Get hired as a developer: Tips from a Technical Recruiter

Darren: Alright. Okay. So let's get started. Hello everybody, welcome to Codementor events and thank you so much for joining us. My name is Darren, and I'll be the host. So before we start, I'll share some quick instructions because as you probably have noticed, this is not zoom. So this is a new tool that we're trying, it's called Butter, because supposedly it's gonna help us create smooth event experiences, stuff like that. But anyways, so the basic features are all there, you can see on the left side. Yeah, I think, I think that's pretty self-explanatory but I think the most important part is probably the queue. You can see that, you know, with the little pointy finger logo. So it's basically like raising our hand in Zoom. So you have a question during the talk, you can click on that and click “I have a question”, then you'll be in a queue on top. So when the speaker gets a chance, he'll hand you the mic to ask directly, but you can also put your question in the chat, as usual and we'll get through it at the QA section at the end.

Darren: Okay. So I hope it's simple and you can let us know how you'd like this tool afterwards when we send out the post event survey. All right. So let me introduce our topic and speaker. So our topic today is “Get hired as a developer - Tips from a technical recruiter.” So our speaker is Jeff, as you can see, he's already sharing his screen. He is the senior recruiting manager at Arc.dev. He's had years of experience recruiting professionals in tech industry, and he's going to share some insider info of what recruiters look for. So I'm really looking forward to this. All right. So I think that's enough for me to talking. Jeff, I'm going to hand the mic to you.

Jeff: All right. Well, thanks for introducing me, Darren. See, we still have some people joining us, I'm going to get started. So the topic today is how to get noticed by recruiters.

Jeff: All right. So a bit about me, after spending several years in IT recruitment between professionals from technical support to engineers, to director levels, I've seen, you know, candidates, all sorts of candidates, and I've seen thousands upon thousands of resumes as well. I've used LinkedIn quite a bit throughout the time. Majority of my experiences has been using LinkedIn. I've trained a lot of developers, I’ve trained a lot of recruiters looking for developers. And the organizations I've supported is generally within the agency environment that I was part of. So on behalf of these organizations, I looked for personnel for their teams.

Jeff: So this is generally around North America. That's my specialization. That's what I've been sourcing, and recruiting in. And in the last, last, few months I decided to join Arc and joined the mission and helping developers build amazing remote careers from anywhere in the world, so that is something that I believe in and now that's why I'm part of Arc right now.

Jeff: Right. And, just note, if you guys, if anybody had any questions throughout the talk, feel free to ask it in the queue, I'll be more than happy to answer those questions. Happy to answer those questions. If you'd like to put the question in chat. We can always answer those in the Q & A at the end. Right. That's and beat it, followed by how to structure your professional profile. And then lastly, what can I do to stand out from sea of applications or on the web.

Jeff: Let's say on your online presence. Starting with the first one, how to play the recruiter game and beat it. Firstly, we need to understand what what's the recruiter background, what's their training. Get a better understanding of where they come from is going to allow you to understand how you're going to, how you should structure your profile, how you should structure, I guess, your presence online.

Jeff: So the recruiter background is very interesting, you know, I'd say 90% or even more so. All of us recruiters are not technical. We're trained professionals. We could come from business backgrounds, we may come from engineering background. Chances are it's probably not, not it. We could come from sociology background. It could be marketing background. It can make many different backgrounds. But the recruiting game and the recruiting role it's a very people-oriented position where it's more for people-oriented business, where we're selling jobs, we're reaching out to candidates, we're evaluating profiles, and the training that we receive is we have basic training and learning how to look at resumes and we get to look through and scan through resumes at a very, very quick pace.

Jeff: And when I say quick, I mean, maybe we may spend 15 seconds on resume at a glance and then we're going to move on to the next. So if we're able to determine that you're a good fit or you're a strong candidate, in those 15 seconds, maybe even 30 seconds, then we'll pick you we’ll select you, we’ll shortlist you. But times and times again, now I've seen a lot of candidates that make it a little difficult for us to assess them in that short amount of time. And the reason why we go through in such a quick pace is because we have lot of demands from the organizations we're part of, the clients we work with, and also, we need to scan through large volume of resumes and applications on a regular basis. So that's one reasons that we need to, for us to do our job effectively. We need to be able to scan through profiles very very quickly.

