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Lifehacks to developers from a recruiter

Recently on Habr there was a translation of the article " Evaluating recruiters by cold letters ." A translator’s note and 120 comments show that the topic is painful for Russian-speaking developers, and the IT recruiting market is toxic. On the one hand, developers suffer: a blockage of letters in the mail, calls from recruiters, which then suddenly disappear, ridiculous vacancies with relocation to Guatemala, senior offers to work as a junior in a young startup and interviews with questions like “why are the hatches round”. On the other hand, recruiters themselves suffer from incompetent colleagues who expose them as spammers who do not distinguish Java from JavaScript, and scatter vacancies indiscriminately, as if they are realtors on Avito.



My name is Svetlana Petrovicheva, 10 years working in IT recruiting, founder of a recruiting agency and platform for finding work in IT. I have a dream to rid the IT market of toxicity. Therefore, today I will share my experience, share some useful tricks and try to describe how recruiters work. You will learn how developers evaluate vacancies and companies, how recruiters find and evaluate you, whether a “personal brand” affects salaries and why they are not written in vacancies. I will also give some recommendations on how to prepare a resume so that you earn a little more, how to catch a vacancy earlier than the rest, why there is no “fair” salary, and in the end I will describe my vision of how to get rid of toxicity in the IT employment market.

Recruiters who are looking for developers can be divided into two parts: those who specialize in IT and everyone else. The second ones are not immersed in specifics: they don’t understand the terms, they don’t understand the language and terms, they can’t evaluate your profile on GitHub. 



Usually the second type is "bombed" in bulk by letters and calls, in the hope of hooking at least someone. In this case, just anecdotal situations arise when they do not distinguish a Java developer from a JavaScript developer.

A good recruiter does not call and does not like to do this, because it has not been effective for a long time. Professionals act differently and I will tell you how. In the process, I’ll share some tips for developers in finding a job (even if you are not looking for it yet).

Do not wait for vacancies - look for yourself


When the company has a shortage of personnel, they try to find specialists within the organization: in other departments, through employees, through personal channels. Searching for resources with resumes or social networks is common, but this is not the most effective way. When you see a published vacancy, it means that the company is already tired of looking for developers and hooked recruiters. The first tip follows from this.



It’s not difficult for a developer to find a job. It is more difficult to find a “dream job” so that close to home, and with cool colleagues, the projects are interesting, and the salary is not lower than the market. You can wait for the perfect offer for a long time, but it is better to act yourself. 

Make a list of companies that you like and attend conferences where its representatives speak or participate. Come, communicate, make acquaintances, ask about tasks and their work, offer solutions to problems - show your benefits.



Look for contacts of team leaders and HR through mutual friends. Write to mail, in social networks or instant messengers. Even if there are no open offers right now, you will be remembered, and the resume will be postponed marked “For the Future”. As a last resort, call general numbers.

The activity of IT candidates is as rare as the Tesla Model S in Moscow, and is rated positively as pro-activity.

Develop a “personal brand” - employers are interested in public candidates 


When the company could not find an employee through its channels, it turns to IT recruiters. If you turn to the usual, then everything will be sad. Perhaps he will not even collect customer requirements (team lead or HR).

But this is the most important stage: the recruiter must understand what kind of specialist is needed, for what tasks, what kind of workload, what kind of stack, salary, conditions. A good IT recruiter understands terminology, understands development processes, reads Habr and speaks the same language with the customer.

After collecting requirements, the recruiter does not always publish it on HH.ru and other resources. Often, he searches for candidates himself: in social networks, LinkedIn, Telegram, according to his bases and on GitHub. For GitHub, recruiters use special plugins that help them understand what the developer was doing, what technologies he owns and even issues contacts. At this stage, it is important to carefully search correctly (write the right queries), study profiles and resumes.

It’s logical that in search of a recruiter looks at publicity. Developers who lead an active social life are simply more noticeable. Therefore, at the level of HR and recruiters of large companies, the “brand” has some weight. Articles, podcasts, a YouTube channel, courses, and conference speeches all capture attention and influence your hiring decision. In my practice, I saw how cool offers came to developers who developed community on nuclear weapons or organized meetings.

But there is a nuance.

Good to speak, write and speak does not mean good coding.

If a developer speaks 10 times a year, writes on an article a day and writes podcasts, then when does he code? Therefore, the "brand" gives an advantage in hiring, but not critical. If you know, it will be easier for you to get more (and earlier) interesting offers from HR or from developers who know you in the companies where the vacancy has formed. 



Evaluate vacancies by her contribution to your career


When the recruiter could not find a suitable candidate, he draws up a description and launches it on the sites with vacancies.

Cool job - personalized . It’s cool when a recruiter writes personally why he believes that the candidate is suitable, praises for his cool achievements and sells the company and the product that he will have to work on. For everyone else, the vacancy is cool when it describes the exact stack, salary, team, there are photos of the office, all the pluses are described, and it’s immediately clear why to join the project.

