How to convince a recruiter to hire you? 1/3
A conversation with Mirela and Molly from Project A Ventures.
Meet Talent Acquisition Leads Mirela Stefan and Molly Barrett from Project A Ventures in Berlin. Project A is one of Berlin’s premier VC funds, attracting about 1000 applications per month.
Imagine Foundation hosts a Q&A session where Mirela and Molly reveal the secrets of the talent hunt in the German job market. They answer questions like:
- How recruiters find talent in Berlin
- What you can do for winning job interviews
- How you catch the recruiter’s attention through your LinkedIn profile and CV.
Are you curious? Check here the part I of our chat, where they give us precious tips about LinkedIn profiles and CV’s.
Fernanda (Imagine Foundation, Moderator): Welcome Mirela and Molly. What exactly do you do at Project A?
Molly (Project A): I’m Molly, I’m a working student at Project A. I’ve been working there for about eight months and I’m getting a master in business psychology so I’m studying a lot of like HR talent acquisition. So, when I am at Project A, I’m doing a lot of recruiting and since we are in venture capital we can work with a lot of different companies, so basically it’s like a lot of different clients.
Mirela: Hi, I’m Mirela, I’m actually from Romania but I’ve been living in Berlin for two years and a half. Now I’m at Project A for one year almost. We are doing talent acquisition there as well and yet helping basically recruiting for several roles, tech or non-tech.
In terms of tech I’ve been recruiting Ruby developers, front-end, back-end, with PHP, JAVA, some DevOps guys, infrastructure system admin and that’s it.
Overall I think we are seven people in the talent acquisition team, and then in terms of number, we had so far 2,800 applications in 2019, so that’s for over three months.
Fernanda (Moderator): That’s great because at Imagine we have a boot camp for software engineers who live in MENA countries and apply for jobs in Germany. Our team of volunteers evaluates hard and soft skills and provide personal career advice, especially regarding how to master job applications and succeed in interviews.
So, let’s start! As you mentioned you’ve received ~3,000 applications in the last three months. Therefore, my first question is:
- How do you guys look for talent? Considering that candidates can apply for job positions through the companies websites but active sourcing is also common between recruiters. From your perspective which is more common: active or passive searching?
- And thinking about active searching how relevant LinkedIn is?
Mirela: It’s always nice when you post a job and you have applications and you just review them, but then sometimes it can happen that people don’t really apply. Of course, if we don’t have a lot of applications, we have to go out there and search by ourselves, and then focusing a bit.
For tech roles, we sometimes use StackOverflow and Github. It’s important that candidates not only have a profile but rather also be active by making comments, interacting with other people, and also publishing their projects.
On the tech side I would say that LinkedIn is the easiest platform for us because it’s basically the biggest database when it comes to professional CV’s and professional experience, so it’s very easy for us to access.
And normally for that we just do a search to find profiles, by using keywords. So as long as people have LinkedIn we can find them very easily.
A LinkedIn profile is more or less like a CV. So I think it shouldn’t be too little. That’s hard for me as a recruiter if I’m looking at a profile and I just see “back-end engineer”, I have no idea if he/she knows Ruby, PHP, JAVA, so I’ll need a bit more details.
But then also having a very long LinkedIn with very long text doesn’t really help, because presently we are screening hundreds of CV’s per day so I won’t have time to read three pages.
Molly: It’s also really important in LinkedIn to put in the About Me section that you’re looking for new experiences because it saves a lot of time and it really helps to have a better response rate on our end that we can maybe count on this person a little bit more to respond or to be looking for response.
Fernanda (Moderator): Ok, great! My next question is: what does make you feel that a profile matches the position you have? You mentioned that you use some keywords for searching on LinkedIn, but maybe there’s something else that makes you feel like this is the candidate I’m looking for.
Mirela: Yeah, that depends a bit on the roles. I’m doing a lot of direct sourcing from our senior profiles. In these cases, it’s relevant that you actually have experience, so several years of experience, and also show what you did, the projects you worked on and what languages you used.
But it’s also very helpful if I know in which project you used the languages you work with. Because it may be that you just saw a PHP script and you put it there, or it can be that you coded PHP for the past few years, so that’s a difference and it’s very helpful for our end as well.
