they've got to put food on the table?
I'm not passionate about programming (and certainly not passionate about freight logistics), I just happen to be very good at it, I like my coworkers..oh and it pays the rent and tuition.
The metaphor I like to use is, I'm looking for a carpenter that likes building structures, not a carpenter that likes using hammers.
But that's just what I'm looking for, and what I believe many engineering-centric orgs are looking for. There are definitely companies out there that just want another assembly robot in their software factory assembly line and plenty of people happy to take that role.
What about the people that don't have that time though? The people that may have spent time in evening classes learning how to program. How do they stand out?
I mean, I get the whole 'not everyone designs', but anyone wanting to work at that level should at least know 'text-as-images = bad'.
Now I did some math and with 1000 techs, in stacks of 10, you would get 2.6 * 10^26 combinations. So it's impossible to find a candidate that will match!
It is talking about expressing shared values (trough open source and mentoring) value (personal accomplishment) and warm fuzzies (being a fan of the company, product, etc.)
As to how to do that; learn it or hire someone. As you likely only have your hours to sell I'd say the case for outsourcing becomes compelling.
Want to stand out? Say you are actually interested in earning money for your work, a truly novel idea nowadays.
But — if you are applying for jobs for which there are common salary ranges, you are signalling that you’re likely willing to work for something in that general range.
I think part of the larger situation is that the leaders of many small businesses (including many startups) don’t know how to effectively apply good engineers.
Let's be frank, people want to pay their bills and suits are worried about bottom lines.
Imagine if a grocer told you: I want you to buy this cucumber because it would make me feel great about my sales skills. Would you buy the cucumber just to do the grocer a favor? Now compare that to a grocer who tells you: "These cucumbers are delicious, healthy and will make you feel great about yourself for eating healthy food." IMO, the second grocer is much more likely to sell a lot of cucumbers, because he focuses on what his customers want instead of what he himself wants. The same is true for selling your labor.
I didn't get an offer :-)
Last month I was ruled out at screening stage because I "focused too much on money" (that was the recruiter's feedback to me from the company's HR). They wanted to pay £35k for a developer who also can build statistical models. In London.
I also don't think good boy points help that much either, I'm subscribed to the idea we tend to hire people similar to us, effectively turning hiring into a numbers game without much influence over over that bias.
Indeed, once a technically challenged HR included a whole spreadsheet of applicants in her reply, which basically confirmed her company rejects applicants for arbitrarily stupid reasons, so one might as well focus on the money.
Is this an imaginary situation, or did it actually happen? If the latter, link?
Rejecting for too high expected salary was a non factor basically (also they strictly did not try to negotiate that), lacking technical skills were rarely mentioned too.
It may well be that they can't afford someone who can build statistical models, but they can probably get someone more junior who's willing to learn. The new hire gets paid and gets experience, the company gets the job done. There are plenty of (experienced) people for whom money is not the prime motivator.
I would look at it a different way: if a company offers you a below-market rate, would you get paid a lot more if you can add significant value to the company in a year or two? Is the gamble of being underpaid in a small company worth it for you?
How is the response "you're too focused on money" when trying to get a job to make money a reasonable one?
> There are plenty of (experienced) people for whom money is not the prime motivator.
There really aren't. This is a myth of the highest order. There might be some, but certainly not many. If they have families or debt, that number basically goes down to zero. And for the record, £35k in London for a software engineer is a laugh-out-loud joke; a bus driver's starting salary is £25k.
The company have stated what they're willing to pay, if that doesn't meet your expectation then look elsewhere. It's not a personal slight. On the flip side there are plenty of jobs which will pay more, and plenty (no doubt) which pay less. You can laugh at the job adverts and get angry when they won't pay you what you think your market rate is, but does it really matter? If you're that good, then you'll find a job which pays you what aspire to.
Note that the OP indicates they were rejected at a screening stage, which implies that there was no wasted time on interviews. I have no idea what the job is/was beyond that it involved statistics. The OP provided no details, although a followup post suggests it's not a small company. I used that as an example of a situation where you might see this sort of salary, and some logical justification for it (the morals are debateable). If it's a big corp then obviously you might expect different standards of pay.
I would give you academia as the obvious counter-example to your second argument. There are thousands of talented people, globally, earning peanuts compared to what they could in industry because they enjoy the work they do. I'll admit some compared to the hundreds of thousands of hungry developers, but it's not insignificant. Starting postdoc salary in London is around £35k for instance, with annual progression up the national spine point scale.
Academia is one field which has historically had excellent benefits for staff including regular travel, very flexible working hours and freedom to work as independently as you want. You also tend to get more holiday than industry e.g. 30 days is standard. That's a pretty good tradeoff to some folks.
Is it a laugh out loud joke? Public sector employees don't earn much more than that initially. To take a fanciful example, SIS/MI6 are currently advertising a software engineering role with a range starting at £32k.
Offer anything else and I'm going to be thinking about how I can pay my bills by doing work on your projects to the detriment of my own.