The main question that you should ask when reading the description: “What next?” Look at the vacancy with the prospect. You can get a Java developer for 350 thousand on a legacy project, but eventually lose. A few years of work without learning new technologies, languages ​​and new skills is a highly paid routine digging in a bad-smelling legacy with a loss of skill.

Salary is the response of the market to your competencies. When you sell yourself in a bad project, where you do not study, you experience personal inflation every day.

In a few years, the question will arise of finding a job, but most likely you will not receive such money. A high salary on a rotten project in the future will lead to a drop in your price due to loss of qualifications. No, if you are sure that you will work for 350 thousand on the project for 5 years, you will invest in the stock market, and then you will retire with the accumulated funds - that’s the norm.



Recommendations 

  • Team . It develops us, so look for job descriptions for the team in vacancies.
  • Technology . Make sure that at your new job you work with more or less new technologies and learn fresh ones.
  • The training system in the organization . It is just needed to learn new technologies, languages, methods and approaches in programming and design. How about a new job with conferences or courses? For example, in Tinkov, they hold internal meetings and send employees to conferences. Do you also?

Prepare a resume to be noticed


Despite the shortage of personnel in IT, most developers, QA and managers (products, for example) are interchangeable. With paid online courses and free information on the Internet, there are more. If you do not have your own language behind you, like Guido van Rossum, for example, then they will evaluate you, like everyone else, by the skills that are written in the resume and match the requirements for the vacancy.

You won’t see the vacancy first when it is published.. Dozens, or maybe hundreds, of developers saw the announcement earlier (or even before publication, see above), sent feedback, a resume, and someone even made an appointment. Recruiters have already flipped through hundreds of candidates, talked to a dozen, and are tired. It will be difficult for you to convey your benefits and stand out among all this mass. Therefore, it is important to write a resume so that it is noticed by the recruiter.



There are several rules for doing this.

Structure . Break the text into paragraphs and semantic blocks: the desired position, experience, skills, soft skills, achievements. No one reads manuscripts from one paragraph. The “Education” block is optional, few people look at it . 



One resume - one position. Each post has its own personalized resume: libraries, frameworks, programming languages, skills that have been useful for business in this direction, a company stack, a description of the team. For example, if you get a job as a team leader, but there is no work experience, write how you replaced the team leader who went on vacation and did not mess with the project.

Avoid two mistakes.

  • Too general description , without project details and tasks, the salary “plug” is too long and “watery”. 
  • Too concise summary . Such manuscripts list all the technologies the developer has encountered, but it is unclear how he owns them.

Such resumes will not help to get a suitable job - the recruiter simply does not understand what to offer you. Avoid this.

Honesty . If in theory you are not familiar with any technology, highlight that the employer knows what to expect from you. If you have already studied something, but have not put it into practice or would like to try, write too.

Nothing more . For a Java developer, don’t write that in your free time you make up websites, bake muffins and take pictures of squirrels - this is all just a matter of business.

Adapt your resume to the vacancy, with emphasis on specialized experience. Do not indicate everything that you have done in life.

Indicate any technology, language or skill carefully - excess rubbish in the resume only scares off the employer. This is a big question, I will discuss it separately in the following articles.

Achievements . In summary, they have a lot of weight. Write personal and team achievements, add numbers, for example, that the project doubled when you worked on it. Resume - the best place for "achievements".

Recommendations . Write a letter of recommendation and let your supervisor sign it. If not, add the recommender contacts.

Desires . This is a small paragraph with a description of the tasks that we would like to work on, comfortable conditions.

A resume is not an autobiography or a set of information about you: "I am a developer, I am looking for work." This is a business card by which the service station will invite you for an interview.

Note. I recommend CV IMPROVER - a service for pumping resumes. Professional IT recruiters and HR will evaluate the resume, add recommendations and even write a resume for you. At the same time, it will be just such that it will be noticed by recruiters and hiring managers.

Show your benefits at the interview


Recruiters can check the candidate for compliance with the corporate culture, present, emphasize the advantages, experience and evaluate soft skills: personality, sociability, toxicity (yes, she is). But the last word is always up to the team and team lead after the interview. If he says that the candidate is not suitable - not fate.



So get ready for an interview if you want to impress and get a job. 
Here's what you need to remember when you go for an interview:

  • what the company and the team you want to get involved in, what products it releases;
  • tasks, requirements and technologies described in the vacancy;
  • repeat the technical part to prepare for the test tasks;
  • pull up English: articles, news, Stack Overflow, documentation for frameworks, libraries and other tools on GitHub - all this is in English;
  • own benefit .



Yes, we understand IT is the candidate market, but still you get paid for the work. You benefit - you get paid . Describe your benefit, what needs of the company you are covering, what problem you are solving. It is the value, not the set of characteristics, that the tenant will ultimately buy. For developers, these are, of course, projects, the stack you own, code samples on GitHub and other open sites. It also increases your salary.

Often there are no salaries in vacancies and you come to the interviews not knowing how many people will offer you.

There are 4 reasons.

Salary below market .

Opaque salary - minimum wage, the rest of the premium.

