Why Personal Branding Is The New Way To Land Your Dream Job
Companies Are Taking A More Creative Approach To Find The Best People
STRV is an award winning web and mobile development studio. They’ve worked with companies like Tinder, Microsoft, Hallmark and even smaller start ups like Surge, Ordr and Zoe. They have offices in SF and LA, but their home base is in Prague. Check out some of the great work they’re doing.
STRV also works with their clients to help them find technical talent. I had the privilege of attending an event hosted by Matej Matolin, one of STRV’s Talent Partners. He’s also a keynote speaker, trainer and has one of the #1 recruiting blogs in Prague. At STRV he manages recruiting teams that are finding the best talent for their clients.
He gave an amazing presentation on what STRV is doing to proactively find some of the best candidates around the world.
Here’s a glimpse into how STRV finds technical talent, and how you might be able to leverage this knowledge to differentiate yourself in the job market.
Let’s dive in.
Great companies aren’t waiting for great candidates
Matej shared a slew of great tools that his company is using to find great candidates. The days of passively attracting great people are over. The best people, whether engineers, product managers or designers, aren’t applying to companies. They’re too busy being great at what they do.
Companies like STRV know this and are reaching out to great people, not the other way around. The talent landscape in tech is extremely competitive. So it pays to consider using unconventional approaches when trying to attract the best people.
Here are just a few of the tools & hacks Matej and his team are using to find engineers & designers.
Meet Up
So this was really exciting for me because this was a hack that I totally didn’t know about. What you can do is use google to find people that are members of specific meet up groups. What does that look like?
If you wanted to find relevant meetups just type the following into google
- Meetup.com: site:meetup.com “react native” “San Francisco” ”Recent meetups”
And if you wanted to get fancy and find people who are members of specific meetups you can use the following syntax:
- Meetup.com: site:meetup.com “member since” Angular “San Francisco”
- This query finds members of San Francisco Angular meetups.
As an honorable mention, I also wanted to share that Angelist has a similar functionality to Meetup where you can review people’s profiles.
Stack Overflow
You can do the same with Stackoverflow. STRV uses this to find folks with specific technical skills. The syntax below returns users that have ReactJS or Javascript listed in their profile:
site:stackoverflow.com/users -inurl:jobs|company|cities|meetup location: *San Francisco ReactJS OR JavaScript
After “location:” you can change the city/state to match the area you’re searching. To filter by technologies, you can use the Boolean operators AND/ OR to find users that have ReactJS or JavaScript listed on their profile.
BONUS: Here is a list of technology tags on Stack Overflow that you can use to help you navigate your search.
Recruitin.net
This is a nifty tool that can be used to create google searches for the top profiles matching specific queries. Below is a screen shot of the home page and some of the options:
Using this tool you can search profiles on a range of platforms; Including LinkedIn, GitHub and StackOverflow.
So what can we learn from all of this?
If some companies are actively searching this way, how do you stand out? What should you be focused on? Where are the places you need to be?
Your Personal Brand Matters. So build it.
Neha Batra, Senior Software Engineer @ Pivotal, did an entire post on why personal branding is important and how she did it. I highly suggest reading this piece.
Below is my take on personal branding and what Matej’s presentation made me realize about creating your own narrative.
Create Content Often And Show Your Work
Matej showed how one could use SlideShare within LinkedIn to post or create content. For example if you go to Matej’s LinkedIn you can see a SlideShare document (see below) that gives an glimpse into some of the gems you missed from his presentation.
Creating this content gives companies a glimpse into your work. A glimpse into your thought process and what problems you’re solving. If you want to use SlideShare to share content on LinkedIn, here’s a short 9-min on how.
But content doesn’t only have to exist on LinkedIn. Medium, YouTube, or your own personal site works just as well. The point is: HAVE A VOICE!
Companies are seriously scraping the internet for talent, and Matej’s presentation demonstrated that they want more than just skills listed on a resume. They want you to SHOW YOUR WORK. Show that you’re passionate about solving a specific problem. Show that you’ve built more than just a simple to-do list. Show that you have an opinion and that your perspective matters.
Companies are going out of their way to find people doing the work and building meaningful projects. Whether it’s an open source project you contribute to, or your own personal side hustle, share your work with the world.
Most people aren’t willing to do this work because there’s no immediate gratification. There’s no immediate indication that the act of “personal branding” is working. But this is even more of a reason to show up and do the work.
Don’t be in it for the sake of likes or getting the credit you think you’re owed. Do it for the sake of producing great work.
No one is going to hire you just because you blog about what it is that matters most to you. But having a portfolio of work you’ve created gives you something to point to. It gives the world a glimpse into your unique excellence. It allows you to say, “Here, I made this. What do you think?”
This is one of the secrets to personal branding. Most people aren’t willing to do the work. But if you’re reading this, I know you are 😊.
Get Out Into Your Local Community
Again, Matej’s presentation shed a huge light on the fact that some companies are looking for people that are active in their local tech scene.
So go on Meetup and not only join specific groups that speak to your skillset and interests, ACTUALLY ATTEND THEM! Companies rather hire someone who has given lightning talks or contributes to communities than the person blindly applying online.
BTW, Fun Fact: I actually met Matej at a Meetup hosted at General Assembly!
So do yourself a favor and get out there. This also goes for hackathons, which are a great place to collaborate and meet folks in tech.
Track Your Impact: Social Selling Dashboard
Another great tool that was shared was LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index. This tool aggregates your activity on LinkedIn and measures how effectively you’re establishing your personal brand.
There wasn’t much documentation on the algorithm and how the score is calculated, but much of it is based on what you like and what you share on LinkedIn. So if you’re an Engineer it helps your ranking when you create, like and share content related to your niche (e.g. JavaScript, Ruby, Python etc).
I think this is a fun tool to provide LinkedIn’s perspective on your personal brand. But regardless of whether your score is 0 or 100, you should have a presence on the outlets that matter to your career. For engineers that GitHub, StackOverflow, LinkedIn and others. If you’re not an engineer, go to where your audience hangs out.
Until next time. Happy Branding!
Feel free to reach out to me (llcholloway@gmail.com) if you want personally tailored advice on how to think about personal branding & career transitions in tech.
