Modern Job Hunting Hacks: How to get a job in 2020
Here are the hard-earned job hunting tips I’ve accumulated from decades of searching for jobs:
- CUSTOMIZE EACH RESUME TO THE POSITION! Note carefully what formats the recruiter will accept; MS Word is common, but some will only take RTF, some PDF, etc. Just pay attention and give them a format they’re asking for.
I use a table on the front page with “Your Requirements” / “My Experience” giving phrases from the ad along with what I can do to address the stated requirements:
This format does two things for you:
- gets past resume scanners looking for words that appeared in the ad, which you will have put all of in your resume’s front page
- it’s psychologically compelling for the hiring people (“well, everything we said we wanted is right here …”)
(2) Be flexible especially in “bonus points” … If you know nothing about Rust, you obviously don’t want to spin yourself as a super Rust hacker for a job that requires that. But if Rust is listed under bonus points, study Rust for a bit, write a few simple Rust programs and put “brief experience with Rust” in your “my experience” box opposite the Rust requirement!
(3) Put a resume up with all relevant experience on both dice.com and monster.com. Set both of these to ‘private’, meaning email will come from dice/monster and not from recruiters directly, making it much easier to keep overzealous spam filters from screening out your job offers. It’s up to you whether or not to put a phone number on these; clearly you have a better chance getting your number out there. But there are tons of incompetent recruiters who will call you for jobs that your profile makes it clear you’re not suitable for or interested in. So be prepared for that.
4) MAKE SOME CHANGE TO EACH POSTED RESUME ONCE PER WEEK! This blasts the resume out to a bunch of recruiters whenever the change is made. I discovered this by accident when making substantive changes, but the change does not have to be anything significant. Just changing “available April 12” to “available April 19” will do it!
5) remove all references to the date you graduated from college and any other clue to your age from your resume. If you’re not 50, you will be at some point and you can nip age discrimination by not leaking your age more than absolutely required. Also don’t put more than the last 15 years (maximum 20 if you have something especially relevant 19 years ago) of experience on your resume.
6) Network like crazy! Go especially to local users groups for the technology you’re interested in; if you want to get a job programming Python, hit the local Python users group every month and get to know the people there. There are also these “speed dating” type networking events these days that have a ton of companies show up to talk to a lot of people individually. These are always worth attending just to talk to the other candidates as well as the company recruiters.
7) Get business cards from Vistaprint or some other online business card purveyor. Get one for every subspecialty you have; if you’re both a systems admin and a programmer, get a different card for each that makes you look like that specialty.
8) Surf http://www.indeed.com, which searches all of Dice, Monster, local jobs boards, and several others. Also scan your local Craigslist tech jobs section regularly, which indeed.com does not cover. And there are other boards for subspecialties like Django Gigs, for that most often required Python web framework, and no doubt others.
9) If you’re showing significant gray hair … think seriously about dyeing it. No kidding! I have had such obvious discrimination on web interviews with a gray beard I have a whole book to write about this in the future. If you’re going to try this, shop around. I finally found a local hairdresser that uses a lower amount of ammonia than others I’ve tried. It’s $60 well spent, every 5 weeks, and I think tax deductible (but check with your tax adviser!)
This way of job hunting is a lot more trouble than just blasting the same resume everywhere the way some recruiters actually seem to be requiring these days. But it’s worked well for me for all these years.
Best of luck to you in finding your next job!
