Develop Yourself
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Develop Yourself
#217 - How to Get Your First Tech Job - Straight from a Recruiter
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Henry Ngo is a tech recruiter who wants to see you win the game of job hunting.
We chat about:
• The Importance of a compelling hero section in resumes
• Utilizing technology and AI in the recruitment process
• Tips for effective communication during interviews
• Addressing myths about the competition in job applications
You can connect with Henry on LinkedIn
Shameless Plugs
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💼 Zubin's LinkedIn (ex-lawyer, former Google, Brian-look-a-like)
👂🏻Easier Said Than Done Podcast
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Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network and more. I'm Brian, your host. In this episode, I sit down with Henry, a tech recruiter with a ton of experience and is really, really smart. What's even more important, though, is he genuinely wants to help people out. We sat and talked for over an hour, but I chopped this interview down to a 20 minute segment that has the most action-packed pieces that I genuinely think will help you out in your search to get your first or your next job.
Speaker 1:A lot of what we hear on the internet is based on our own anecdotal evidence, me included, where we talk about what worked for us or what we think is going on, but what happens when you send your resume or your application into that black void? Hopefully, this interview will shed some light on that, some mistakes that I think a lot of us are making, how to avoid them and how to generally have a better chance at luck when you're playing the interview game. Without further ado, let's get right into it. I speak almost exclusively to software engineers, and the number one question is, of course. How do I get hired?
Speaker 2:What do?
Speaker 1:I got to do. How do I get hired and I tell them kind of what I think, but at the same time I know that I'm not a recruiter I've never been one and a lot of times I feel like I know it's worked for me but at the same time I know there's kind of a black box on the other end of where you send your resume and recruiters in general have been the way I've gotten to most of my jobs. When I think about all the jobs, the last five jobs I've got have all been directly through recruiters. I don't think I've really done a cold apply and gotten anywhere. And I'm curious, I want to know a lot more about that side of the game, like just personally. Like how does that all work? Like you're a recruiter, you've done that for a while, so I'm kind of hoping you can shed some light to me and our respective audiences. I'm like how does this work? How does the game of getting hiring work and why is it broken? Because it feels pretty broken right now in some ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah, dude, yeah, no, yeah, no, yeah, this is, if you got three hours, I can tell you everything. So, yeah, I come across the same issue even as a candidate, when I was looking for work, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The overarching theme is you've got to network, right. You've got to do good work, You've got to meet friends, but how do you do that? Right? And there's also you've got to update your resume for every role you're applying to. How do you do that? You've got to reach out to hiring managers and coding it on how you do that.
Speaker 2:There's so many ways of doing it and I don't think any which way is right or wrong. I think there's a lot of luck involved Timing, market and macroeconomics all of that, especially in tech, right? Yeah? So I guess what it boils down to is, if you're fresh out of a coding program or college, right, what you don't want to do is say, hey, can you look at my resume, right? That's kind of a thing that over time, will be just dismissed. You know, especially with folks like myself who have been in it for a while. It's not that we don't want to. It's not that we don't want to. It's like in our careers we have all these other things going on outside of resume reviews and helping folks with their resume previews. Nowadays, when people ask, I say, hey, I could do it for you, but I'm going to use ChatGPT and I'm going to show you how to do it on that, but I think that's.
Speaker 1:That's really smart. That's kind of a nice way to do it Like shush, teach your man how to fish, right, yeah, yeah yeah, and I think, if I can.
Speaker 2:There's one thing I think folks get really good at is just having conversations, because that'll prepare you to tell your story in an interview and if the interview doesn't go well, you have a network connection. And this quick story here someone by the name of Johannes I interviewed at his company Afresh. He was the chief of staff. This was 2020. I didn't make the cut, but I love the experience so much. We stayed in touch and four years later I may be helping him get hired somewhere else. We've never met in real life, but just that one conversation. Yeah, so it was all add up right. I think the resume thing I would outsource that to AI or someone that writes really well sam's.
Speaker 1:That's how I tell people nowadays. I'm like get a professional, because I'm like I don't want to spend time doing this, I want to focus on the technical portion of the interview, the stuff I'm actually going to get judged on, really yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And then the communication style, the email follow-ups, the hey, it's been a few days. How should we approach this persuasion? There's a sales tactic there as well, and I have to say you need to learn a lot of those things. But understand that the black box is not just the ATS, because there are humans looking at your resume. The black box is how many emails is the recruiter getting every day, which meetings they're in Outside of interviews? We're meeting with hiring managers. We have our own team meetings.
Speaker 2:We have meetings with additional stakeholders. We have meetings where we're training people how to interview it. Oftentimes recruiting, the function itself, runs lean. It's like, hey, it can't be that hard. You do this, this and this. But if you look at recruiting from a platform perspective, there's the sourcing, there's the inbound, there's the agencies we work with. That has to be productized and systemized and refined. Then there's the interviewing portion for the candidates. It has to be top tier, because if you don't do well, you know the word gets out this is a crappy company. Don't interview with them. It's extra hard, right?
Speaker 2:So there's this initial life cycle and from there you have to be so careful from a company perspective on how you treat folks because if you get to the end stage and you're not selling the company as a solution to this individual's career, like hey, I want to do this, this is my career. If I can do that here, fantastic, I'd like to get paid a certain band, that'd be the perfect fit. And if this person's in four or five different conversations now we've spent 30 hours with this individual and cannot offer them what they want for their career. Because we all have a trajectory, we don't necessarily want to be put into a mold. I think nowadays, with all these side gigs and Justin Welsh leading the way on the solo leadership stuff, that's right. That's my long answer, man, it's just so hard.
