Getting Hired as a Developer: Tips from Senior Recruiters

There's no magic bullet for getting hired as a developer. But there is some great advice available to help in the process.

I recently interviewed Matt Langan and Christian Macolino, two Senior Tech Recruiters over at Atlassian. I wanted to get a realistic understanding of the subject from the perspective of the people involved with hiring tech talent for a $3.3 billion software company.

This article looks at issues surrounding getting hired, including some practical tips and pointers that arose out of the interview.

Resumes and Online Portfolios

Let's start with tried-and-tested resumes and portfolios. Through these, we present everything that's important about us to recruiters, interviewers, and anyone else involved in the hiring process.

Often developers invest more time in this portion of job hunting than in the actual searching process.

Digital or traditional?

When looking for a position with a tech company in particular, we might assume that digital portfolios—personal websites and online resumes—would be preferred to standard-format resumes. But that's not always the case. Especially for non-design roles, recruiters care more about just getting the information they need.

Christian phrased it this way:

As long as we've got the data there—enough information that we can dig into about their experience, and ask the right questions—that's all that we care about.

This also applies for smaller firms, or non-tech companies whose hiring processes involve more managerial oversight and less tech.

However, for those smaller companies, the online portfolio may be as important or more so. With less expertise and testing available to gauge your worth, a company may resort to carefully analyzing your past work even more than a large tech company might. Only you can judge how much time each of these tools is worth—by carefully considering what your target positions are.

Choosing Your Path

When we discussed education and the very first positions that developers take on, Matt had the following advice regarding education and getting started:

Get involved in side projects, hobbies, start a blog, join in on discussions on forums, get involved with Stack Overflow or Github, ask questions, provide answers, take part in coding competitions, go to tech meetups.

In your current job, master what you're doing, ask for more responsibility, and help others learn—particularly those more junior to you.

This, of course, is excellent advice. If you've been hired for a particular discipline, use your side projects not only to keep up with that core language or tool, but also to spread out your knowledge base and gain at least a basic understanding of some other languages, software, and other tools.

Constant learning is critical. On the point of continual education, Christian had a sobering point:

The first five years of your career really set the stage. In a new role or area, you're like a sponge, you're open to learning, you're curious, you ask questions.

But after the four or five year mark, you start to know a lot, people look to you for guidance, and your learning starts to switch off a little bit. So if you learn bad practices and bad habits early on in your career, you'll actually carry those with you.

Self assessment

For those already beyond that point, maybe this is time for some self-assessment.

Take a moment to consider where you are in your career. Are you still learning from your coworkers, your users, and your projects? Are you self-improving and growing through personal side projects? Do you still have a passion for your work?

Find the passion

It seems to be a common factor with a lot of companies that a passion for development is critical. Sometimes, especially for junior roles, it can even matter more than the specifics of education or knowledge.

Yet many of us are so caught up in the job security quest that we forget what drew us to programming in the beginning. We fail to realize sometimes that the passion and drive that got a lot of us here is what employers want.

Make a change

If you're already employed as a developer, and you're not still learning, and you're no longer passionate about your career, then consider what you can do to extract yourself from that position and change things. It could be as simple as an attitude shift or a change in responsibilities at your current workplace. It could be as dramatic as switching positions, employers, or even career paths.

Sometimes the hardest part is simply making the change. Beware of sticking with the status quo just because it's easier.

Continue reading %Getting Hired as a Developer: Tips from Senior Recruiters%

by Jeff Smith via SitePoint