I interviewed with a quite promising company beginning of December, only to immediately get the written feedback (after the first call) of
"Well I know a lot of SWE in this town and none of them are struggling to find a job - so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, we've already signed a contract with someone else in the 5 days since we last spoke."
(To be fair to them - I had mentioned how frustrating it was to simply get "no" as negative hiring feedback and asked them to elaborate if at all possible)
I take it as a "well, bullet dodged" moment, but I am not going to lie and say it didn't sting.
I think letting them know you are currently unemployed is a mistake. Frankly your current state of affairs is not their business. You can always tell them that you are ok but looking for a better job. Very simple and understandable. Yes it is a lie but it is the only reasonable option. Telling perspective employer to sod off and not to stick their nose into your internal situation is not going to do you any good. Telling that you are out of job and looking will immediately put you into unfavorable position. Treat yourself as a business in this particular case. Businesses have zero problems lying to each other / their employees for as long as it does not break a law.
It is absolutely trivial.
>"but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job"
Your last job unless it is 10 years old should provide all of the answers. Any really identifying details should not be asked / answered as the employee is normally under NDA.
Same for references. Reference from "current job" can simply be refused. I can hardly imagine employee going to their boss and asking for a job reference while still working.
Anyways I am independent and run my own company. Maybe I am not up to date about how deep the US employers are able to stick their fingers up that proverbial hole.
These fall perfectly into experience with last job. Does not have to be current. And all those questions you asked are trivial. Also I've never dealt with the recruiters. I have always searched and found perspective companies myself and no they were not Amazon big type. If I could not speak with the owner I would simply walk away - not my kind of place.
My first programming job in Canada - I just simply walked into the office and asked to speak to the owner (I knew it was small 20 person consultancy).
Since 2000 I am on my own but I still find clients and have interviews. Just a different type of interview of course.
Also in this case I really don't mind disclosing - I was laid off because my position was made redundant entirely.
Don’t do this! You’re inviting feedback from someone who is basically a complete stranger, who has an undisclosed set of “standards” they’re judging you against, and who might not actually be very good at assessing talent. The odds of getting a “false signal” are high.
Sometimes people just genuinely tell you things like "there wasn't enough detail about X on your CV, but we took a chance and called you anyway" - that tells me that I can improve my chances for a callback in the future by adding more detail (if I get that same feedback 2-3 times).
You're right though in that a looooooooot of hiring people also have no clue what they want to see.
For what it's worth, I thought the same. I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.
In this past search, I applied to about 50 jobs and had 4 interviews. According to LinkedIn stats, most of those jobs had 30-200+ applicants. The results of those applications were:
~12 screens with recruiters that resulted in rejection
~ 8 rejections w/no conversations
~20 no reply whatsoever
~ 3 rejects in first round
- 1 second round reject
- 1 final round reject (a nearly 2 month process!)
- 1 offer for about 50% of my previous salary, but a more more interesting role
- 2 replies indicating a desire to move forward that came 6 weeks after my application, and after I'd accepted a job.
If I didn't have enough money to pay for food/rent, I would take the first offer. Fortunately, I've never been in that situation.
> I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.
If you're thinking about the distinction between FAANG and not FAANG, then we are talking about completely different levels of _okay_. I'm talking about non-tech companies, where you'd most likely be working on internal tools or whatever. Maybe you'd be writing crappy Jira/Confleunce/whatever plugins. Or gluing together one internal system to another internal system, etc.
I consider _okay_ to mean a job that pays enough money to cover rent/food.
Go on monster.com (or any other job search site), type in "programmer" (or "<language> programmer" if you only have experience in a single language) and start applying. If you don't recognize the company name or what they do, that's good. If you're looking for a consultancy gig, then you probably want to look out for keywords like "government" or "client". If you're looking for a non-tech company, then you need to google the company name and see what field their in.
If you know Java, you can probably search for "Jira programmer" or "Jira developer" and find a pretty cushy gig writing those. If you know PHP, then search for "wordpress developer". If it's python, search "Django developer" etc.
I've looked mainly on LinkedIn and some smaller job boards, not Monster or Indeed or Dice or any of those.
Another thing is that I'm avoiding complex applications, the ones where you're immediately asked to create an account and once you do they ask you for a ton of information like every job you've had in your life. Are the jobs you're talking about often gated behind these applications?
Most likely, you'll start to recognize the different software companies use to track job applications.
My only experience was helping someone out when they got laid off. They had a mortgage to pay, a new born and a wife that quit her job to look after the new born.
Being picky about job application software wasn't a the top of our list. I think we applied to over 500 ads over the course of a few days, basically every single commutable job. I think from those, there were 20 interviews and 3 offers.
Some of the software automatically scans your CV and populates stuff. If it can't do it properly, restructure your CV until it can. You might need a few different CVs for different software.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you don't sound very serious. Or at least not desperate (which is probably a good thing).
If you're looking for a job full time, you should spend a few hours a day grinding leetcode and a few hours a day filling in those shit applications. Obviously I don't know you or you situation, I have no idea if this is good advice for you or not.
I don't care about the software as such, but so far I'm not desperate enough to provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong, just to maybe get the first 30 minute phone call from a recruiter. On top of this is the simple logic that any employer that puts up all these barriers is probably not really interested in hiring anyway. More work for less reward, so that my time would be better spent looking for more likely positions.