Salary above the market. Not always the employer wants current employees to envy the new employee. When positions are similar, and salaries are different (sometimes at times), questions and conflicts arise.

Difficulty assessing . It is difficult for an employer to evaluate an employee when he does not know what kind of work a developer can do. For example, for a vacancy “PHP developer” there is a huge variation in salaries if you look at HH.ru or analytics of the Habr Career service. 



The range of skills and qualifications is also gigantic. Therefore, the employer writes 3-4 mandatory points (key requirements) and 10 additional points in vacancies. These are secondary skills, knowledge of related technologies, soft skills, again.

A hundred people respond to the vacancy, but each of them will receive his salary. For this there is "salary corridor ”- the area between the upper salary bar and the lower. With a salary of 100 thousand per month, the salary corridor can be from 50 to 200 thousand. A qualified experienced person who closes all points in vacancies knows everything, knows how to teach others, is considered on the upper level and above. There is always a budget for such a specialist. But most candidates are different, so they are considered on the lower or middle bar. As a result, the next tip is about evaluating yourself.

Rate yourself in advance


The goal of any company is to make money (we do not consider state and charitable). In order not to spend too much time on hiring, any candidate is sorted into "parts" - profiled . Profiling is an analysis of a person into an understandable set of skills : on the stack, personal qualities and experience.

Companies match job requirements and your "profile". Matching - search for matches between job descriptions and candidates. The more matches, the better: more benefits, and less resources to spend on your training. Each employee in this model is simply a set of benefits that he brings to the business.

Disassemble yourself "into parts." To do this, take a few vacancies that you want to apply for and write down the requirements for the candidate in the table. In most vacancies, 90% of the requirements coincide - this is some kind of “core”, something that you must be able to get a job. 

Write yourself the “core” and mark what you own. Compare the two lists: yours and the "core". If the requirements and your list of skills matches 9 out of 10 - you can try for this job. At interviews, add 10% to your price, because there is always room for bargaining.



Note. The method is not always reliable, but it works. It also helps move to a higher level, but more on that next time.

How to find a job without life hacks


To summarize: we have a toxic market in which the issue of job search causes pain for everyone . Candidates are sent messages to the post office and to Telegram, stuck on meetings and phoned (sometimes at night), and you can get a job if you write a divine resume and go through thirteen stages of the interview. Companies are also tormented: it’s hard to find someone who raises the hammer of Thor corresponds to a vacancy at least partially in the sea resumes from the June. Every day - lost money, and if a candidate is found, and then left in the first couple of months, it is doubly disappointing.

The developer community (and the market as a whole) are already trying to find a solution to the problem. Chatbots and services for developers appear with a selection of vacancies, for example, Hired, Talent.io or Honeypot. They try to circumvent recruiters and the shortcomings of the "classic" search, but many of them are English-speaking.

Honeypot . Service for European developers.

  • Quick registration (if you know English)
  • There is screening skills (code verification).
  • You can turn off “visibility” and stop receiving offers.
  • Stack relevant offers.
  • You can add links to GitHub, Behance, StackOverflow .

Disadvantages: in English, and all vacancies in Europe - consider only if you want to move.

Talent.io . Also a service for Europe. Similar to Honeypot, but with the addition of anonymity.

Hired . An analogue of previous services, mainly for the USA. Of the advantages, I note that you can choose a specialty from the list .

ActualizeBot . Bot for the selection of work in IT.

  • This is a telegram bot . Through it, the developer writes an announcement about his services.
  • Suitable not only for permanent work, but also for freelance .

Disadvantages.

  • This is a Telegram bot with all the shortcomings of the bots.
  • Everyone can respond to the developer’s proposals, there is no dropout of recruitment agencies.
  • It is planned to introduce a paid subscription.
  • No vacancies from companies. One-way communication - only the developer writes his proposals

Arena . Russian-language service for anonymous job search in IT.

  • The profile is populated with data from LinkedIn and GitHub. Personal data is not added .
  • You can add expectations from the vacancy : stack, salary, and more.
  • Proof of skills with tests and tasks. Results are added to the profile to avoid test tasks from recruiters.
  • Companies may not respond to the entire profile, but to the part to confirm what expectations they are ready to realize.
  • No recruitment agencies .
  • Suitable for beginners and middle-developers.

Disadvantages: there are complaints about the code editor (buggy), but the activity of the company is not happy, there is a "hibernation" in social networks.

headz.io . A Russian-language platform on which you can anonymously select vacancies in IT according to the technological stack and skills, without suffering from a resume, without spam and recruiters.
Among the shortcomings, among employers there are not all technology companies (which they are actively working on), there is no integration with HH.ru (for those who move).

Benefits.

  • It was created with the participation of professional recruiters with experience who know the problems of both sides of the process: developers and business.
  • You can upload data from LinkedIn and GitHub to your account or send a CV and fill out the profile for the candidate.
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I hope my advice will help you. But if you do not want to bother with a resume, for example, then just use one of the services. For example, headz.io , while it is the most convenient and well-developed.

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