Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

Still luckily have work when I want it.

However, my general feeling is the market is cooler here in the UK. I used to get annoyed on a regular basis by the number of recruiters who contacted me .. it's happening a lot less often now.

I've been both on the hiring side and candidate side this year and demand is still very strong (granted moreso for more senior applicants than junior).

Couple of tips that have worked for me:

* Make sure your Linkedin is up-to-date, you have "open to work" turned on and that your experience is filled with direct results and accomplishments. Example of a bad bullet point (Used javascript to build a user-facing dashboard). Example of a good bullet point (Built a new dashboard product that manages x for y number of users. Ultimately drove z result.

* Tweak your resume details over time. Don't blindly apply to 100+ roles with the same resume. Not only could there be something wrong with it that's throwing off employers, it doesn't serve you as well as it could. If it's a full stack role, highlight more of those skills in your resume. If it's a iOS role, make sure more mobile experience is called out. Note: this doesn't mean filling it with things that aren't accurate about your background.

* Don't underestimate a solid cover letter (especially for smaller companies) and also reaching out to recruiters at those companies. Both of these things should take * Have a skills section somewhere on your resume that lists the technologies you are familiar with. This is critical to get passed resume screeners and it also helps free up your experience section to list more accomplishment details than technology ones.

* Leetcode, leetcode, leetcode. I know it sucks and it feels like a waste of time but your point of "several places where I was rejected after either the initial or tech screen" makes me feel like you could use some work here. Try to do as many mediums as you can. When I've been deep in interview mode, I try to solve 1 medium problem/day every single day. I set a 45 minute time and make sure I can get something working in that time. If I fail, I study the answer and get ready for the next day. After 1-2 months you should be in good shape.

Hope this helps!

I know LinkedIn and recruiters get kind of a bad rap but I really like working with them over applying the old fashioned way.

You get more phone calls but it beats filling out forms. If you get multiple recuriters working on your behalf you can setup situations where you try to interview for lots of companies at once in batches. If you're currently unemployed and have the time for that, some companies will eliminate time consuming steps in their interview process to hire you before one of the other companies does.

I haven't looked in the last few months but this is most of my strategy for finding good jobs without having to bother with annoying things like job applications or too many interviews.

Long term an additional thing you can do to boost this is continue to add recruiters on linkedin even when you're not actively looking.

I don't enjoy the job search, so I let the recruiters do it for me.

You can be pretty straightforward with them too because they're incentivized to get you a job with commissions. You might be surprised with what they come back with if you tell them very explicitly what you're looking for (money, remote, type of interview, etc). Of course the more recruiters you work with the more likely some of them will be able to turn up these roles.

I also like this system because it ensure you are only working with companies extremely motivated to hire. At the point where a company has hired an external recruiter, they have already spent thousands of dollars to try to hire you, failed, and now they're spending thousands more in commission to send someone out into the wild to find them someone they can please hire.

One last thing I'll throw out if you're still having trouble past that or if that strategy is unpalatable to you. You could pick up a couple AWS certifications.

They aren't easy, but they aren't that hard either.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate AWS Certified Developer

These certs are extremely similar and if you study for one you can do just a little more and pass the other too.

Cloud skills are in especially high demand and some companies agreements with AWS even require them to employ a minimum number of people with AWS certs.

The AWS certs in particular are nice because they are quite cheap compared to many certifications. $150 each for the 2 I mentioned. You'll want study materials as well. I really liked the courses offered by acloudguru which I believe is now owned by linux academy.

https://acloudguru.com/forums/certified-solutions-architect-... https://acloudguru.com/course/aws-certified-developer-associ...

In any case sorry you're in that situation. Job change is always stressful, especially when it doesn't go smooth. Good luck!