If You Want To Land An Awesome Job, Do An Awesome Job Of Applying For It
At ChefSteps, I sift through several dozen resumes every week, trying to find the next developer to join our team. I’m amazed at the mindset that many people bring to the application process.
It is a seller’s market for software developers right now. If you can write code, many companies out there are looking for you. It seems that a lot of programmers look at that fact and draw the wrong conclusion about how they should go about finding a job. They will apply to a bunch of companies, trying to find one with a short commute or a nice ping-pong table, or a place where they can use the particular shiny software stack they have fallen in love with. Or they will apply for positions they don’t have nearly enough experience for, hoping to find a company that will take a chance on them.
This approach will absolutely land you your next job.
It won’t be the best job you can get.
The best job you can get is at a company where you will love to come into work everyday, because it has a mission which aligns with your interests and values, a culture that suits your personality, and products you think are great. You should be able to see both how you can contribute right away and what you believe you could learn — not just about technology, but also about business and the application domain. Growing in your career takes hard work over the course of years. Starting with a great fit will sustain you through the good times and the hard ones.
Once you’ve chosen a company to focus on, learn as much as you can about them. Read everything you can on their website, especially the about page and jobs page. Read about their products. Read their customer forums. Read blogs by their prominent employees. Check out their social media. See what other people are saying about them. Use your network and see if you can have an informational coffee with a current or former employee. Doing this research will both confirm for you that you’ve chosen the right company and arm you with the information you need to apply and interview successfully.
Then, make sure the job is a realistic match for you. If you have only been programming for a few months, even in an intensive programming school, don’t apply for a senior full-stack developer role. You aren’t ready yet; it takes time — and experiencing the long-term consequences of your coding decisions — to learn what you don’t know. Instead, take an entry-level position where you can learn from people who have shipped a lot of products. Work your butt off, be humble, and learn everything you can, and in a few years, you’ll have a much wider array of options for your next position.
Next, take the time to do the basic application well. Have a nicely formatted resume. Write a cover letter that shows you’ve done your homework. Good lord — don’t have freaking typos in it. Don’t puff up your skills or make it sound like the company has been lucky to survive this long without you — that is for them to decide! In the past, it was considered good form to fill your cover letter with boasting and bravado. I don’t know if that works at, say, a hedge fund, but it isn’t going to work in software. Just lay out succinctly what you’ve concretely shipped in your career so far that shows you are a great fit. Have a friend, preferably a good communicator, read your resume and letter over for both errors and tone.
Congratulations, your resume made it past the first level of screening at the company of your dreams! If that company is ChefSteps, I’ll be sending you a set of email questions to give me a basic sense of how you think about the world and how you code. I get a lot of responses that are obviously dashed off with little thought or care, so let’s talk about how to stand out.
Perhaps you’ve heard the expression “How you do anything is how you do everything.” I don’t believe this is literally true; not everything in life is worth crushing, but if you do the minimum when you do something as important as apply for the job where you will spend a large percentage of your waking hours, I have to assume you will do the minimum when you are on the job as well.
Sure, if you are applying to develop web services and your last role was on the core team for Amazon Web Services, or you want to work on an iOS photography app and you just left Instagram, your job history may be all you need to land the position. Strong open-source contributions can also make the case. But if you have set your sights high and your past experience alone doesn’t clearly demonstrate that you are skilled enough for the job, the best way to make up for that is to go above and beyond with your application.
I ask a very simple programming question in my email screen. There are two fantastic people on the team here at ChefSteps who answered that question by deploying web apps complete with fully functional and attractive frontends. They could have answered correctly with just a few lines of code, but they realized that going for “extra credit” would both show their interest and skills and make them stand out.
The particulars will vary from company to company, but I guarantee you that putting 100 percent effort into a small number of applications is a much better way to find a job you will love than putting 50 percent effort into lots of them.
Remember: you have the great fortune that the thing you love to do is in very high demand right now. You can be choosy. Take advantage of that opportunity!
Michael Natkin has spent the last 30 years building movie dinosaurs, shrink-wrap software, cookbooks, and sous-vide cookers. He was mostly recently CTO of ChefSteps. He’s currently looking for his next role. He’s also written more words.