Molly: Yea, I think on LinkedIn you should comment what you’re applying for or if you want to be available to certain tech stack, you should be able to comment “search for…” at least a couple of things in your profile. That is easily accessible to recruiters because that’s also the command search function a good recruiter uses.
Mirela: Yeah, indeed. If you are looking maybe for a PHP position, you should have at least once PHP mentioned on your profile or the framework that you use for that or for front-end as well.
When I’m looking for example for a front-end engineer is tricky that people can write javascript in different styles like JS, or JavaScript in two words or one word. So I always have to think of how people would write that. So as a person looking for a job you can put that in different forms in your profile so then you have more chances of being found. Because maybe recruiters won’t check all options available, maybe they will check just JavaScript in one word but not JS.
Fernanda (Moderator): Thank you! The next stop is CV. How would you guys describe a perfect CV?
Molly: Basically, there’s like a general aesthetic that you should follow, it should be at least one to two pages, max three, but we’re really not really looking….reading every single line, every single word so it should be fairly condensed. It should be in PDF format. Word documents or anything else that could be altered is just a general no-go. And then about the content, you should have your spoken languages because some companies are looking for German speakers, English speakers, whatever…So that’s really important, especially in Berlin.
You really should include the position that you’re working under, so your title, the company, the city or country of where you worked at that exact company and the duration: month and year.
I think the only thing about a bad CV would be personal information. For example, your marital status, how many kids you have, your birth date, things like that. It’s illegal to discriminate against those things so I would just cut it out.
Also, have at least three key tasks under the position that you are working at. Sometimes, people don’t include anything and that’s really difficult because you don’t actually know what you worked with.
Mirela: Also, it shouldn’t be too long with a lot of text, just like I said, people won’t have time to read more than one, two pages. It’s always easy if you have bullet points.
Fernanda (Moderator): What about education? What is relevant in terms of education? Only the Bachelor and Master degrees should be mentioned or also short term courses like Coursera, Udemy or certifications?
Mirela: So in terms of education, especially in the tech roles, as a whole I would say it doesn’t matter that much because again it matters what you know. However, in Germany, it’s a bit tricky especially if people are relocating here because of the working permit and the visa and everything, you sometimes have to have a university degree. Especially if you actually studied something similar to the work you’re applying for and if you didn’t of course, you don’t have to. But I would say, I would recommend you do that.
Regarding certifications, think about those relevant certifications. For example, I’ve been recruiting for a DevOps role, and normally they would have AWS certification. If they had a certification, it was definitely a plus because we knew that they know about AWS. But there should be also serious certification, not just that you watched the video on YouTube. It doesn’t mean that you know that. So as long as it’s a relevant course or certification, yeah, I would put that on my CV.
Fernanda (Moderator): Ok, cool. And, Molly, you mentioned something interesting which is about personal information. And I know that recruiters they have the concern about avoiding bias so I believe that if the person provides so many personal details, it ends up leading the recruiter to bias somehow, right?
Molly: Yeah, sometimes it’s just this subconscious bias that maybe the recruiter might have especially with relocation and visa.
So if somebody has a whole family that means that the company has to take care of the whole family visa process and that’s something that doesn’t need to be considered, that’s something that can be talked about in the next interviews, when you already have established a personal connection and you can see how serious the candidate is about moving.
Additionally, I would stress the importance of a cover letter. If you have something that’s more complicated, such as a product manager to describe what a product you are working on if it’s not clear. Or for instance, if you are full stack engineer applying for front-end you can talk about it, describe a little bit more in your CV about what front-end projects you had. Just anything that cannot be described on your CV that might help you.
I mean if your CV is very clear you don’t need a cover letter, but it depends if your role or application is a little bit ambiguous, it’s helpful.
Mirela: The cover letter can help because you pass a bit more background on the profile. If you are a full-stack and you maybe want to focus just on the front-end side, then maybe it’s always nice to kind of explain a bit the change or why do you want to focus on that and give some sort of explanation. And I think the cover letter shouldn’t be again too long, I would even appreciate even two or three paragraphs like half a page, one page, but really on the point and explain why exactly you’re changing, why you’re interested in that but not really too long.
Fernanda (Moderator): Ok, guys. Thank you very much for all your valuable tips.
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This post is part of a series. Continue to Part II.