Jeff: So, what do recruiters look for? When we're using a search engine to find candidates similar to Google, you need to appear at the top ranking top results, you know we, it's very rare for anybody to go on page two of Google. And it's a little similar to our applicant tracking system, our databases, as well as LinkedIn. So you want to appear at the top result of the search. And how do you go about do that? I'm going to go in a little further in the next point there in the next slide, I mean. But in regards to what we're looking for, we look for the tech stacks where we're given and years of experience. We may look for individuals who are, have shown consistent employment throughout their history. May have maybe looking for individuals that have, I guess, a very clear and concise profile, resume, CV, something that allows us to scan through it easily. If it's very, if it's taking us a long time to review your resume, chances are we might skip over it. And the reason why, again is we don't have a lot of time to go through every single profile, and take too long to do that.

Jeff: And lastly, how do I optimize for visibility? How do you want to optimize for visibility is you want, if you're specializing in a certain skillset, for example, let's say frontend development, you're somebody that's skilled in React, JavaScript, HTML, CSS. You want to make sure those appear everywhere. And what I mean by everywhere. You want to appear in the summary, you want to appear in a tech stack for every employment as well. And the reason why is because it helps the algorithm for the search generation for you to appear at the top of results, you want to make sure those words are there. You may have it in your job title as well, so make, try and make it appear everywhere as much as possible. You don't want it to be overwhelming as in like every second word you have that, those keywords, those, those terms. But you want to have an every project implement wherever you've done it in the summary, as well as in the title.

Jeff: Go into the structure of your profile. Important thing is, make it easy to read. As I mentioned before, we don't have a lot of time. A couple of key points is bullet points, include the tech stacks and project details. And what does it mean by project details is, we want as recruiters, when we look at a resume, we don't want to see I've done development on a web application. I develop, I've developed or assisted the designing of this application. That is a very basic, no responsibility. We don't want to see a basic responsibility that we know developers do. We want to see things that, you know, that is maybe challenging. It could be something that's different, something that's unique to that role. If it's just development, doing coding as a responsibility that you're putting in your resume. It doesn't add a lot of value. Right. So make it easy to read, make it concise. And again, as I mentioned before, add tech stacks to all your employments, any projects you've worked on.

Jeff: Don't overwhelm your reader. Now, I've seen a lot of developers and candidates that have included everything they've ever seen. In terms of technologies or in terms of things they've done on the resume, CV, the profile,whatever it is, even LinkedIn profile, now where you have, a large paragraph of just technologies. And we know as recruiters that you have done every single one of those in the last year, and, you know, there may be a few highlights out there, but we need to pick and choose them. Right. And we are trained to find evidence of where you've done these things in the recent employments. So if you feel like, you know, it's going to take that kind of large paragraph tech stack, it's not very accurate. It's going to take us a lot of time to determine okay, where you've done certain things. The more relevant it is, the better chance that you're going to get shortlisted, you're going to be picked and selected by a recruiter as well.

Jeff: Recruiters aren't technical. We're experts at keyword searching. So we look at keywords who may, for example, let's say I use React as, as the technology we'll put React, we'll put different variations of React. We'll look at sub-sect technologies that were, were, that would be used for frontend developers. So it'd be React, we look at JavaScript, I'm going to look at HTML/CSS, might look at let's say you're a full stack developer like we'll add node.js there, we might add Java, if it's a Java full-stack developer. We'll work around the technologies and we'll look at alternatives to technologies. Let's say if the client's looking for AWS and they’re very, very specific on that, then we're just going to use AWS as the keyword, different variations of writing AWS or Amazon web services. But if the client is a bit open in terms of variations and just, they want to have cloud technology then we'll put AWS, we'll put GCP, we'll put Azure and we'll try to find individual that meets these requirements at a minimum level, at least.

