Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Jobhunting With Less Pain, Part 1

A new influx of recruiter spam plop­ping into my inbox this after­noon promp­ted me to write a post I’ve been mean­ing to put together for a few months: a col­lec­tion of my top tips for com­plet­ing the job-hunting pro­cess with as little pain as possible.

This art­icle ended up becom­ing a bit of a beast, so I’ve split it into sec­tions which I’ll post daily for the next few days until — like a strange, inform­at­ive ill­ness — I’ve got it all out of my sys­tem. UPDATE: You can find the second part of the art­icle here, and the third and final part here. Enjoy!

I decided to look for the next step in my fledgling IT career about five months ago — mov­ing from freel­ance and con­tract web devel­op­ment work back into a per­man­ent role. At the time the over­all job mar­ket was pretty depressed — more so than now, I’d bet — but against gen­eral expect­a­tions I man­aged to run the whole gaunt­let — CV post­ing, oppor­tun­ity con­sid­er­a­tion, employer nego­ti­ation and finally con­tract sign­ing — in exactly ten days. The job I ended up with kicks massive amounts of ass, so I’d say that for me the pro­cess was a pretty suc­cess­ful one. The job mar­ket is still hurt­ing, but there’s still plenty out there if you’re will­ing to put the leg­work in to find it.

It was the first time I’d had to per­form a proper “cold” job hunt (i.e. going into the mar­ket with no exist­ing con­tacts or proffered open­ings), and it was equal parts ter­ri­fy­ing, exhil­ar­at­ing and fas­cin­at­ing. I got a real sense for how the mar­ket works, but wasted a lot of time on shit that didn’t mat­ter — time-sinks to which I’d be keen to alert future job-seekers. Thus this art­icle, in which I’ll attempt to pass on the know­ledge that I gained in the hope of help­ing any­one else think­ing of look­ing for a new job in the near future.

The advice that fol­lows is fairly biased toward the IT industry, which I real­ise is a some­what priv­ileged pos­i­tion to be in as far as indus­tries and their recruit­ment pro­cesses go. It is, how­ever, the only industry with which I am famil­iar enough to want to pass com­ment, though I’ll do my best to cover as much in the way of gen­eral advice too.

Before you start: An often over­looked part of the job hunt comes before the hunt actu­ally begins. It may sound like stat­ing the obvi­ous, but you should know what you want to do, and the sort of com­pany for whom you want to do it. A lot of people miss this part out, instead sub­con­sciously defer­ring these decisions to be made later when they eval­u­ate incom­ing job offers.

Knowing these two things up front will save you a lot of wasted time, as it’s the best thing you can do to help nar­row your search and screen out irrel­ev­ant stuff. If you have the lux­ury of being able to move into pos­sible roles in mul­tiple areas, draw up a chart of their rela­tion­ships and eval­u­ate the pros and cons of each. Decide too what sort of com­pany you want to work for — do you want to go the cor­por­ate route, the star­tup, the SME or some­thing in-between? Public or private sec­tor? And where­abouts, geo­graph­ic­ally — would you con­sider relo­cat­ing for the right job, or do you want some­thing local to where you are now?

CV pre­par­a­tion: Unless you’re known in your industry by name, your job hunt will likely begin with the con­struc­tion of a CV. Known as a résumé to our friends across the pond, your CV is an enu­mer­a­tion of your rel­ev­ant per­sonal details, cur­rent qual­i­fic­a­tions, skills, and career thus far. It is usu­ally the first thing of sub­stance that a poten­tial employer will see of you — if a recruiter is involved, they’ll pass on a couple of breath­less, glow­ing sen­tences regard­ing your suit­ab­il­ity, then send over your CV (there may be a cov­er­ing let­ter, but I’ll get to that later).

Books have been writ­ten on the sub­ject of CV writ­ing alone, but most of this advice is com­mon sense, so I’ll try to keep it short… ish. Your CV needs to be a pol­ished, per­fec­ted piece of work. If this is your first time job-hunting, you’ll likely agon­ise over it more than any other doc­u­ment you’ve ever writ­ten up to this point. You’ll also come across a lot of con­flict­ing advice regard­ing level of detail, lan­guage and so on. I won’t attempt to argue with this stuff as it depends a great deal on the situ­ation. I can only relate from my experience.

