5 ms·

Job hunting tips

13 points by MarkPearce 9y ago

bradknowles 9y ago
This website doesn’t seem to work on iOS.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- oldboyFX 9y ago
  Just message the owner then. Why post this here?
  - gus_massa 9y ago
    1) Many times the owner see the peak in the visits and come here to see the comments to reply. 2) The domain of the site is markpearce.net and the submitter is MarkPearce. My guess is that the owner submitted it. (It's ok to submit your own stuff here if it's interesting and you don't [re]submit too much.)
    - MarkPearce 9y ago
      I did, Gus. I woke up in shock when I saw the comments and views. Thanks to everyone. It's most appreciated.
- MarkPearce 9y ago
  Hey, Brad. This is an important issue. Thanks for raising it. I'll look into this ASAP. Does the page not load at all on handheld/desktop?
dforrestwilson 9y ago
I sent the writer an email but I'll go ahead and ask it here too: Where and how does one find a good recruiter?
- oldboyFX 9y ago
  The answer is probably similar to "where and how does one find a good developer"? I'd say that there's tons of crappy recruiters in the world and not enough great ones. Which means that the best recruiters probably only work with the best talent. I might be totally wrong about this though. Anyone?
- rebeccaskinner 9y ago
  I don't think in most cases you can. Even recruiters who are good people and technically savvy enough to help you find opportunities you want are at the whims of agencies, very large HR organizations, and the ups and downs of the market in the city they are focusing on. As far as I can tell, recruiters work best when you want to work at a large non-tech company, because smaller companies can rarely afford the finders fee, and tech companies are starting to move toward having recruiting in-house. You might luck out and find a mid-size tech company that is using a recruiter because they haven't built up internal recruiting yet and are growing faster than they can hire current employee's friends, but that's probably a small slice of the overall market. Recruiters also seem to work better for early to early-mid career folks (less than 5-7 years of experience). A lot of the work that they are doing is in the space of differentiating individual candidates, and using their personal relationships with hiring managers to get you an interview. If you're senior, with a decent github account and a reasonably impressive work history then there is honestly not much the recruiter is going to do to sell you, beyond maybe standardizing your resume into a familiar template or something- and you'd save a lot of money paying a fixed fee to a resume service if you need that. The final bit about having luck with recruiters is that it depends a lot on the technology you're using. There are recruiters who specialize in hard-to-find skills, but the majority of recruiters are hiring for whatever 3 technologies have the most keywords in their database. This is where the adverse incentives come in. Recruiters are hiring out of a very large talent pool, because they are focusing on tech that has the most hiring volume (so usually something that was popular a few years ago, everyone knows it now, and it's being used in a lot of existing or legacy applications). They are going to have mostly undifferentiated early-to-mid career folks out of a very large pool of people who know a very common technology. In that case, they are incentivized to maximize their own revenue, which means if they are on a finders fee they want to get butts into seats as quickly as possible, and if they are contract-to-hire they want to bring people in with the largest gap between the candidate and employer rate (they want to pay you as little as possible and charge the client as much as possible). You're essentially seeing the same problem that you have in realty (http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/barwick_conflicts_of_interest_and_the_realtor_commission_puzzle.pdf http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/barwick_confli...) As for the firms that specialize in hard-to-find talent, there are a slightly different set of problems. The specialty recruiters I've worked with have often worked a much broader set of clients, and have much more shallow insight into the actual workings of the company. Since companies hiring people for harder-to-find tech stacks seem to be much more selective about candidates and hiring fewer candidates, the relationships the recruiters have helps you less. Because the recruiters are placing fewer people they want higher margins on you, so you have more to prove as a candidate to ensure the companies think you are worth the price. I've also found, anecdotally, that when I've worked with specialty firms, they have a lot less insight into things like company culture than run-of-the-mill recruiters. Again, if you have specific experience you can point to of success using the tech that companies are hiring for, and the ability to actually do the market research to find companies that are hiring for what you want, I think you're better off going directly- but recruiters can help if you are trying to pivot into a new specialty.
karmel 9y ago
I disagree with many minor points here, but one strongly enough to comment: do not send your resume as a Word doc. Any modern tracking system parses PDFs, and Word docs make it look like you don’t know how to use a computer.
- MarkPearce 9y ago
  Sorry, you disagree with many minor points, Karmel. I'd be keen to get some comms going with you to learn where this needs tightening. Always happy to listen to people's views. I can be reached on welcome@markpearce.net (and I don't bite. Ever).
  - karmel 9y ago
    Sorry if I seemed too negative initially-- I was just typing on a phone :) For the sake of public record, I'll add a few notes here. "12. Don't be afraid to ask for the job after your interview..." Only, only do this if you can pull off suave confidence well, and if you are fairly certain that you killed the interview(s). It is very rare to have someone ace all interview segments in the modern tech interview (for better or for worse), and if someone were on the fence, but seemed to be so totally unaware as to ask for the job on the spot, I would be concerned about self-awareness. Not to mention that many companies have a review process anyhow, so it can seem naive to be over-confident. That said, perfectly fine to exhibit confidence about how the interview went-- I feel like this went well, I'm really excited, what are the next steps, etc. "20... You can type something like this: Project Manager - Actively seeking a new opportunity..." To each his/her own, but I would go one step further, and just avoid having "actively seeking" in the title anywhere. There is a lot of noise in LinkedIn messages, and I tend to ignore those that are too needy at the first outreach. "24. Write your resume in the same font. Write it in the same colour and sized font." If you don't know anything about type design, this is probably safe. But after a dozen or more resumes fly by, I don't mind a little pop of color or finesse :) "27. Leave photos or graphs out of your resume. These can confuse an employer's tracking system...." While I totally agree with the tip, I think the reason is wrong here. Many tracking systems are fine with photos. The real problem is that it's very jarring to see a photo on a resume, and feels too personal. Or heaven forfend, your marital status, which I have also seen. "30. Apply for jobs where you only have to upload your resume...." It's annoying, but some of the best employers in the tech industry still do this, so, probably a little premature to use this as a hard filter. Also, +1 to whitespace in resumes.

