I'm keeping a job search diary on my blog | Hacker News Reader

I'm keeping a job search diary on my blog

letmypeoplecode.com

131 pointsburgerguyg44 comments

Good luck on the search! Particularly curious to hear your experience with recruiters; even though that industry should be really competitive at the moment with the great resignation and all, I've found they still feel kind of general and don't necessarily make great matches. But that certainly could just be my own limited experience with them, maybe the key is to find niche recruiters?

Not sure if you're interested in startups at all, but shameless plug: I recently made a startup jobs board[0], it tracks number of job posts each company has over time and ranks them so you can see how much each is growing.

[0] https://www.coolstartupjobs.com

What are you using for text search? Looks like Algolia to me. Did you roll your own?

I'm using typesense (https://www.typesense.org), a really great open source alternative to algolia. I'm using their cloud offering, but you can self-host as well, it's awesome!

For my own part, I've found that a lot of recruiters operate like used-car salespeople. They don't really know what they're selling or care who they're selling it to. They operate by relying on phone-sales skills and trying to control your information to get you where they can talk about this great chance to get in on the ground floor of this faced-paced mission-driven work environment with great benefits and unlimited PTO. While doing their best to avoid telling you the comp.

I've started refusing to take phonecalls from recruiters who cannot give me JD, comp, and remote-friendliness. This basic stuff seems to scare off about 80% of them.

It's crazy that we're living in the world of (almost) infinitely available information, big data etc. in 2022, but recruiters are still often secretive and shady.

For the general audience, let me drop some advice here that helped me during my job search:

- I knew what I was looking for (remote-friendly tech startups with their own product). I suggest you think this through as well.

- No Linkedin profile! Really, not needed unless want a corporate job. (Though I have a tiny and mostly neglected personal website which is appreciated by most companies.)

- Browse and actively follow dozens of job boards like the one in parent comment. DuckDuckGo is your friend. In a few days or weeks, you'll find out your 'taste' in terms of jobs that interest you and easily filter out mediocre offers.

- Draw boundaries and put your bar high. Know your desired compensation range and ask right away if not indicated. Reject take-home homework, leetcode interviews etc. if you don't like them. The interview process tells a lot about the company culture and you're also getting to know that company, not just the other way.

- Work on your resume! An investment that pays back like wonders. It also makes you much better prepared for interviews. There are some very useful books out there like "The Tech Resume Inside Out". Best $20 I've ever spent.

This way, you have total control in your job search and will have zero awkward HR phone calls. Though I admit that if you're looking for corporate jobs, a Linkedin profile might help. Also, if you're looking for MANGA etc. jobs, you'll need a totally different approach.

Shameless plug: I'm currently working for a no-code process automation tool startup called Process Street (https://www.process.st/), and we're hiring. :)

While I mostly do ignore recruiters that don't put all the information upfront, I think there might be a couple reasons why they do that:

- Incomplete information is provided purposefully to get you to the next step of the funnel which is a phone call

- They don't want competition to narrow down who their client might be

- Possibly they are trying to lowball potential candidates (has happened to me)

Or maybe... some of them are just simply incompetent. Looking both at my inbox and a several LinkedIn groups with jobs that I run, I do wonder how some of those opportunities are getting any replies.

On the bright side though I have interacted with some recruiters that really know what they're doing. It's not a big group but it's worth remembering who they are.

It's frustrating, the number of recruiters who don't provide the job description and compensation - even when directly asked for them.

I keep "Can you please send me the job description and pay rate, so I can let you know if I'm interested?" in a text file, so I can easily copy-paste it.

I also created a web page, to send a link to the most annoying recruiters (https://hellotechrecruiters.com/), but haven't used it - yet.

Thank you! I will 100% start using this now.

How does someone at a startup add his company to this list?

Want to email me at hi@coolstartupjobs.com? Just let me know the site and I'll add you.

Thanks. Actually checked it out and found one interesting opening and one I'll be talking about today because of a radically bad candidate experience.

I managed to land a well paying job with good work life balance by changing my approach to job seeking. Here's what I did.

1. I tracked all incoming offers in a spreadsheet with a column for salary and equity 2. I responded to every incoming lead on LinkedIn with 'what is the salary band for this role?' and 'how did you find my profile? What did you like about it?'

This allowed me to build a distribution of jobs available to me, and then I only ever took calls with the top 1% of those offers.

I must've spoken to 150 recruiters on chat, but I only interviewed for 6 companies and secured 4 offers.

I kept iterating on my LinkedIn based on the feedback from the initial chat interaction and very quickly I was getting really good leads.

I put in about 100h work over a year to get to that point. I still, 3 years later, regularly get offers with >200k GBP base compensation now.

EDIT: I forgot to add a key factor. When the recruiter responds with a salary that is below the top 1% you reply: 'Thank you, but I am currently only able to consider salaries with a base comp of at least X, please get back in touch with me if you find something in that range." - X being your current estimate of the top 1-5% of the distribution.

I’m curious what you learned and how you optimized your profile.

£200k? I had no idea UK salaries were up to that sort of level.

When people tell me they think all they can in the UK is £28k or something, I point them at jobs boards like Oxford Knight https://oxfordknight.co.uk/jobs/. You'll easily find £200+ base on there.

While this is surely feasible (especially in London) I wonder how many of those outliers are marketing baits for recruitment agencies to collect CVs.

