Junior Devs – How to find work
I get A LOT of junior software developers/grads reach out to me looking for their first full-time role as a software developer. This is happening even more now with the economy. Naturally, you’ll gravitate towards a recruitment agency to help you but more often than not, I can’t help you. I want to explain why and give you some pointers because theres probably a number of you that have contacted recruitment businesses and heard nothing.
Generally, recruitment agencies are engaged to find the talent that the companies internal recruitment/talent acquisition team can’t find. In our case – senior software engineers / tech leads etc. If you go forward for a position via a recruitment agency, you’re essentially applying with a fee attached to you and will be considered after anyone whose applied directly.
With this in mind, there are a few things you should be doing to help yourself and strengthen your chances of landing that role you want.
You need to remember that as someone with no commercial experience, you will require help and mentoring, meaning somebody senior needs to come off their project to help you. This could come as a burden to the team, so you need to make sure you’re going to try and make that persons life as easy as possible. This will come with your enthusiasm, attitude and eagerness to learn.
When applying – make sure your cv looks great, spend some time thinking about where you want to work, make a list of those businesses and then send your CV to the careers section/portals of those companies. These should be; banks, tel-cos, ecommerce businesses, healthcare.. the list goes on. You’ll generally find that larger organisations are set up with mentoring programs and have hired juniors before. That’s not to say that start-ups don’t, so contact any businesses you like the look of.
Any of those businesses that you really like the look of (lets say, Google, Atlassian or Canva, etc).. spend some time on Linkedin and add/connect with 1 or 2 of the internal recruiters and even hiring managers that could potentially hire you / be carrying out interviews. You’re junior, so you should be pro-active right? Once connected on Linkedin, drop a quick ‘Hey, I dropped my CV into your careers portal today as I’m looking for an entry level role where I can be mentored. Would love to have a brief chat with you, if you had time?’.
Remember – just because there aren’t any roles suitable to you in a particular companies career section of their site, doesn’t mean that they’re not hiring. In a lot of cases, the careers sections of websites aren’t kept up to date as things change so frequently, especially in larger firms.
Put the hours in – if you’re a junior developer or designer, you should have a blog, personal website, github or folio that you’ve been working on to showcase your skills. This is going to help you stand out from the crowd.
Make sure you’re Linkedin looks good but don’t create the impression you’re more senior than what you are, or request contract rates just because you’ve got all the buzzwords written in your profile – Its frustrating for recruiters and hiring managers. Be really up front about where you’re at / what you can bring and what you want to do..
These are just a few basic pointers will hopefully help you. Any other questions – drop me a line;
nick@tekfinder.com.au