Jeff: And what we do is we pick up, we check out all the candidates that we think would be suitable for the role, and that we'll just do a large scale, email to them. We have cases where we just do individual personalized emails as well. It depends on the position. It depends on the organization it come with.

Jeff: This is an example of how not to structure a profile. So keeping it simple and optimized for databases, we use almost every organization, have a database, have an applicant tracking system. And when you're uploading your resume for us to be able to search you, we need to get keywords. And for us to get a keywords, when you scrape your resume, into their database. So a resume like this, where. No, you have the information here. Great theory. You have the title, the company, the employment, the location. These are all great, but I want to see you have the responsibilities there as well. That's perfect. I would add the technology stack at the bottom of this employment and again, for every employment as well.

Jeff: On the right-hand side, you have the skills. Now that's the part where that's, what you don't want to do is you have a graph here that shows your different skill level, with the technology. And the challenge, it doesn't allow this database to know how, you know, what your proficiency is because it's not in that numerical format. It's doesn't show years. So it scraped the JavaScript Python script the keywords, but it won't recognize the number of years experience or your skill sets there. So, what do you want to do instead is this following structure here. So in a typical applicant tracking system and optimize resume, you want to have a summary of your professional experience. So a couple of lines about what you've done to past some highlights of what you've done. I would put any key technologies that you worked with more recently or something you specialize then, so it will be easily recognizable by these applicant tracking systems.

Jeff: The second one here it's bullet pointed is bullet pointed at short sentences. Similar to what we had in the last one. But the key differentiator here is the one at the bottom here. So expert advanced, familiar, you have all the technologies that's there. That's good as a summary, but you can see all the keywords there, all the technology stack that you ever use, but different, seniority that you have the expert level there. So that's a really good thing. I've definitely, I definitely encourage everybody to include something of the sort, not only for the reader, as the recruiter to easily see this, but also for applicant tracking systems.

Jeff: And what can I do to stand out? Activity on social media, regarding work, github, LinkedIn, Twitter, all these are great. When we're looking at thousands upon thousands of developers, any little differentiator about your profile, about, something that you're doing, that the person next to you isn't, is a plus. So if we look at, let's say we look at somebody called John Smith. They're a developer, they're on social media. They're actually have some activities on github or on LinkedIn. When we source for your profile, we'll actually find those as well. If we see that you're using the relevant technologies, let's say React or MongoDB or whatever technology that we're looking for and we see you're talking about it, sharing content. You're being somebody that is doing more than just the average developer, that's already a big plus that you're having. And these little differentiators do add up for us when we're evaluating candidates and shortlisting them as well.

Jeff: Give your professional profiles some personality, don't hesitate to, you know, talk about your background, where you came from, just in terms of maybe your passion to IT. And this goes for LinkedIn profiles as well, as well as our profiles. You know, when we're reading and looking through these candidates, these little differentiators, getting to know you, getting to know where you come from, getting to know where your passion is, getting to know your interest lies. These are all again, little things that do make a difference. Reach out to individuals that can contribute to hiring decisions within companies you're applying to. So I've seen more and more people do this over the years and I do encourage any developer, if you're really interested in an organization, you can apply to a job, can apply to hundreds and hundreds of companies, for sure. Right? Sometimes just because of the number of applications you'll still be hidden. And it doesn't hurt for you to reach out to somebody part of that organization and the hiring decision. It could be a recruiter, it could be the manager of that department, it could be an acquaintance that you would know work in that organization. A lot of organizations do allow referrals or do encourage referrals to their own organization. So that's something that, if you do reach out to other individuals within that organization that may be able to help you, maybe it could be another developer that’s there you ask them to introduce you as well.

Jeff: This could, this could be a differentiator. I've known a lot of people who've landed jobs just because of that. So I encourage you or anyone to do that. If you're looking to differentiate yourself and get in contact with somebody there. It may not be, no, it might not work every single time, but at least it will impose your name onto, you know, their, their awareness and they can keep in mind for you in this role or next.

