Hi,
I am looking for a remote senior software engineer position. Most of my career I have been using connections to move from one job to another but this time I haven’t had the luck, so I am mostly blindly applying through LinkedIn.
I know the general tips but I would like to get some more specific tips to improve my chances.
How can I make my CV stand out? I feel I am getting rejected by positions that are way below my qualifications. I have wondered if I should be updating my CV according to the stack of the position I am applying for. Throughout my career I have focused on building transfarable skills and as a result I have worked with a wide variety of technologies and it feels like I am being penalized for that.
Are there any job boards that may be better than LinkedIn? I am tired of skimming through ads about fintech and AI positions. I am not interested in those and I would prefer to work somewhere that I genuinely I am contributing something in the world. Also, I would be interested on job boards on the Fediverse, especially if it meant that my resume is read by humans and not machines.
How can I avoid time wasters? I had applied to Canonical, after 8 interviews and a bunch of offline steps, I was rejected. While the interviews were fun, I feel I have wasted a lot of time and energy for a someone that was not genuinely interested in hiring.
Anything else I should be paying attention to?
Companies won’t hire someone that’s overqualified because the employee is very, very likely to leave again soon. It costs the company a ton of money and headache for very little benefit.
I had the same experience with Canonical. They advertise hundreds of jobs in LinkedIn, in every major city around the world.
I applied for one that matched my skillset well, and the recruiter was enthusiastic about my application.
After my application was accepted, and passed the first round of scrutiny, they wanted a long and detailed cover letter answering some very specific and personal questions about your education and career. Eg. “How would your friends describe you in High School?” and “What was your least favourite subject in high school?”. Man, high school was 20 years ago, how is that relevant? And weird stuff like “how can Canonical become a global leader in Software and compete against Microsoft, Apple, and Google?”. I’m a senior software engineer, not a CEO.
I did a whole series of tests, did their online exam and weird online IQ test thing. I passed them all with very good results. Then suddenly got the rejection letter out of nowhere.
I don’t think they actually want to recruit people. They have no budget to put on new software engineers. They just want to advertise hundreds of jobs on Linkedin and send candidates through meaningless hoops for weeks to make it look like they’re recruiting.
I remember those questions! As soon as I read high school my mind went from “working for Canonical would be nice” to “let’s justify not writing an essay by reading everything bad about Canonical”.
Lucky for me it was easy as r/recruitinghell was full of post about people doing the whole process and being rejected. Also the CEO had a reddit account and the way he was justifying this process didn’t jive with me, at all.
For some reason it never occurred to me to check if others online were sharing their own bad experience of the canonical recruitment process. That would have lessened the impact a bit at the time if I knew it wasn’t just me.
I was going through two other recruitment processes at the same time, so I didn’t stop too long to think about it.
Use a recruiter, they know how to sift through the bs, if they reach out, respond ASAP. It’s about the only way I’ve found real jobs these days. It’s absolutely abysmal out there.
How do you find a recruiter though? The one time I had one reach out on LinkedIn, it was a scam.
+1
Worked for me multiple times
News.ycombinator.com has worked for me. Look at the monthly “who is hiring” thread (1st weekday of each month) but also random hiring posts from YC companies.
specific tips
You’ve enabled the visible as “for hire” to recruiters thingy, right?
I feel I am getting rejected by positions that are way below my qualifications.
Also below your pay grade, that’s most likely why.
Are there any job boards that may be better than LinkedIn?
The only two others i know are xing (mostly german) and honeypot (haven’t quite figured it out yet besides the silly name).
job boards on the Fediverse
Try cs_career_questions or engineering_resumes.
HTH
I feel I am getting rejected by positions that are way below my qualifications.
Also below your pay grade, that’s most likely why.
You’re not wrong, but it is almost comical how stupid this situation has become: new grads aren’t allowed to work because they don’t have experience, but experts are also being denied work because they have too much experience??? It makes no storming sense.
I suspect he means less “too much experience” and more “not wanting to pay his desired salary”, though I may be mistaken.
Yeah, “nobody wants to work anymore”, but “we’re not willing to pay for 10+ years of experience, yet we’re only looking for 10+ years of experience”
I think job postings are better in indeed, but tbh >75% I’ve gotten in pretty much my whole 25+ year career has been through a recruiter. Dice.com used to be big for tech jobs back in the day but I’m not sure any more.
As a SSE, mostly I have recruiters hitting me up through linked in. This is also a really bad time. I’ve been back to work for about a month after 5 months of not finding anything. That’s the worst drought I’ve had in almost 15 years. Usually it’s < 1 month.
Be seriously prepared about cloud. It’s so anyone fucking wants right now. I’m a damn good Java/js developer, but I’m still learning the tech stack and I haven’t touched a line of code yet in this job. Everything has been configuration and pipelines. I feel more like devops than developer.
What the hell is the secret to get recruiters to reach out to you? I get literally nothing…
Make sure your profile matches their lazy ass search queries
Where do you put it their query items in though? Your headline or whatever it’s called?
Yep just putting rails and COBOL will get you loads of contacts. Not good ones but you’ll get them.
Man I would get offers twice a week even after switching jobs when I had data engineer as my job title, took them like a year and a half to stop sending me offers for data positions
As @[email protected] said, use a recruiter/agency. Post your CV to indeed and reed. It depends also where you are, in EU the job boards are different than US I guess. Speaking of LinkedIn, have you posted a message saying “hello world, I’m open to work and I’ve experience at this $stuff”, and then ask your friends to share it. I got a couple of contacts that way.
Also, look for a resume builder/parser. Quick search gave me https://www.open-resume.com/ https://noted.lol/open-resume/
Pretty much everyone uses a CV parser when you apply, so if your is not formatted properly it’s properly one of the reasons you get rejected. Another reason is that probably they recognize you are above what they need, so they know that a) you’d be expensive and b) probably get bored fast and leave. Put stuff you have experience with, specifying what your experience is, what your contributions were to the project etc. Saying “5 years of experience on $language” is not very meaningful. Writing “I created a Perl program to import data from Word docs to a MySQL DB, optimizing the code to use no explicit variables” (true story btw) is better. Or most likely “worked on $project for $industry, implementing $modules and enforcing $best_practice, collaborating with the wider team and helping mentoring other junior developers”. Don’t forget to mention non-technical skills. Companies look for someone whom is nice to work with more than someone who knows everything. A guru that alienates people is less worthy than someone that maybe don’t know everything (and admits it) but can talk to others.
Re: time wasters. Holy shit 8 round of interviews! Even MS and AWS are less than that! MS was the biggest in my experience with 5 (but tbh it was all in a day, so not a horrible drawn out process, just different people). But you can ask at the beginning when speaking with the hiring manager what’s the process, and you can decide if it’s something you want to spend time on or nah.
Best of luck and don’t be discouraged! I had a 3 months dry spell once, applying every day to multiple roles and being rejected. It’s part of the game I’m afraid. Venting helps. Not getting a job immediately is not a failure in your part.
Best of luck!
Hey not sure if I’m too late but there are a few places I have run across that I don’t see mentioned:
- https://weworkremotely.com
- HackerNews Jobs (aggregator: https://hnhiring.com)
Also, your resume sounds a lot like mine, I have done a wide variety of things over the years. If you want someone to review your resume I am happy to, send me a DM or something. I’m not a developer but I have reviewed a lot of resumes for people and mentored all kinds of engineers, I am a principal level engineer in a related path though.
