5 ms·

Ask HN: What job search strategies work for you?

• brudgers 2y ago
  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.
  • toast0 2y ago
    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.
  • staticautomatic 2y ago
    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.
    • brudgers 2y ago
      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.
    • andyjohnson0 2y ago
      ATS?
      • ostaquet 2y ago
        Applicant Tracking System
    • guinn8 2y ago
      Hey, I wanted to thank you for this advice! A recruiter from my dream company reached out to me on LinkedIn yesterday about an opportunity. Before responding, I remembered this specific comment and took the following steps: 1. Applied for the job within 30 minutes of the recruiter reaching out. 2. Replied to the recruiter, requesting a quick phone call the next day. This approach worked beautifully! I just got off the call, and it looks like I’ll likely be doing a technical interview early next week
• giantg2 2y ago
  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
  • samuelson 2y ago
    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.
    • craftkiller 2y ago
      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.
      • gcheong 2y ago
        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.
    • giantg2 2y ago
      Unemployment is only temporary.
      • readyplayernull 2y ago
        You mean not a binary state?
  • 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• blueyes 2y ago
  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.
  • vdvsvwvwvwvwv 2y ago
    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.
    • jameshush 2y ago
      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.
      • polishdude20 2y ago
        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.
• MrVandemar 2y ago
  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.
  • roland35 2y ago
    I've never put my fire extinguisher skills on my resume... No wonder I didn't get any call backs!
    • MrVandemar 2y ago
      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.
      • defrost 2y ago
        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: Ensure installed fire equipment is suitable for specific fire risks at your workplace (eg foam or dry powder type extinguishers for fires that involve flammable liquids, Carbon dioxide extinguishers for electrical fires). Install signage so people can find fire equipment quickly and identify what type of fire it can be used on. ~ https://www.fire.nsw.gov.au/page.php?id=73 https://www.fire.nsw.gov.au/page.php?id=73 Nothing about only trained people can touch the extinguisher.
• tetris11 2y ago
  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.
  • readyplayernull 2y ago
    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.
• Euniceconfort 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • yurishimo 2y ago
    Is this spam?
• ozim 2y ago
  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.
• dirtbag__dad 2y ago
  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!
• Ocerge 2y ago
  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.