Jeff: All right, the wrap up. So, the most one most important key takeaways is using keywords. We, as a recruiter, we use keywords every single day. That's our lifeline. If we don't have keywords, we can't find candidates. So make sure your resume is optimized with keywords. You're having keywords everywhere. We say this as a joke, you want to light it up like Christmas tree, but essentially you want to see if we're looking for react, I want to see React everywhere. All right. If I'm looking for JavaScript, HTML, CSS, I won't see these things everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean every employment or a project or most recent employment engagements that you've had. Make it a clean and concise profile, CV, or resume. We're trained to review these profile within 15, 20 seconds. So if you have too much stuff in there, it's gonna be cluttered. So let's make sure that it's concise, it's clean, and this is direct to the point.

Jeff: Be active in developer community. That's a big thing. again, small differentiators will make a big difference into your profile and you being found. So definitely be active there. And lastly, don't be afraid to reach out to decision makers. So, believe that is it for the presentation. I do have some additional resources to share. There's a resume guide on this link that you can see, interview tips, as well as a way to build and optimize your resume for the ATS databases, and within organizations. That would be it. We got the Q&A section here. Darren, should I go through the questions I believe we have.

Darren: Yeah. We can start with the chat or I see that Adam has a question as well. okay. Yeah. Good. Yep. Let's give, let's give that in word first. okay, so Adam, yeah. Can feel free to unmute yourself and ask your question.

Darren: Oh, Adam, are you available? Okay. Yeah, you have to click unmute to be able to talk. I wonder if it's. Oh, okay. Okay. No worries. So the question, yeah, so the question he posted is down here, so Adam said as a self-taught developer with 20 plus years professional projects with many under NDA, how would you make your resume stand out? Well, that's an interesting question.

Jeff: Great question. And I've definitely noticed a lot of developers that have that challenge. So if you're not able to name the organizations or the projects that you worked on, then I would talk about some details about things you've done about those projects. So you don't have to say, Hey, I work for Netflix on this project, but you can say, Hey, I worked on this web application doing this and these are things I did to contribute to it. So you could omit all the names and no project, but you can talk about details there. So if, as long as you don't mention those things, they won't know the organizations and you can protect yourself and protect the NDA as well.

Darren: Okay. Awesome. Thanks. I'm going to go through the chat because there's a lot of people ask the question quite early. Sorry if I pronounce the names wrong. She asked, as a junior developer with just one year of experience in a few months of gap now. What types of jobs would I have the most luck with? I'm pass over for every intermediate role I interviewed for, and most of the time don't get the call. How can I optimize for exposure?

Jeff: So as a junior developer, it depends how many years experience you’re talking about. You’re talking about one, talking about six months experience, even individuals with internship experience or, you know, less than year experience. There's still a way for you to make sure you get seen. And that is, as I mentioned before, be active in developer community, share passion, talk about things that interest you, highlight the keywords that you have there. And yes, there may not be as many junior positions at there would be. This is a great portal where you can reach out to organizations or hiring leaders, and you know, just put yourself out there just because there isn't a position posted doesn't mean that they won't consider you if you show enough interest. And if you showed that you're actively working to secure a position, there oftentimes organizations that will create a junior position to hire you on as well. So don't be limited by just from the job boards.

Darren: Okay, awesome. And, let me keep going. So the next one I think is Garth? So the question is, are cover letters necessary slash recommendable?

Jeff: The question, for recruiters in agencies, agency recruiters, we actually don't look at any cover letters. No, oftentimes receive it. It doesn't mean anything to us and the reason why is because it's going to take us too long to read the cover letters. We just go straight into your resume and look at the keywords there. For organization where you're part of recruiters are part of larger organization. Sometimes it's actually pretty necessary. So it depends on which, you know, what type of recruiter, what type of organization you're applying to for an organization like Arc, we do look at that and want to see, okay, how much do you understand our business? How much do you understand our mission, our services? What interests you in applying to this organization? A lot of, a lot of hiring professionals, they would look at this and say, okay, do they believe in what we're doing? Or do they believe in our mission or goals? And are they on board? If they do, that's a point, that's a point that allows you move to the next round. If you don't show any of that, that's, you know, generally they’ll pass you on unless if you have a phenomenal resume.

