The art of finding referrals and landing job interviews on LinkedIn | Hacker News Reader

The art of finding referrals and landing job interviews on LinkedIn

tanayagrawal.substack.com

I don't know. It seems easier and more fruitful to build some cred (not even that much) on stackoverflow, then sit down and watch job offers pop up in your inbox without any further effort on your side.

If you follow this path the positive side effect is that you will probably have helped at least a few hundreds of people with your questions/answers. You are actually doing something concrete, making yourself professionally more appealing for the rest of the world at the same time.

On the other hand it won't probably land you a FAANG job (who knows?), but it feels to me like a lot of time wasted on LinkedIn without any positive return for yourself, the tech community or even the world. Just time and energy spent trying to get the attention of some recruiter. Let them come to you instead.

Can you speak a bit to your experience with recruiters reaching out to you on Stack Overflow? How frequently do you get reached out to? Do they usually mention that they noticed you on SO? Are all the jobs they are looking to fill specific to the questions you answered on SO? Thanks!

> Can you speak a bit to your experience with recruiters reaching out to you on Stack Overflow? How frequently do you get reached out to?

It's mostly a matter of quality over quantity. On SO I got 4 job offers since September, all of them viable and decent offers, all from recruiters internal to the company who would hire me. On Linkedin instead I get more messages, but most of them are from hunters working for 3rd party agencies, or just very low quality offers/business proposals.

> Do they usually mention that they noticed you on SO? Are all the jobs they are looking to fill specific to the questions you answered on SO?

To be fair not really. I suspect it's a combination of what you advertise in your developer story and your reputation on the platform. That's how I would do it at least. Of course any recruiter looking up to your developer story can also check your question/answers, it's public data anyway.

This is a great perspective! Thank you for sharing. I guess this applies more to dev roles though and tough to do for product management roles. Thoughts? Are there platforms where you could build credibility like SO for PMs?

I agree, what I wrote applies only to developers/technical roles as far as I know. I don't really know how it would work for a management position.

I am not sure if the referrals are that useful. For the last few months I applied to around 50 companies and all the companies with higher bars ignored my application and all the expected companies proceeded with it. My referrals basically did nothing. It certainly didn't help with the interview process since the companies only care about the interview performances.

I think it depends on your skillset, experience, and overall repertoire. There will be many hiring managers trying to get in contact with you. Well, this depends on what type of job or niche you're in.

Resume screen is definitely the hardest part for most regular devs (aka those without a start up or faang) but once you get one on your resume, the next is usually a breeze.

But hey--maybe shotgun approach works.

This post speaks to the persistent inefficiency of this market.

Shouldn't take this much to connect compatible employees and employers.

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