Hiring Cafe
hiring.cafe
hiring.cafe
If you are applying blindly to an ATS, you have already lost. Every remote job literally gets hundreds of applications and if your skill is generic - ie “full stack developer” or even “I can do leetCode and got into BigTech” - it’s hard to stand out from the crowd.
I don’t care if you said you were on the Amazon EC2 service team. I do care if you led a major feature on the EC2 service team and you can point to an YouTube video or a public blog post on AWS’s website explaining the feature.
I was looking for a job in both 2023 and last year. Both times my plan B was ordinary C#, Node or Python enterprise CRUD jobs where the company wanted AWS experience. I had 12 years of development experience on my resume (I’ve worked a lot longer) and 6 years of AWS experience including 3.5 working at AWS’s consulting department (Professional Services). I blindly submitted my resume to ATS’s far and wide including LinkedIn. Probably around 100 resumes.
I heard crickets. I never usually do this. But I didn’t have a job so why not?
On the other hand in three weeks…
I reached out to my network and that led to 2 full time offers and 1 short term contract.
I did a targeted outreach to two companies that had a “nice to have” experience implementing a popular open source official “AWS Solution” in its niche. Not only did I have experience with it, I was the third highest contributor at the time. This led to two interviews and one offer.
I accepted an offer within three weeks.
Last year when I was looking, it was about the same. But this time, I responded to an internal recruiter that reached out to me from the company I work for now. I got an offer again within three weeks.
As a bootcamp dev, with barely 3 yoe, I'm hitting around 10% response rate for recruiter screening (remote/hybrid positions). I put a boatload of hours honing and perfecting my resume + a few other strategies.
I think there's always a way to stand out as long as they don't follow advice/opinions from anonymous forums like HN or reddit. Lots of bad noise out on the internet.
2008 was the last time I had to randomly apply for jobs because I stayed at my second job for over 9 years and had no network.
The only time I randomly applied for jobs was last year and the year before even though I had no expectations of it working.
My response rate from using local external recruiters that I had built a relationship with (before 2020) has been 100%.
I had three rejections between 2012-2020. Post 2022, my response rate through recruiters, my network and targeted outreach, has still been 100%. My success rate has been 5/7 for getting an offer - around 70%.
As I moved up in my career, around 2014, they would actually meet me for lunch. In 2016, I started working with one of the same recruiters when I was in a hiring position to staff.
By then, when new to company managers, directors, CxOs (small companies) were looking for their first couple of hires and spoke to recruiters they knew, I became top of mind.
That was kind of my thing between 2012-2018.
When people say that remote work hurts early career people, this is one of the issues. People who have been in the industry for awhile can still lean on a network we built when people were working in the office and in the same city.
I have a few new people in my network since working remotely in 2020. But that wouldn’t even be the case if I hadn’t done a lot of business travel meeting coworkers between Covid lifting and late 2023.
I've probably used/gone through over 25 different hiring sites the past few months and most were awful to use or had some glaring flaw. I liked X jobs, but their filtering options are terrible. LinkedIn use to be quite nice, but now it's completed bloated with promoted jobs that you can't find a real job posting until page 5 or 6 (I never hear back from promoted positions, and often they're posted months prior so probably huge backlog).
- breaks the back button pretty badly - when I filter jobs it says seven results but really there are only two