- Your resume sucks
- You don’t have a portfolio
- You’re not getting a referral
- You don’t know how to tell a story
- Your technical skills aren’t up to par
How it feels to never hear back from recruiters
Note: This should be categorized as more general career advice. I know things are particularly hard in the Covid-19 era. Finding a job will be hampered by factors well outside of your control. With that said here are the things that ARE in your control:
There are many tiers to the job hunt process:
- Getting interviews with recruiters
- Getting past the recruiter screen stage
- Getting passed the initial technical screen
- Getting past the onsite
If you are failing at getting a new job, you are failing at one of these steps. But I would classify the first steps as the most frustrating, especially to new candidates trying to make a career switch. My experience in this domain is in Software Engineering but I would posit that most of my suggestions would be applicable to other careers.
The reason this part of the process is so difficult is because there isn’t a very strong feedback loop. If you fail a technical screen or an onsite interview, you can generally pinpoint where you went wrong. But if no one will even give you the time of day you can’t rely on feedback.
My hope is to help cut some of the guesswork and give you a solid path forward.
1 Rule for even getting to TALK to a recruiter:
Referrals Referrals Referrals
Getting referrals outweighs almost everything else you could do. That goes for inexperienced and experienced candidates alike. Recruiters are lazy (sorry recruiter friends!). They have to sift through a ton of qualified candidates to find ones to put in their pipeline.
That means that when you apply you go to the bottom of the stack. Unless you happen to meet some identifiable criteria like a name brand CS program or company. It’s not fair but it’s natural human behavior to sort based on qualities like prestige (think Ivy League Schools or FAANG companies).
If you’re a self taught engineer from a no-name college (or without a formal education) how do you circumvent this then? By trying to expand your network and ask people who work at a given company for a referral before you apply there.
It sounds obvious, but most people are so afraid of rejection that they would rather lazily send out a million resumes into the ether than contact someone and have a conversation with them on somewhere like (god forbid) LinkedIn.
However, if you apply through a referral recruiters will often bump you to the top of their pile, at least for a reachout. Why? Because:
- They trust that the companies’ employee has more data on your experience than they do
- Referrals are a form of social proof
- Retention rates go WAY up for referred candidates.
Fortunately I’ve found that far more random people you reach out to for a referral are likely to get back to you AND refer you than a recruiter is to just accept your cold resume. Plus there is nothing stopping you from submitting your resume if you don’t get referred… just be prepared for your resume to be sucked into the ether.