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I find it fascinating yet sad that some people have such adverse opinions toward whole generations, essentially. Why such animosity?
Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
281–290 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
#282It's not a good job market, but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.
It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them.
Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they'll have tools for this and if their tool can't extract your text they may not bother. Unless you're a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume.
Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you're coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.
Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine's dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.
Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
#283I hate to say this, stop applying. Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.
I've given up on applying through company portals for a few years. Last job I applied myself was in 2016. The rest was people reaching me via LinkedIn.
I'm not a recruiter and have no vested interest in this, but the experience with recruiters from the candidate side is just completely different to justify their existence. From the company side, we also get better candidates from recruiters.
Applying through portals make you feel like a second-class citizen. Companies often ignore you, ghost you, have terrible screening, take ages to respond, give no feedback. Recruiters that reached directly to you have your back and will push for timely responses, will help you negotiate a salary and will prepare you for the interview.
With that said: I had good experience with internal recruiting too. My best salary offer I got was from a company that had internal recruiting (I accepted and work at this company).
But I hope I never have to fill a form in a website ever again.
Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
#284Same here. 22 years experience full stack; leadership roles. Can't get an interview. Taking an ML class. I think telling some recruiters I had a baby on the way was a mistake.
I have had the same experience job hunting with 15 years experience as full stack and leadership. The market is awful right now, I either get rejected outright with some automated email or I get through to interviews where they clearly haven't read my cv and they'll ask if I have experience managing teams of 100+ (I don't)
I don't even know what the overlap between people that are looking for jobs at my level and people who have managed huge teams is... everyone I know who have managed teams that large is on massive comp packages at FAANG type companies.
It's all very confusing, it made me feel like I've picked the wrong field. I have been lucky enough in my career that I have a long runway, but I'm also not rich enough to retire and do something crazy like buy a farm like I've seen other people in my situation do.
Very frustrating situation, I have been trying to work on my own projects but I'm not a natural salesperson so it takes a lot of effort to motivate myself to do things like cold calls or even cold emails.
Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
#285I hate to say this, stop applying. Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.
If you don't mind, could you tell me how I should go about finding a recruiter directly on LinkedIn? I've been out of the market for three years now (had to take care of sick family) and it's extra brutal; I've been contacted by a few recruiters but I'd really like to speed up the process of networking with them if possible. Thank you. (I'm in the Inland Empire in Southern California).
This is weird. I've stopped going on LinkedIn because there is a constant barrage of recruiters.
If you list the right skills they will find you.
Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
#286I hate to say this, stop applying. Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.
If you don't mind, could you tell me how I should go about finding a recruiter directly on LinkedIn? I've been out of the market for three years now (had to take care of sick family) and it's extra brutal; I've been contacted by a few recruiters but I'd really like to speed up the process of networking with them if possible. Thank you. (I'm in the Inland Empire in Southern California).
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
#287It's not a good job market, but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview. It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them. Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overde…
No, no one calls someone with 5.5 years of experience a junior engineer.
Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
#288I believe the market really is just bad right now. When I was job searching it probably took me 3 times as long. I noticed that there were hundreds of applicants per role when normally I'd have noticed less than 20 maybe? Even at my current company they told us that hundreds of people were applying. That's how many you have to beat just to get in the door. I think it's caused by a number of factors: (1) Investors are…
It's the interest rate. Investment money is no longer (near) free.
Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
#289I thought I'd add a data point to this discussion. I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback. I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue. T…
as a rule of thumb I ignore all UK agents, they have the attention span of a coked up butterfly. from my experience they try extract as much information out of you (your salary, last company, are they hiring, give me phone number to their manager or hr) and never call even if they scheduled a call. they never update you if the role you applied for have been filled in meantime, you simply get ghosted and your email ge…
I won't resort to naming and shaming here but if you ever get contacted by a UK agency that 'resources vividly', immediately request a removal of your contact info per GDPR or you will get phoned daily for months on end.
Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
#290I hate to say this, stop applying. Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.
If you don't mind, could you tell me how I should go about finding a recruiter directly on LinkedIn? I've been out of the market for three years now (had to take care of sick family) and it's extra brutal; I've been contacted by a few recruiters but I'd really like to speed up the process of networking with them if possible. Thank you. (I'm in the Inland Empire in Southern California).
Add them as a friend on LinkedIn and start a conversation.
This is how they do it, they don't mind if candidates do it back.