Ask HN: What job search strategies work for you?
I’ve been laid off since June and have not been getting responses from most of my applications other than denials. I have 10+ years mostly Ruby/React/JS. New just working on a side project (job listing scraper) but curious what is working well for you? Specific apps or strategies that lead to your hiring?
My current version of "it's not who you know, it's ..." ends with "it's who wants to work with you again." Which is another way of saying that whether you're moving up, down or sideways on a job, doing good work and treating people professionally goes a hell of a long way to increasing your luck surface later on.
I love to see how this works in practice. Most jobs seem to be gated by various interviews and maybe panels. At lower levels it doesnt seem knowing someone is an advantage beyond avoiding the circular file. Smashing the interview seems key. I have seen at higher levels (higher EM levels) yeah people move as a tribe.
Two people I know, one friend and one family member, landed jobs this year in a tough market due to the reputation they had built for themselves.
The friend is a programmer. He used to work in CGI, gained a reputation in animated film, and decided to leave it. People he had known for years convinced him to apply for a role in gaming. He wasn't a typical candidate, but the insiders he knew vouched for his skills and volunteered to onboard him, so he effectively switched industries.
The family member is a nurse. She holds an NP with a midwifery specialization. She was based in a large Western city and couldn't land a job for many months after she got her license. Every clinic wanted someone with 1-2 years one the job experienced.
When she finally applied for a role in the small mountain town where she had done her clinical training, the people she had interned for put their reputations on the line with the folks hiring at the clinic. The job offer documents were ready before she walked out of her interview.
These people are both conscientious and hard workers, but they were each making a leap of sorts. One to a new sector that also needed his skills, and another starting her career and in need of a couple years training post diploma. In both cases, people who had the ear of the hiring manager staked their repuations so that they would be hired.
Anecdote from me: I jumped from leading an engineering team for an online virtual events company to working as a solutions engineer for a WebRTC vendor.
They asked for a reference from my previous CEO.
I had left on good terms (gave 4 weeks' notice) and was incredibly professional while working with the previous CEO, so I got a glowing reference. If I had been an ass, it'd be unlikely I'd have gotten such a great reference and got this job. ~6 months later, we even scored my previous CEO as a customer.
The tech world is SMALL. Especially if you niche down career-wise, it's possible to find yourself in a situation where only a couple hundred people worldwide have the same expertise as you. At that level, people would instead work with people they know or have strong references from people they know.
Fun story: I quit my previous job due to health reasons (as far as everyone there knew). I later hear from a friend who works there that during the retro the CEO just said "He couldn't handle the small amount of work that was on his plate." I had never had a one on one with this guy since I started working. He didn't exit interview me. Just a piece of shit truly.
He must have been terrified that people would follow. That’s one of the things about the workplace - the second you’re out the door you don’t matter. He even had the temerity to show everyone around you how they’d be treated if they left. Culture of authority and fear. It’ll come to every company eventually (and spreads like wildfire whenever people hire from Amazon)
Every day multiple people post on LinkedIn “my team is hiring a <your role here>.” You can search for this on the main search bar “hiring a <role>” or variations of that.
Connect with them on the LinkedIn desktop web app and include a personal note how you’re interested in the role.
I have had a lot of success-maybe something like 30%+ interviews from the cold outreach.
Worth noting I was targeting early stage startups who are more likely to engage with any interested candidate. These folks are also more motivated to talk with you - they are literally posting hoping that it will happen.
For more mature companies apply through LinkedIn was actually fruitful for me too, but I had to be eagerly watching and ready to apply within the first few hours of posting.
You can also toggle on that you’re looking for a new job and recruiters should ping you if you have the right stuff in your profile - which is really just “software engineer” and use the keywords.
Good luck!
Two CVs stuck together.
One with all the robot text at the top with all the keywords for easy parsing by their automated services.
The next page should be a colourful tour through your life, that showcase your skills.
First one gets you through the door, and the second one makes you stand out.
This. It have also helped me to place keywords of niche stuff I play around with. This year I landed a completely random offer for a client of a company to which I sent my CV 3 years ago. And in general recruiters value tech curiosity.
You're not going to like this. My plan for when I get laid off or fired is to get a help desk job, or even at job at Walmart. If you can't get responses for what you want, you might need to do stuff you don't want to. That's most people's reality anyways
If they will hire an overqualified person, because they're wary of people who have options and can walk out suddenly.
You don’t need to tell anyone you’re overqualified for those types of jobs. It’s not like the manager at Taco Bell is checking references anyway.
Are you kidding they check credit ratings and will decide not to hire you if you have a GED at Taco Bell or many other min wage jobs. They absolutely will pull your history, just probably not check references.
Depending on your current salary, you might make more by collecting unemployment which has the benefit that you can make finding a job your full time job.
The max unemployment benefit in my state (NY) is $504/week for a maximum of 26 weeks. This adds up to $13k over half a year, or the equivalent of a full-time 40-hour per week job at $12.60/hour. So if you can collect the max benefits, you might beat a walmart job (though minimum wage where I live is higher at $15/hour) but I'd certainly hope that a help desk job pays more than that.
I would expect most software dev jobs to hit the maximum payout but assuming that Walmart/helpdesk job will always be there and you can cover health insurance then it seems to me it would be better to take the unemployment first and get paid to send off a few resumes and have the time to do other things instead and then get the help desk job if you need to.
Unemployment is only temporary.
You mean not a binary state?
Anything but blind applications. I know that's not useful information for a lot of people, but if you have experience, you _really_ need to lean on ex-coworkers that you had a good relationship with. Any way to not be a random resume is going to exponentially help your chances.