That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.
Pretty much, around 5 minutes per application.
>provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong
Either you're completely overthinking it and you can just omit a bunch of stuff, or you're applying to some job that requires security clearance and they use those questions to prescreen. I remember the application for some defense contractor was too painful and we gave up.
But if it's some standard jobvite or whatever form, just fill it in. Only include relevant tech jobs and your university education (if you have a degree) and move on.
If it's really that big a deal for you, shortlist 50 jobs from those job search sites. Then go to /r/slavelabour and pay someone $15 bucks to apply for you (given your CV and email).
> That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.
It's more likely that at some point that bought a license for the applicant tracking software and they'll use it forever. They probably have it on some default settings so it's not the best for tech jobs. That doesn't mean they aren't serious about hiring.
But those job aggregator sites are a bit shit, they'll have listings for jobs that are already filled or no longer available.
These are also the sorts of positions I think people are talking about when they talk about HR being a barrier, filtering on keywords, or how important it is to network around them before applying. So I don't think it's a matter of the company being stuck with software they can't do anything about, instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so. I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.
This is the most standard thing ever. The ycombinator job board[0] works the exact same way. No one is going to fire you if you leave out that you worked at Pizza Hut when you were younger. They will fire you if you claim to have worked at Google but never actually did. Or if you claim N years of experience in some technology despite never using it. Just make sure your CV matches what you enter into the software and that you're not lying on your CV, that's it.
> I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.
I have experience working on the recruiting side of a fairly large company that used Jobvite (which is why I mentioned it, first piece of software I could think of) for their application tracking system. It asked you the same sort of questions, even some really stupid ones like your Myers Briggs personality type, despite me arguing very strongly against it.
Yes, HR would do some filtering, they probably filtered out good candidates and let many bad ones through to the next stage to get filtered by the hiring people. This shouldn't stop you from applying, who cares if you get filtered out by HR at X% of the time? You'll get through 100-X% of the time, and if you apply to a lot of places, that'll be a lot of people looking at your CV. An application should not take you longer than 5-10 minutes, it's not a big investment of time.
> instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so
Yes, the hiring process will be shit. But it's not intentionally hostile, it's "hostile" because that's the way it's always been and there's too much momentum to change it. I'm certain the Myers Briggs questions turned off many good candidates. I would immediately close a job application if it was asking stuff like that (assuming I wasn't desperate). But the company was genuinely looking to hire good people. I feel like you underestimate how difficult it is to change anything at a large company where tech is a cost center :).
There are many tech jobs out there that just ask you to send in a resume and cover letter and answer some questions. Saying it's technically possible to get an interview from sending out an unfocused 5-10 minute application to a big corporation using something like Taleo is not a strong argument in itself to do that.
I think it's like for successful startups: luck, luck and luck.
edit: And for having been on the hiring side a bit: I know luck's involved, more than people think or - worse - than they want to admit.
I think you can go faster if you use third-party recruiters, as much as I often despise them. Try to pick out one or two individuals within recruiting firms that are not awful. They're out there. Recruiters are given the jobs that corporations need a warm body to fill now.
Yes, you can absolutely always quit that un-ideal job and completely omit it from your resume. I don't see the wrong role as a good reason to turn down a job when you have bills to pay.
My other feedback on this article:
I wish it generally talked about unemployment insurance. It can be a complicated process, and I wonder if the author had any success there.
#1 should is a part of the basic life skill of understanding the difference between coworkers and friends. I do have friends that started as coworkers, and they did a lot more than help with the mechanics of getting laid off. I do agree that it's not a life skill that is taught very well.
If you want to turn coworkers into lasting friends, you need to be proactive and invite them to do things outside of work.
#3, I'm just not sure I agree with it. Getting interviews is an excellent indicator. At the very least it means that your resume is attractive. I don't think it's very common for companies to waste their own employees' time interviewing people for roles they aren't serious about filling.
My rule of thumb is that if you get beyond the recruiter and talk to the hiring manager, the company is serious and intends to fill the role. Maybe they get around to it or maybe not, we all know how priorities can change.
#5 seems like a waste of time. Either you know someone who is a hiring manager or you know someone who can refer you through a company's referral system. I think those are the only two activities that are productive. I wouldn't want to get any of those requests in my LinkedIn Inbox.
Writing open source software is a waste of time with respect to job hunting unless you are looking to build a portfolio. Your time is better used physically applying for jobs (which takes a legitimately solid amount of time).
#6, totally agree with that. The author absolutely overshared, and should have known better. Corporations want to know that you can keep secrets. Transparency is almost never in the best interest of a company.
As I mentioned above, I'd only agree with #7 if you have runway/a spouse earning income.
I'd almost replace #8 with "enjoy being laid off." Spend some days doing activities meant for joy, especially if you've exhausted your job application pipeline for the moment. I'm almost hoping I get laid off, I love not working, and I loved all the stuff I got to do the last time I was laid off. I played two video games the whole way through and read an entire novel, which are things I rarely get through when I'm employed.
Also it pains me a little for you to say that reading one book is a big sign of having lots of free time. Maybe you're not a huge reader but I hope you normally do stuff you enjoy, reading or not, whether you're employed or not, if you don't mind my saying so.
Basically, the fact that I had enough free time to finish a book and do all the things I like to do higher on my list was one of the joys of unemployment.