How on earth do people have these experiences? I have to submit multiple hundreds of applications to get one interview.
Throwaway because it could turn into multiple thousands if that fact is linked to my identity.
Throwaway because it could turn into multiple thousands if that fact is linked to my identity.
I don't generally apply for highly competitive jobs, nor ones which I'm am not clearly qualified for. My strategy is normally to find jobs that are looking for candidates with a specific skillset and focus on that. Recently this has been AWS/Cloud development skills.
I think some people are not so reserved and conservative. They either want to break into a specific field for which they are currently under-qualified (like data science), or just apply for jobs that have a significant number of excellent candidates in the application pool.
Interviewer proceeds to imply the other 99 are morons. Some of them are, but all are unlucky.
And that was primarily with blind online applications.
If you would like a hand or just want someone to read over your resume and see, my email is 13mdg5@queensu.ca. Would be happy to help.
Local positions depending on the match can be 8 / 10.
Remote roles in other countries. Indeed 1 in 25. Stackoverflow 1 in 100. Angelist 2 in 10 (best 10) then 1 in 25.
For reference, I have also been internally referred in multiple companies including 3 FAANG style companies. Absolutely crickets on that front.
What woke me up was when I got rejected after the recruiter call with SurveyMonkey. That was whenI realized my pre-pandemic /recession attitude wouldn't hold any more and I had to show interest / motivation / better prepared at every stage and not just when the tech rounds rolled around. Since then I have been able to make progress with the few callbacks that I am getting now.
Hope that helps.
I think it was 55 resumes- 11 contact made/ tech exams - 21 rejections - 6 interviews - 1 offer. (about 40 days)
I am bad at technical interviews, but I got better the more I did them.
Keep at it! You can do this! :)
That said, going through recruiters alone should give you decently high interview rates. Assuming you have some experience and so on. If it's not then your resume needs work. For whatever reason, hiring manager look at it and don't want to talk to you further.
A few more are: a) They cold call you in a way which makes it obvious they don't respect your schedule. b) They just want to shoe horn you into a role, get the commission and keep moving. c) Some third party recruiters get offended when I tell them that I am also trying to get interviews on my own without them or through other third party recruiters. d) I have a sneaking suspicion that third party recruiters are paid if the candidate stays for 3 months. So if things were not to go perfect in the first few months then the company might be more inclined to fire you to save the commission.
I don't work with 3rd party recruiters anymore.
After I apply to a few companies, I can easily reuse resumes with little to no modifications. The goal is to hit as many job requirements in the job description as I have experience for without overwhelming the recruiters and hiring manager with irrelevant information.
I only submit cover letters if they are required, or if I have a unique connection that I can bring up (e.g., having met the hiring manager at a recent meetup).
What if you dont have any JS experience, but have say several years working on .NET and Java. Removing that experience makes it looks like you're an entry level candidate, when in reality theres actually a decent amount of transferable skill between the tech in question and if you have enough informal experience with Node (through personal projects, etc.) you should have little issue switching.
Also, I should have been more clear. I don't erase everything about a past experience if it's a different technology. Here are a couple hypothetical examples to help clarify. In this first version of a resume snippet, the applicant should be applying for a Java position since it's filled with terms that make sense to the Java community:
> Software Enginer at XXX Company
> * I led the design and implementation of XXX Company's internal payment processing service which processes $YYY million USD in annual revenue. The project used Java, Spring, Hibernate, and MySQL.
> * Introduced testing (JUnit and Mockito) into the engineering culture by leading brown bag talks. Increased unit test coverage on critical company projects from 0% to 73% over 2 years.
> * Used JNI to integrate critical path code with XXX Company's proprietary hardware driver, increasing average performance by 8x.
Here is a snippet representing the same experience, but catered toward a Node.js position. References to enterprise Java are removed, and the last bullet is replaced with a more relevant bullet:
> Software Enginer at XXX Company
> * I led the design and implementation of XXX Company's internal payment processing service which processes $YYY million USD in annual revenue.
> * Introduced testing into the engineering culture by leading brown bag talks. Increased unit test coverage on critical company projects from 0% to 73% over 2 years.
> * During XXX Company's annual hackathon, I implemented and presented a functional prototype service to present payment information in real-time using WebSockets.
Now these changes alone are likely not sufficient to get a call back from the Node.js job position, but it changes the automatic typecast from "experienced Java developer" to "experienced developer" Hopefully this candidate has some other past experience in Node.js/web development/JavaScript to flush out the story.
I use to think that a well crafted custom cover letter totally gives me a leg up on the competition. But recently, I've been gettin lazy and not sending cover letters and I still get responses. Go figure.
The notion of a cover letter is pretty outdated for most jobs. The people still teaching their use are firmly rooted in the age of sending unsolicited job applications via mail that will be screened by a human.
(that's around the same level of Matt Cutts Current Job)
Edit: I meant to add that I am also happy to review your resume and provide feedback, too. Contact in profile.
If you're looking for advice, it really depends on where you are in your career.
- college OCR postings
- a recruiting firm run by people i personally know (specializing in smaller startups)
- companies that ex-co-workers work at
- FAANG recruiters that reached out via LinkedIn
- personalized emails from in-house recruiters or hiring managers
So, in all these cases, I'm already connected with someone who is incentivized to get me hired, and I start off with a recruiter screen or initial technical screen, depending on the company. And then from there, it's up to your own skills at interviewing (which are slightly correlated with your skills as an engineer).
If I was just randomly dropping resumes everywhere, no way I would ever even make it to that first screening call. You need to be paired with someone who's going to handhold your resume through the whole process until you are either hired or bomb your interview.
Each resume and cover letter needs to be customized for each company. It needs to fulfil each of the roles and demonstrate compelling evidence (projects) of how you meet the requirements.
It's amazingly clear if the resume is not written for a specific job and will most likely be immediately discarded from consideration. So why bother sending all of them then?
More time on less applications leads to more interviews
please use PINEAPPLE in subject line so I can find you easily.
For me, every job after my first one (15 years ago) has been via reaching out to the people I have worked with before. Do you have people you have worked with who are at new places?