Job hunting tips

13 points by MarkPearce 9y ago

bradknowles 9y ago

This website doesn’t seem to work on iOS.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
oldboyFX 9y ago
Just message the owner then. Why post this here?
- gus_massa 9y ago
  1) Many times the owner see the peak in the visits and come here to see the comments to reply. 2) The domain of the site is markpearce.net and the submitter is MarkPearce. My guess is that the owner submitted it. (It's ok to submit your own stuff here if it's interesting and you don't [re]submit too much.)
  - MarkPearce 9y ago
    I did, Gus. I woke up in shock when I saw the comments and views. Thanks to everyone. It's most appreciated.
MarkPearce 9y ago
Hey, Brad. This is an important issue. Thanks for raising it. I'll look into this ASAP. Does the page not load at all on handheld/desktop?

dforrestwilson 9y ago

I sent the writer an email but I'll go ahead and ask it here too: Where and how does one find a good recruiter?

oldboyFX 9y ago
The answer is probably similar to "where and how does one find a good developer"? I'd say that there's tons of crappy recruiters in the world and not enough great ones. Which means that the best recruiters probably only work with the best talent. I might be totally wrong about this though. Anyone?
rebeccaskinner 9y ago
I don't think in most cases you can. Even recruiters who are good people and technically savvy enough to help you find opportunities you want are at the whims of agencies, very large HR organizations, and the ups and downs of the market in the city they are focusing on. As far as I can tell, recruiters work best when you want to work at a large non-tech company, because smaller companies can rarely afford the finders fee, and tech companies are starting to move toward having recruiting in-house. You might luck out and find a mid-size tech company that is using a recruiter because they haven't built up internal recruiting yet and are growing faster than they can hire current employee's friends, but that's probably a small slice of the overall market. Recruiters also seem to work better for early to early-mid career folks (less than 5-7 years of experience). A lot of the work that they are doing is in the space of differentiating individual candidates, and using their personal relationships with hiring managers to get you an interview. If you're senior, with a decent github account and a reasonably impressive work history then there is honestly not much the recruiter is going to do to sell you, beyond maybe standardizing your resume into a familiar template or something- and you'd save a lot of money paying a fixed fee to a resume service if you need that. The final bit about having luck with recruiters is that it depends a lot on the technology you're using. There are recruiters who specialize in hard-to-find skills, but the majority of recruiters are hiring for whatever 3 technologies have the most keywords in their database. This is where the adverse incentives come in. Recruiters are hiring out of a very large talent pool, because they are focusing on tech that has the most hiring volume (so usually something that was popular a few years ago, everyone knows it now, and it's being used in a lot of existing or legacy applications). They are going to have mostly undifferentiated early-to-mid career folks out of a very large pool of people who know a very common technology. In that case, they are incentivized to maximize their own revenue, which means if they are on a finders fee they want to get butts into seats as quickly as possible, and if they are contract-to-hire they want to bring people in with the largest gap between the candidate and employer rate (they want to pay you as little as possible and charge the client as much as possible). You're essentially seeing the same problem that you have in realty (http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/barwick_conflicts_of_interest_and_the_realtor_commission_puzzle.pdf http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/barwick_confli...) As for the firms that specialize in hard-to-find talent, there are a slightly different set of problems. The specialty recruiters I've worked with have often worked a much broader set of clients, and have much more shallow insight into the actual workings of the company. Since companies hiring people for harder-to-find tech stacks seem to be much more selective about candidates and hiring fewer candidates, the relationships the recruiters have helps you less. Because the recruiters are placing fewer people they want higher margins on you, so you have more to prove as a candidate to ensure the companies think you are worth the price. I've also found, anecdotally, that when I've worked with specialty firms, they have a lot less insight into things like company culture than run-of-the-mill recruiters. Again, if you have specific experience you can point to of success using the tech that companies are hiring for, and the ability to actually do the market research to find companies that are hiring for what you want, I think you're better off going directly- but recruiters can help if you are trying to pivot into a new specialty.

karmel 9y ago

I disagree with many minor points here, but one strongly enough to comment: do not send your resume as a Word doc. Any modern tracking system parses PDFs, and Word docs make it look like you don’t know how to use a computer.

MarkPearce 9y ago
Sorry, you disagree with many minor points, Karmel. I'd be keen to get some comms going with you to learn where this needs tightening. Always happy to listen to people's views. I can be reached on welcome@markpearce.net (and I don't bite. Ever).
- karmel 9y ago
  Sorry if I seemed too negative initially-- I was just typing on a phone :) For the sake of public record, I'll add a few notes here. "12. Don't be afraid to ask for the job after your interview..." Only, only do this if you can pull off suave confidence well, and if you are fairly certain that you killed the interview(s). It is very rare to have someone ace all interview segments in the modern tech interview (for better or for worse), and if someone were on the fence, but seemed to be so totally unaware as to ask for the job on the spot, I would be concerned about self-awareness. Not to mention that many companies have a review process anyhow, so it can seem naive to be over-confident. That said, perfectly fine to exhibit confidence about how the interview went-- I feel like this went well, I'm really excited, what are the next steps, etc. "20... You can type something like this: Project Manager - Actively seeking a new opportunity..." To each his/her own, but I would go one step further, and just avoid having "actively seeking" in the title anywhere. There is a lot of noise in LinkedIn messages, and I tend to ignore those that are too needy at the first outreach. "24. Write your resume in the same font. Write it in the same colour and sized font." If you don't know anything about type design, this is probably safe. But after a dozen or more resumes fly by, I don't mind a little pop of color or finesse :) "27. Leave photos or graphs out of your resume. These can confuse an employer's tracking system...." While I totally agree with the tip, I think the reason is wrong here. Many tracking systems are fine with photos. The real problem is that it's very jarring to see a photo on a resume, and feels too personal. Or heaven forfend, your marital status, which I have also seen. "30. Apply for jobs where you only have to upload your resume...." It's annoying, but some of the best employers in the tech industry still do this, so, probably a little premature to use this as a hard filter. Also, +1 to whitespace in resumes.