Additionally, depending on how desperate your search is, you need to be honest with yourself about remote work being a requirement. Ideally you shouldn't budge on it, but the reality is that capital owners have the leverage now vs a few years ago, and you have to play the game. But I would only budge on this if you absolutely need a job asap.
You get actually denials so you get responses? I still have my job but I was sending CV out just to check and I basically did not even get a single reply besides automated "thanks, we received your application".
It is also not that my CV sucks because in 2020 and 2021 I was sending out my CV and was getting calls or replies the next day.
1. Don't look for advertised jobs. Phone a place you want to work, find out who their hiring manager or whatever is, physically drop in a resume and cover letter addressed to that person.
2. Do a first aid course if you haven't done one. Out of two otherwise equal candidates, a first aid cert is a nice tie-breaker. Or a "how to use a fire extinguisher" course.
3. Go lateral. It's easier to get a job when you have a job. I found work as a medical receptionist/IT guy. Now they have a wiki, dynamic PDF forms, better typography, Open Office, spreadsheets for time-sheets, text expanding software, and on-the-ground tech support for paper jams, etc.
Have you tried getting a new job in the last 20 years? I'm a tech hiring manager and if someone tries to apply in person they are automatically dismissed since it's safe to assume they are not competent enough to read the clear instructions on how to apply on the website.
Also only happend like two times in my experience
Also why would any company care if you have a first aid course.
I think it entirely depends on the market you live in. If I was wanting to apply for a job at a local company in a midwestern college town, dropping by in person might be seen as folksy and community oriented. Dropping in to the 29th floor of a random building in Manhattan to drop off a resume might be taken as you described however.
The world is more complicated than always/never.
YMMV obviously. Context is important. I wouldn't apply to Google like that for example! But a local web-shop? Defintitely. And yeah, it is important to research first, such as checking if they have existing channels.
But never underestimate an in-person appearance. An resume is easy to chuck in the bin, a person is less easy to dismiss.
I've never put my fire extinguisher skills on my resume... No wonder I didn't get any call backs!
I'm not sure if you're being humourous, but in Australia in an office you are not permitted to touch a fire extinguisher unless you are trained in its use. Even if there's a fire.
I'm inclined to think that in some large office you were informed that they already have people trained to respond to fires in the building and you should leave it to them as they know the various colour codes, etc.
I'll even acknowledge that someone told you that you were not permitted (by whom, and on what authority?).
O/wise, after many years in Australia your statement sounds sketchy.
eg: In NSW:
~ https://www.fire.nsw.gov.au/page.php?id=73Nothing about only trained people can touch the extinguisher.
I live in a nanny state. :-/
It's still great training to know the various types of extinguisher, and how to correctly operate one. It's not as simple as "aim and press trigger".
Is there an actual state law forbidding untrained people to use an extinguisher though?
It sounds much more like a job site policy that trained staff must exist and that they must be the ones that respond first (to use the correct extinguisher, etc) .. but it's difficult to imagine actual rules forbidding on pain of penalty (firing, fine, jail) an untrained person to step up (in the absence of any trained person being present, etc).
I'm in and from WA, although I've travelled a great deal, and here there's a lot of encouragement to have St John's Ambulance training, to take fire safety courses, to join SES and local volunteer fire brigades, etc. and I've never yet heard of any such rule as if your not trained, don't touch an extinguisher.
Reaching out to everyone you have worked above, under, and beside is the best strategy (assuming you are not the kind of person people don't ever want to work with again).
To put it another way, with ten years experience a hiring professional might reasonably wonder why you are cold applying rather than working through a professional network. Or at least networking into the company org-chart before applying. [1]
And because any public job listing is going to be fire hosed with applications by people scraping, the hiring professional's job entails saying "no" on more than 99% of applications.
Therefore finding reasons to say "no" is mostly what they are going to do for very practical reasons. You might be a diamond in the rough, but being in the rough is almost certainly a good enough reason to not move your application forward in a saturated channel of applications.
Good luck.
[1]: If you identify someone within, reaching out and asking for an "informational interview" is a way of opening a conversation. An informational interview is where you can find out what a company is looking for in candidates. You need to be fly fishing, not chumming.
Adding on. Networking works. Niche job boards can work. Mass market job boards are a pretty bad experience for employer and employee; if you're in a pile of 100 applications, chances are good the decision manager is out of attention when they look at yours. You need something to get yours looked at; when you're new to the job market, that can be a cool side project; when you've been around for 10 years, it really should be your contact that put you in.
Contact everyone you've worked (or studied) with before that you'd at least consider working with again, and say something like "Hey Jabbs, I enjoyed working with you at [name of place], I'm looking for a new opportunity, are you/is your employer hiring or have you heard of any opportunities that might be a good fit for me? Thanks etc"
Looking for work is a slog, but send out at least ten of those a day, until you run out of people you can remember; and hopefully you'll get something moving.
Going forward, try to make sure to keep a list of people and contact information you work with that you'd like to work with again, on personal equipment/accounts, so that you can network more easily in the future.
As a hiring manager, I’d say rule #1 is “apply for the job” regardless of what else you do. If someone reaches out to me on LinkedIn for an informational interview or whatever and they’re not in my ATS, I don’t take the call. I cannot apply for you or move you through the process without an application.
Like I said, hiring managers are incentivized to say “no” but as I did not say clearly, informational interviews are a networking strategy, not a backdoor to job interviews.
They are a way of meeting someone on the inside.
ATS?
Applicant Tracking System
[flagged]
Is this spam?