I know a couple of people who have worked successfully with Oxford Knight, otherwise I wouldn't recommend them.

Skilled senior engineers working for hedge funds or in low latency trading can get paid that much but I've never seen tech salaries that high in any other industry in the UK.

What kind of roles are you applying for that go up to £200K?

At Architect level, I think the highest I've seen are around £125K + bonuses.

The roles that I get approached for that pay 200k+ are mostly in Finance (quelle surprise) or DeFi. I regularly see golang and c++ roles paying 175k+ outside of Finance too though. Some tech roles typically fall between 120-150k with the odd outlier. And yet other roles come in at 60-80k.

I'm pretty sure the distribution of salaries are multimodal, even when you discount finance.

Salary aside, IMO the higher paying jobs are also the more attractive ones when it comes to remote work, holiday allowance, and (I suspect) technical maturity.

I'd read a whole blog post on this! I'd love to see how you've setup your linked-in and example spreadsheet.

A bleak and honest look into the current job market but also hilarious and relatable. Every recruiter I've been contacted by always seems confused about some aspect of whatever job they are trying to find interviewees for.

Some/most recruiters seem to be just handed a job spec and told to get on with it.

I asked a few of them recently about simple things like how many were on the team, out whether it's a remote position, and they simply didn't know.

This, to me at least, is a red flag of a dysfunctional company culture, probably siloed and entrenched departments not communicating.

I have had convos like this:

Do you know React? "Yes."

Do you know React hooks? Yes.

Do you know JavaScript? "Well, it is what you use for React."

Do you know JavaScript? Yes or no?

Lots of them just have a keyword list.

This explains why a lot of them feel like poorly generated AI. Thank you for the insight :)

My last job search was so frustrating it caused me to become self-employed.

So be careful, it could happen to you too!

This... I managed to find a good position in the end but the whole process just reminded me what is important in the long-term...

Put a resume on Monster if you really want to feel wanted by a bunch of terrible options. I get some 30 recruiters a day from a resume I dumped on there out of curiosity.

I did. I'm also tracking those in a spam section of each update.

If you want REALLY bad options, post to Career Builder. Last time I did, I got approached about jobs in insurance sales, door-to-door sales, and cashing checks for forging rings.

I contacted someone at a well known large firm back at the start of May last year about a role. Filled out loads of forms online. Heard nothing.

Yesterday I got an email inviting me to arrange an interview, wondering if I'd still be available, and asking me for my salary expectations.

Sometimes you wonder how these firms work at all.

For those looking, my experience is that virtually all aggregator sites like efinancial and LinkedIn are black holes for applications. Just find the person who put up the advert and contact them directly. You can often see how many applicants there are and from there you can extrapolate how much time there really is to look at CVs. It's not good, but also it's impossible for all the CVs to be relevant. I've been on the hiring side myself and I can tell you there's a heck of a lot of people who apply for jobs they can't get.

People say a lot of things about third party recruiters but I keep in touch with a good few of them. They have certain benefits, mainly that you can straight up ask them about salary and they know a lot of firms who don't advertise.

yeah, thats the problem there are to many people that apply that dont meet the requirements. my colleague made a mistake about sending rejections and we got a negative google rating. so as little information as posibile should go out. nothing more.

Twilio did that to me. I applied in Jan 2021. Heard back in May. I had begun interviewing and was about to get my first offer. The HR had the gall to say she can't offer nearly that much but I should interview anyway. I did interview, only to see how the process would go for a Developer Evangelist.

I aced the interviews but there was a week between each interview- even after telling the HR about the now nearing joining date. I got a call one day before my joining date at a new company and was told that Twilio would pay about 20% more. I didn't take it. The HR sounded like money would buy anything. Maybe I was wrong. But I feel I did the right thing.

Good luck! Make sure to get your resume done correctly. It won’t get you the job, but it helps get you accepted for interviews.

I wrote “How to write a great technical resume” here: https://www.leetresumes.com/blog/how-to-write-a-great-techni...

I think he's good on the resume...https://bulmash.com/04-10-97.html

Good one. Thinking of using some of these one liners. Which one should I go with

Definitely the "sign here" line. Throw in your Meyers Briggs type for good measure ;)

Missing field:

Sex: Yes, please.

Thanks for keeping a open diary. I am wondering if you find the big banner ad on your website worth the extra money, it makes the blog feel like a spam website.

Exactly my thought. For added hilarity, I got recruiter ads when I visited.

Diary is interesting, though.

I just installed Google's plugin. Used to be that they only put ads in the sidebar, but this is new. OTOH, I made like $13 bucks overnight with the traffic this drove. :-)

I'll look at my options to control location in the plugin. Right now it's just letting them "optimize" placement.

Mostly, I've had a half dozen blogs over the last 26 years. This might feel spammy because I recently migrated from a static site back to WordPress, and have been slowly adding back old content from that site and the one it replaced, so there's not a ton of content right now.

> Posted on January 18, 2022 by Greg Bulmash

Job hunting two weeks into the first month of the quarter, yikes. This is going to make for an interesting read.

People are ALWAYS hiring and January can be good because the headcount they got approved for 2022 is just getting opened up.

Checked today and no. Update for 19th and 20th. Kinda disappointed. Was looking forward for my daily motivation

My mistake. I needed to go to main website and select appropriate pages instead of the link in the post

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