
Ask HN: How did you find your last job? - yarper
I&#x27;m looking currently and wondering the most efficient way to do it. Based near London, open to contract&#x2F;perm &amp; remote.<p>Edit; what I&#x27;m really wondering is if there&#x27;s a place I can go that I pay the money to and they find jobs I might be interested in, for places I don&#x27;t yet know about.
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twunde
Make sure to keep in contact with old coworkers, especially if they've moved
on to other companies. I've gotten contract work from former coworkers and
actually got my first job because my boss' boss found out that I did some
development and he was working with another startup that was looking for a
junior programmer.

Otherwise I've had some success with recruiters, but the quality of the
recruiter does matter.

~~~
yarper
I've had hit and miss results with recruiters too, and by large prefer to
avoid them if possible. They tend to want to pick you up and shoehorn you into
anywhere they can.

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probinso
Find videos from conferences with technologies you are interested in. Watch
any / all talks from that conference. Take note of company behind each
interesting talk.

You know that the company is trying to make a difference with their community.
You are gifted a topic to discuss during an interview.

You can also use the companies that host local meet ups.

~~~
yarper
This is a good idea I hadn't thought of. Thanks!

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yarper
I've found these;

[https://triplebyte.com/](https://triplebyte.com/) (and HN who's hiring also)
[https://nomadlist.com/](https://nomadlist.com/) for remote
[https://remoteok.io/remote-jobs](https://remoteok.io/remote-jobs) also for
remote

Not a lot is for London specifically. Triplebyte only lists a few startups in
London, some of which I'm already in the process of applying for.

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zhte415
In addition to having a network with old colleagues and LinkedIn (which can be
really good, if you have a network).

Do consider headhunters. Some can be very good and professional (my area is
finance and IT). If you're not sure how to contact them, search via LinkedIn -
for time efficiency, avoid the bigger shops and look for ones with small
looking independent websites (again, finance IT type headhunters) as they're
likely to have a personal network of employers to fit you against.

Non financial IT, I've little idea.

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kleer001
A friend asked me to join up.

Since I've been in my industry for 15 years and since people seem to like me
(dunno why) I haven't gotten a job but through personal recommendations in 8
years.

Please don't pay people money to get you a job. Just get your cold-call game
on.

Go through the phone book and find any place that remotely looks like they
could use your skillset.

Ring-ring "Hello, are you looking for what I do? No? Ok, thanks for your
time." 10 times a day for a month and you should be fine.

~~~
yarper
It's not so much paying people to find me a job. What I'm looking for is a
reliable way to find good leads at companies that do the simple things to keep
their staff happy and are continuously looking to make whatever they make the
best possible. So far I haven't found a good way to find that through just
trawling the internet and hoping to find gold.

People such as yourself (and to a lesser extent me I guess) have a solid
professional network. That network kind of pre-vets stuff before they send it
on to us. That's really good because you tend to stay in touch with people you
like, and we usually like the same things as the people we like.

Things like HN who's hiring do help because the kind of companies that post
there are likely to have a similar outlook to me (after all we frequent the
same place).

Edit: when I said I have a professional network - it's not that wide. While a
couple of things have come up from it, it's not like other stories of just
letting people know they're available and getting hired

~~~
kleer001
> reliable way to find good leads at companies that do the simple things to
> keep their staff happy and are continuously looking to make whatever they
> make the best possible.

Just word of mouth, right?

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MalcolmDiggs
My most recent job was from StackOverflow Careers (careers.stackoverflow.com).
Before that, I got a job via Angellist Jobs (angel.co/jobs). In both cases
creating a profile was all I had to do, then the companies reach out and say
hi.

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krisdol
My last job or my current one? Current: AngelList exclusively because I was
new in town and knew no one. Last: I was asked to join by colleagues who left
a former company after it was bought out.

~~~
yarper
You're the second person to list AngelList - are you located in SF (or near)?
Would you use the same if in another location?

~~~
krisdol
Sorry for the late response. I'm in Boston, MA. I would definitely advise it
in Boston, SF, NYC. Elsewhere, let's just say that I would also use it first,
but depending on the market I would move to other resources. It's great for
startups but don't go there for jobs at large companies. All in all, I would
definitely use it again if I was jobless today.

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cm2012
Recruited on LinkedIn - best job ever. It was a really recruitment message
though from someone who referenced very specific things on my profile, not a
random generic one.

~~~
yarper
Out of the blue? Or was the recruiter already a second or third relation to
your contacts?

I'm just wondering because linkedin seems to have pockets of good people and
then pockets of spam recruiters. Right now I'm in the spam trap and 90% of my
traffic is boilerplate recruiter spam. I'm not sure how I'd get myself noticed
by good recruiters like this.

~~~
mirceal
for some recruiters it's a numbers game.

the more time/effort they put into understanding your background the better
they can tailor their message / asses if you are a good fit for the target
positions they have. Most good recruiters put a lot of time in before reaching
out.

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onedev
I was approached by a VC firm to consider a job at one of their portfolio
companies and it has worked out fantastic so far :)

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pmiller2
I met several of my now coworkers at a meetup group.

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dyeje
I contacted someone in my professional network.