My advice on CV writ­ing is thus, in no par­tic­u­lar order. Put your con­tact details at the very top of the doc­u­ment — include email address (more on that shortly), tele­phone num­ber, and loc­a­tion (you don’t need to provide a full address). Start with a con­cise, well-written intro­duct­ory para­graph of a few sen­tences sum­mar­ising your situ­ation and what you are look­ing for. List your edu­ca­tion back to GCSE level (or equi­val­ent, for non-UK read­ers); you don’t need to provide grades, with the pos­sible excep­tion of your degree clas­si­fic­a­tion where applicable.

List your career back as far as is rel­ev­ant (in my case I stopped at my first “proper” part-time job, as a bar­man, aged 18). Provide descrip­tions of the roles you held, the dates you held them, and the skills you were required to exer­cise in doing so. If there are gaps in the dates, be pre­pared to explain why. For the last pos­i­tion (or two, depend­ing on how recent) you should provide details of someone who can be con­tac­ted to provide a ref­er­ence, e.g. your man­ager. Enumerate your skills in as much detail as you feel is neces­sary. Include skills that might not be fun­da­mental to the role but that show your well-roundedness and adaptability.

Include a short sec­tion on other achieve­ments, where you can detail “extra-curricular” suc­cesses you have enjoyed in recent years (e.g. ran the London Marathon; had pho­to­graphy fea­tured in a national magazine; released a piece of open-source soft­ware). This helps to illus­trate your life out­side of work. Also include a brief list of your interests, and try to make them sound inter­est­ing! Everyone likes social­ising and watch­ing films. Try to add a little spice.

Overall, rep­res­ent your­self as fully and as pos­it­ively as pos­sible without des­cend­ing into bull­shit. Avoid buzzwords if at all pos­sible. Remember the dif­fer­ing esteem in which CVs are held — Jason Fried of 37signals, for example, rightly points out that they usu­ally “reduce people to bul­let points, and most people look pretty good as bul­let points.” Any indic­a­tion that you’re being eco­nom­ical with the truth, and most poten­tial employ­ers will lose interest.

In terms of present­a­tion, your CV should rock. I’ve seen far too many examples in my very lim­ited exper­i­ence that weren’t spellchecked, used shitty desktop-publisher tem­plates, naus­eat­ing stand­ard typefaces, or were laid out with all the ima­gin­a­tion of a brown paper bag. There are thou­sands of examples of good CV design online, so off you go. If you’re apply­ing for a design-related role, your CV should reflect your design skills. This art­icle con­tains a few inter­est­ing examples of that, though I think for the most part they’re a bit over-the-top. I did, how­ever, gain some inspir­a­tion from them for rep­res­ent­ing some of my details in novel ways.

You may want to pre­pare a couple of dif­fer­ent ver­sions depend­ing on the sort of roles you’ll be put­ting your­self for­ward for. I pre­pared a stand­ard tex­tual ver­sion of my CV as well as a flashy graph­ical one as a bit of fun, and sent both to the com­pany that ended up hir­ing me.

Save your com­pleted CV in both DOC and PDF formats, and make sure the format­ting holds up in the DOC ver­sion (if you’re on a Mac, make sure you test it on a Windows machine). Most recruit­ers use the DOC format in their internal sys­tems, and we’re all poorer for it. I’ll talk a little more about this in the sec­tion on recruit­ers later.

When includ­ing your per­sonal details, use a proper, professional-looking email address. This means, at bare min­imum, your.fullname@gmail.com. Ideally, register your own domain name (with your name in it) and use an address with that. These details may seem trivial, but decisions may rest on john@johnsmith.com vs. jonnyboy1986@hotmail.com. It hardly costs any­thing, and it adds to your appear­ance as a pro.

With that in mind, I strongly recom­mend creating/registering a new email address for the pur­poses of your job hunt. Inevitably you’ll end up get­ting spam when your search is long over, and hav­ing that kept sep­ar­ate from your day-to-day account is a bless­ing. I ended up cre­at­ing all my job site accounts using a new address, and put­ting my “real” address on the CV itself - that way I could tell which recruit­ers had actu­ally read it, accord­ing to the address on which they reached me.

Finally, get someone sens­ible to review your CV before you start send­ing it around. Another pair of eyes will likely catch any mis­takes, as well as being able to provide a bit of advice. If you’ve a par­ent or friend famil­iar with such things, cor­ral them into lend­ing a hand. Your cur­rent boss is prob­ably not the best can­did­ate for this part.

Having not really inten­ded to write a whole post about CVs, I’ve ended up acci­dent­ally doing so. Whoops! Tune in tomor­row for the next part of this series, which will dis­cuss cover let­ters; the “hunt­ing” part of the job-hunting pro­cess; and so much more.