1. Your resume sucks
  2. You don’t have a portfolio
  3. You’re not getting a referral
  4. You don’t know how to tell a story
  5. Your technical skills aren’t up to par

This part segues well from part 1 (https://alexdajani.com/top-5-reasons-youre-not-getting-hired-part-1/). Most people do not know how to craft a narrative about themselves. They either underestimate their accomplishments, or state their accomplishments in vague, lazy terms.

Two Phases of Writing Your Narrative

Phase 1: How You Got into Software Engineering

I’m leading with this because a lot of people I speak to have nontraditional backgrounds. This is an important part of your identity, and your narrative matters. So share it!


You don’t have to be too complicated at this stage. Have a clear vision in mind of how you charted your path. Were you completely nontechnical before? Came from a different STEM background? What did you do to get your skills up to par? These things matter!

Example:

“Originally I started my career out as a lion tamer. After many years of near death experiences I realized I was ready to make a career change. I started by auditing programming courses at my local Community College and I was hooked! I loved the excitement of writing code and seeing my work come to life. I started my career by building small websites for my fellow circus performers, and eventually worked my way to an entry level position at Ringling Bros. Corporate.” etc.

Phase 2: Your Projects in Greater Depth

For your resume we highlighted the usefulness of the CAR model (Context Action Result) to turn something like this:

  • “Rewrote an e-commerce app with React and Javascript”

Into something more like this:

  • Worked for major e-commerce company and built a new application that surfaced to 30+ different locales
  • The application was refactored from BackboneJS to React to improve improve usability and decrease application load time by ~40%”

The second example makes for a couple of good bullet points on a resume and gives us a better picture of the A-Z journey. But, it does not tell us about everything in between.


Your next step in this process is to take all the projects you worked on and step through the decisions you made. Why did you choose the technologies you used? How many people was this product surfaced to. What were some of the challenges you faced. What about interactions with coworkers?


A good interviewer will be looking to gauge your depth. They will figure out if you made major decisions while working on your project.

Don’t worry if you are early into your career, or if these are small projects. There is value to at every level. What matters is that you’ve siphoned all the information possible from your projects, and that you have a clear picture of why you made the decisions you did.

For both of these examples I would highly suggest you write these narratives out, tweak, and refine them.