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.