Darren: Great. Okay. So Jen's question. Oh, I think this is also a great one. So I've heard that tailoring your resume to a specific job description increases your chance of landing the job, we can’t tailor our online profiles to any specific job though. So how do we go about creating our online profiles? Should we search for keywords? Non-language related that most job descriptions include?

Jeff: Right. So there's two parts that I want to answer. So the first part is, tailoring keywords to jobs they're applying to. That's a great question. And I would definitely encourage that if you're applying to jobs, specific jobs, and there's you know, some differences between the jobs are applying to whether it's like technology stack or just the general responsibilities. I would for sure tailor it. I wouldn't, obviously I wouldn’t include anything that's untrue, but I would reinforce and highlight the things that would be beneficial to that role. And your online presence, I would stick to what you're specialized in. What's your strongest or what you want to be known and be found for.

Jeff: So let's say you're a full stack developer. You're main is Angular and you're backend is .Net. You will make sure you highlight these things just because you've done Ruby a few years ago. It doesn't mean that you want to include that as well. So if, if you're not specializing in that and you've just been exposed to it, you could include it somewhere in the general tech stack, but don't highlight, don't highlight those things. You want to highlight the things that you want to be known for, that will give more reassurance, more evidence to the recruiter that that's what you’re specialized in.

Darren: Great. Well, let me take one more. I see your question. It seems like we have another person in the community, Eric, who, who kind of answered that. So let me go to the next one, which is Keith, he asked, do you think it's worth it for me to use an automated CV review system or to hire a company to help me do a CV slash LinkedIn overhaul?

Jeff: I can't say for sure which one which one you need more assistance with because I don't know what your resume and profile looks like. But there are, as I mentioned to you before, there are some links that I shared in the additional resources you can take a look at. I don't, there's some organizations, even though they say they’re professionals, it might not be that optimized. So it depends on which organization you’re looking for. In terms of overhaul, it's really a case by case basis. If you, if anyone has any specific questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'll be more than happy to provide some, I guess my 2 cents on your profile or any other questions that you may have.

Darren: Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So because of time, I just want to wrap up and make a quick announcement. Jeff, thank you so much for sharing. This is really helpful and sorry if we didn't get to your questions. But as Jeff said, he shared his LinkedIn, let me put it in the chat. So then, you know, every, all the links and the relevant stuff is there. So yeah, so you can see, you can see Jeff on LinkedIn. Well, there's also, you can also put your questions on the discussion section on the event page, and also let me just share quickly my screen. There is an event that's coming up. Okay, one second. We did. There you go.

Darren: Yeah. So, can you guys see my screen and seems like it's a little bit black. Okay. There we go. Okay. Yeah. So I just want to share quickly then the next event coming up. This one is a bit special because it's actually the first event that was submitted by a member in our community. So it's called “Blazer - has the C# utopia arrived?” So our, our speaker Benjamin, he has experienced in C# Blazer. So he’ll share from his experience.

Darren: So we actually have multiple events not just this one, because of time, I won't go through every single one of them. So just feel free to check out our events page, and I already put the links in the chat, so yeah, we'll love to see all there. yeah, that is all again. Sorry if we didn't get the chance to, to answer your questions. Follow Jeff on LinkedIn or put it on the event page, everything should be in the chat as well. So Jeff, just want to thank you so much again for sharing with us today. And I wanted to ask if you have any final thoughts or encouragement that you'd like to share with our audience.

Jeff: Yeah. I'd say the demand for software development jobs has increased significantly over the last few years, even to this day software development is probably one of the most demanded jobs that we'll see on the market. So. Hundreds of thousands of years, developers are being hired on a regular basis. Here at Arc, we try to help developers find griever remote careers from anywhere in the world. If you're interested in learning more about that, you can reach out to me or go to arc.dev.

Darren: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So cool. Jeff, thank you so much for sharing with us. I'm going to leave this session open for another minute or two. So you have the time to get that info if you need to, or, we just want you to then enjoy the music a little bit. That's great too. So yeah. Thank you everyone. And hope to see you soon.