1. I got the job based on a previous internship that itself was based on talking to people in the career office in college. (1996)
2. I talked to someone at a local recruiting agency and went to the office and met them in person (1999)
3. I found an interesting looking job on CareerBuilder for a startup and reached out to the internal recruiter via email and we started having a discussion (2008)
4. When that company was folding, a couple of recruiters reached out to all of us and I was hired four days after I was laid off (2012)
5. I reached out to an in house recruiter on LinkedIn where the manager was looking to start a “tiger team” of experienced developers (2014)
6. I had plenty of recruiter i knew by now. I responded to every local legitimate recruiter who reached out to me. I told them what type of job I was looking for (a tech lead position at a smaller company) and just waited for the right opportunity. I found it in 2016.
7. The same for my next job, I was looking to work for a company that was doing new “cloud initiatives. I asked all of my recruiting contacts to be on the lookout. The recruiter I met in 2012 that I had stayed in contact with knew a guy who was the newly minted CTO of a startup that was trying to bring development in house and be “cloud native”. Before they were using a contracting agency. (2018)
8. A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a software development position. I really wasn’t interested in relocating, working as a software developer for any large company or ever being on call. I kept talking to her and she recommended I apply for a position at AWS ProServe. But even then, she shepherded me through the process and made sure my application got looked at by the right people.
I didn’t just blindly hope for a keyword match (2020)
And btw, in my entire career, I’ve done exactly two coding tests and both of those were FizzBuzz level sanity checks.
Then I "do it wrong" about half the time! There's a lot of tech out there to explore and if I'm only tethered to my (now many-)siloed network, I'm not going to see it all.
Honestly, hiring "networked" people is also hit or miss. There are a lot of decent IC devs with meh friends; combine that with scattershot hiring practices. And I've seen creepy empire building happen via external hires of networks of friends before, too.
I don't think there's a silver bullet.
If you’re an experienced developer and still randomly submitting your resume to an ATS instead of depending on your network you’re doing it wrong.
I have never in 25+ years across eight jobs randomly submitted my resume to an ATS hoping and praying someone would find it based on keywords. I’m much more strategic.
Yes, I’ve applied for (and currently work) for very large organizations.
Sure for a lot of jobs you have to submit your resume to an ATS to start the process. But I only do that as a perfunctory step after talking to someone who is already looking for my resume in the system when I submit it to start the process.
> This is a trope. Tech hardly move at all and it is way faster to refresh, dunno, 8 year old Java Spring experience, than learn it from scratch.
I last wrote a line of C# in 2020 after doing C# in for over a decade. But the last time I was in the weeds as a heavy C# developer was probably around 2018. Even in that brief amount of time, I know that the ecosystem has gone under changes and what are considered best practices have changed. More importantly, new features and frameworks have been added.