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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

Find a good recruiter and put a solid profile on LinkedIn. The difference is night and day.

> Find a good recruiter

I'm going to throw my voice into the ring on this specific line; recruiters get a bad name (often deservedly), but I found my current job (coming up on 3 years) through a local recruiter that contacted me. The whole job search once they got involved turned into an incredibly fast, easy process; they were great about finding companies that matched up with my skills/conditions, they even did some salary negotiation (which I am terrible at).

It was a really positive experience. I'm not going to say every recruiter would be like that, I'm sure many (even the majority) are not. But if you're looking for a job and having a lot of difficulty just finding places to apply, think about finding a recruiting firm to help.

Do make sure:

- A) that you aren't required to apply through them for every job. My recruiter let me keep applying for my own jobs on the side while they scouted out.

- B) that they actually have some domain knowledge about the industries you're applying to.

- C) that they're actually meeting with you and putting in some effort to understand what your goals are, not just trying to pressure you into taking every job offer that pops up.

I think if you're already a qualified programmer, recruiters can fill in a lot of the groundwork of finding out who's hiring and getting your resume in front of companies, and that just increases the number of options you have. I expected to completely hate the process and instead I came away feeling like it had made my life a lot easier and a lot less stressful.

Seconding linkedin, got my current job passively through recruiters reaching out to me and taking interviews with ones that sounded interesting.

Same, for both my current and previous. The two before that were via a recruiter relationship. Before that was through a friend who works there, and before that was a de facto apprenticeship, also via a friend already there. I have never gotten a job in this industry by submitting a resume cold. From this I conclude that the point is not to need to.

You need the LinkedIn profile to look good both to humans and to robots, and a worthwhile recruiter will give you substantial help tuning both that and your resume because these will both help them place you, which is how they get paid. Make sure a new recruiter clearly understands this and is happy that you clearly understand it, too. Those who fail this test are not the ones you want to work with.

It will be harder to work with top-tier recruiters if you're working your way up and not yet established. That's not fair, but it's the way of the world, and as always you mistake the ought for the is at your peril. If you're smart and capable, just not yet tested and proven, the ideal is to find a recruiter who will invest in helping you develop. This is tricky and I lucked into it. The best advice I can offer there is, bigger firms with deeper pockets are more likely able to support that.

The unequivocally good news is that there is a lot of interest, money, and good roles sloshing around the market right now. While that's less good for a newer junior than for a proven senior, it is still good for us all.

Don't wait. The article compares the tech industry labor market to the housing market, which I think is accurate. It also compares now with the boom before the 2000-2001 crash, and I think that is accurate too. We can reasonably predict another crash. We cannot reasonably predict when. So get while the getting is good.

The recruiters I get reaching out to me through Linkedin rarely tell enough about the job to make it interesting.

They usually give you info like size of company, stage of company and general business area the company is in, which is usually enough to know if you want to set up a 15 min call with the recruiter and ask more details like the company name so you can look it up and see for yourself what they do.

I've had calls with recruiters; during the call, I told them "that's not something I'm looking for and thanks for your time" and moved on.

I've also had multiple late-stage interviews that started this way and my current job was found this way.

do you have any tips for finding a good recruiter? I've never actually searched for one. I get recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn and they are pretty bad in my opinion. The ones I've followed up with know very little about the job they are hiring for and trying to get useful answers back from them is a giant pain.

Select the best-looking roles from the contacts you get, then audition the recruiters. Depending on your experience, this may mean relying on your gut. It also means meeting in person if possible, or at least on the phone. You want synchronous communications and the highest semantic bandwidth you can get. If they won't give you half an hour, that alone is a huge red flag. There's some other pointers in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029857

Keep searching and hang on to the ones who are funny and genuine. I've failed to get a job with an awesome recruiter and ended up getting placed with them for a different role 12 years later.

None of them know tech but a few of them are smart enough to understand that they don't know tech and to focus on mastering the social market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com