Ask HN: What job search strategies work for you?

I’ve been laid off since June and have not been getting responses from most of my applications other than denials. I have 10+ years mostly Ruby/React/JS. New just working on a side project (job listing scraper) but curious what is working well for you? Specific apps or strategies that lead to your hiring?

My current version of "it's not who you know, it's ..." ends with "it's who wants to work with you again." Which is another way of saying that whether you're moving up, down or sideways on a job, doing good work and treating people professionally goes a hell of a long way to increasing your luck surface later on.

6 days agoby blueyes

Every day multiple people post on LinkedIn “my team is hiring a <your role here>.” You can search for this on the main search bar “hiring a <role>” or variations of that.

Connect with them on the LinkedIn desktop web app and include a personal note how you’re interested in the role.

I have had a lot of success-maybe something like 30%+ interviews from the cold outreach.

Worth noting I was targeting early stage startups who are more likely to engage with any interested candidate. These folks are also more motivated to talk with you - they are literally posting hoping that it will happen.

For more mature companies apply through LinkedIn was actually fruitful for me too, but I had to be eagerly watching and ready to apply within the first few hours of posting.

You can also toggle on that you’re looking for a new job and recruiters should ping you if you have the right stuff in your profile - which is really just “software engineer” and use the keywords.

Good luck!

4 days agoby dirtbag__dad

Two CVs stuck together.

One with all the robot text at the top with all the keywords for easy parsing by their automated services.

The next page should be a colourful tour through your life, that showcase your skills.

First one gets you through the door, and the second one makes you stand out.

6 days agoby tetris11

You're not going to like this. My plan for when I get laid off or fired is to get a help desk job, or even at job at Walmart. If you can't get responses for what you want, you might need to do stuff you don't want to. That's most people's reality anyways

6 days agoby giantg2

Anything but blind applications. I know that's not useful information for a lot of people, but if you have experience, you _really_ need to lean on ex-coworkers that you had a good relationship with. Any way to not be a random resume is going to exponentially help your chances.

Additionally, depending on how desperate your search is, you need to be honest with yourself about remote work being a requirement. Ideally you shouldn't budge on it, but the reality is that capital owners have the leverage now vs a few years ago, and you have to play the game. But I would only budge on this if you absolutely need a job asap.

3 days agoby Ocerge

You get actually denials so you get responses? I still have my job but I was sending CV out just to check and I basically did not even get a single reply besides automated "thanks, we received your application".

It is also not that my CV sucks because in 2020 and 2021 I was sending out my CV and was getting calls or replies the next day.

5 days agoby ozim

1. Don't look for advertised jobs. Phone a place you want to work, find out who their hiring manager or whatever is, physically drop in a resume and cover letter addressed to that person.

2. Do a first aid course if you haven't done one. Out of two otherwise equal candidates, a first aid cert is a nice tie-breaker. Or a "how to use a fire extinguisher" course.

3. Go lateral. It's easier to get a job when you have a job. I found work as a medical receptionist/IT guy. Now they have a wiki, dynamic PDF forms, better typography, Open Office, spreadsheets for time-sheets, text expanding software, and on-the-ground tech support for paper jams, etc.

6 days agoby MrVandemar

Reaching out to everyone you have worked above, under, and beside is the best strategy (assuming you are not the kind of person people don't ever want to work with again).

To put it another way, with ten years experience a hiring professional might reasonably wonder why you are cold applying rather than working through a professional network. Or at least networking into the company org-chart before applying. [1]

And because any public job listing is going to be fire hosed with applications by people scraping, the hiring professional's job entails saying "no" on more than 99% of applications.

Therefore finding reasons to say "no" is mostly what they are going to do for very practical reasons. You might be a diamond in the rough, but being in the rough is almost certainly a good enough reason to not move your application forward in a saturated channel of applications.

Good luck.

[1]: If you identify someone within, reaching out and asking for an "informational interview" is a way of opening a conversation. An informational interview is where you can find out what a company is looking for in candidates. You need to be fly fishing, not chumming.

6 days agoby brudgers