
Job hunting tips - MarkPearce
https://www.markpearce.net/single-post/30-quick-and-simple-job-hunting-tips-for-job-seekers
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karmel
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.

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MarkPearce
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).

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karmel
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.

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MarkPearce
Thanks for your comments. Useful insights. One or two could be subjective, but
I realise the people reading the resumes will see things differently too. It
reads like the ATS you've used / seen can ID resumes and not kick them out. In
Australia, this is rarely the case. Even though it's 2017.

I'll review point 12. Good advice. Thank you.

It's still a work in progress and I'll be trying to reach 100 tips by the end
of this year.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Really appreciated.

Mark

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dforrestwilson
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?

~~~
rebeccaskinner
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_confli...](http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/barwick_conflicts_of_interest_and_the_realtor_commission_puzzle.pdf))

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.

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MarkPearce
Thanks for your great insight, Rebecca. Kind of you to answer this. I also
sent Forrest a response last night.

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bradknowles
This website doesn’t seem to work on iOS.

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oldboyFX
Just message the owner then. Why post this here?

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gus_massa
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.)

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MarkPearce
I did, Gus. I woke up in shock when I saw the comments and views. Thanks to
everyone. It's most appreciated.

