How can junior developers find jobs when hiring boards look like this?

How can junior developers find jobs when hiring boards look like this?
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Search for jobs on aggregator sites, not by going to a handful of company’s career pages.

Don’t bother applying to explicitly senior roles if you have 0-2 years of experience. Companies are flexible around job requirements, but not that flexible. You’re not going to “wow” them into changing their hiring program around and searching for mentors to accommodate you in particular.

What sets you apart from every other entry-level employee on the job market? Ask yourself that question and try to highlight it in your applications. There are plenty of junior positions on the market, but that doesn’t mean companies will rush to hand those positions to you without good reason.

Work on building your skills and setting yourself apart. Take advantage of resources to review your resume, practice interview skills, and be matched up with internships or opportunities. In my experience, nearly every recent college grad I’ve worked with could use a lot of work on their interviewing skills unless if they haven’t already received help somewhere.

Finally, don’t become cynical or overly dramatic. Yes, it’s easier to find a job as a senior with a track record but it’s an exaggeration to think that no companies are hiring juniors or that the software world is conspiring to exclude you. We all started in the same position and worked our way up. You can too.

It’s not that simple.

Seniors are less risky to hire, in general. You can collect references, gauge their past performance, and interview them about real-world topics they’ve worked on. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good indicator of how they’ll perform.

Juniors are a blank slate and a roll of the dice. Some of them turn out to be fantastic. Some of them turn out to be unfit for the working world or not yet mature enough for the responsibilities of a job. You have to hire many of them, assign other people to train them, then have the stomach to thin out the underperforming juniors so you can focus your resources on the ones who deserve the attention.

It takes a lot of time and energy to train and filter juniors, and companies that are already short-staffed are actually the last ones to have extra hands to give juniors the attention they need.

Trendy companies and fast-growing startups always sound fun to work for, but they’re often the last companies equipped to take on junior employees and give them what they need.

This isn’t what most juniors want to hear, but it’s often easier for juniors to start at boring, slower moving big companies that they can find locally. The kinds of companies that have extra hands to train people and give them room to prove themselves before they’re expected to be senior-level productive. Don’t try to force your way into hypergrowth startups that need results now unless you already have a track record of delivering those results that you can show them. Have to start somewhere.

The working population is heavily skewed toward non-entry-level candidates, so job listings naturally reflect that.

If an engineer is a junior for the first 2 years and goes on to work for a 40 year career, they’re only junior for 5% of their career.

Expecting a large majority of job listings to be targeted at entry level candidates ignores the reality: Entry level workers are, numerically, a tiny minority of applicants anyway.