Speaker 2:I think again, just have conversations and people like yourself and myself that are open to these types of chats. These things have led me to multiple opportunities across my, my, my career. Whether it's getting hired fractionally, new opportunities I've never even heard of because you only research so much, right, that's right. When we have some time in the day and, yes, do the hobbies thing, you know, learn something new, just talk to people. That's the simplest thing I can maybe suggest here. So I mean, I'll pass it back to you like what's, what are your thoughts there?
Speaker 1:on the hiring and it's funny, I mean, you gave me some a bit of a different perspective too, because sometimes I feel like, uh, I forget that. You're right, there's there's humans on the other end of this. I I do see like I had a weird experience recently which kind of showed me a lot of how much I think the process is a bit broken, and this is just. I'm making some. I'm extrapolating maybe too much from this experience, but it seems like to me that there's a wave of AI candidates, people that are using AI to spam, essentially companies, and some companies trying to fight back by using AI to also then filter. So I had this interview eight months ago with a company I shall not name right, and they sent me a peer review to do.
Speaker 1:I did the peer review. It was immediately rejected. I went on Glassdoor. I saw this. Thousands of people have this experience. I'm like there's no way I have humans reviewing thousands of these. I said, okay, I forgot about it. It's one of the many rejections I'll get, not a big deal. They called me up two weeks ago. They said, hey, we made a big mistake. We've been auto-rejecting people. We haven't found any candidates. We see we've made a big mistake. I thought, wow, that's really cool you're correcting that, but I'm like thinking that was eight months ago. This is not a good process.
Speaker 2:Stick to the choir man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like this can't work and cause I feel like there's I mean, I've been on the hiring side too, you know, and I was an engineering manager and I was hiring people and it wasn't we had a flood of bad candidates, but it wasn't like we had a flood of great candidates and then we'd go through like a seven round interview process and I'm like why are we doing seven rounds of interviews? You know do we really need to do this and we'd lose candidates in the in the thing.
Speaker 1:But yeah, like kind of echoing what you said, I see a big portion of this. Something I didn't take seriously for a long time is the networking, and it feels almost cliche to say that Cause I feel like everybody says it like it's. But the way you do it, of course, is way more important than the, than just like the idea of networking because now I've learned to like it, like talking with you, like meeting you.
Speaker 1:We had shared interest. You have an interesting story. I'm like, oh cool, I genuinely, genuinely want to know more about that and speak with you, and I've met so many people online just from just being curious and starting conversations. You can start from like a comment under a post like yeah, that's how we got on this podcast actually actually.
Speaker 1:And then like next thing, you know we're speaking and having a good time and learning about each other. So that's the thing. I think genuine curiosity leads to these actual relationships or connections you can make, and who knows where they lead to. They can lead to a job, they can just lead to interesting conversations, all sorts of things. I've kept in contact with a few recruiters over the years, which has been really cool, because sometimes I've spoken to people that I talked to.
Speaker 1:Years ago, I think the last role I had was a short contract. I got laid off last year too, in the middle of last year, and immediately I found a job really quickly, very lucky, but also because I kind of have a built-in network at this point and it was much easier. I didn a job really quickly very lucky, but also because I kind of have a built-in network at this point and it was much easier, I didn't apply really. The jobs I applied to I never heard back from, but the recruiter quickly got a job. Then, after that contract, I got into another role. I kind of want to pivot into this question, though, because having you as a recruiter, this is really interesting, because there's a narrative there online that there's like too many people out there going for the same roles, and it's like that recruiters are just overwhelmed by a breadth, a massive amount of these really great candidates, and now they're just getting to pick and choose. Is that true?
Speaker 2:Not really.
Speaker 2:Okay, I mean, if you think about just the sheer number of folks that are applying to a role, right, just be neat. To this day, I don't think I've seen a report come out of an ATS that tells anything other than time to hire. The only things we look for is how fast we're hiring. A couple of stories here. So this is almost six, seven years ago. I crunched a role, hosted a role or data scientist In the first 24, 36 hours 250 applications and I knew that was going to happen, because, yeah, it's a lot, right, so that does happen, which is fine.
Speaker 2:What a lot of folks are, what the narrative is out there like oh, recruiters have to look at these resumes one by one, by one, because that's what we do. We want to be fair, we want to be, we want to do things right, and that's the correct answer. Right, the better answer is, if the resume is written in text, there's got to be a way to search for this text without having to look through everybody's resume. Right, and I'm talking very specific technical roles, like engineering or anything outside of that. Maybe, maybe you'd have to like read into the story. There's a marketing role. Obviously there's more tech involved, there's tooling, but there's also like verbiage. You can't really scan for, um, without looking at it directly. When I say scan for, I don't mean like using a tool or bot, I mean like, yeah, command, humanized, right, well, almost keyword search.
Speaker 2:Yeah, command of, yeah, gotcha, gotcha so I was greenhouse at Crunchyroll and I knew I made a bet on myself. I'm like I bet out of 250 resumes, there'll be less than 15 that have the qualifications that are on the JD Right. So there's, you know, there's. You can point fingers at a candidate not reading the JD, or the JD is really behind team sucks.
Speaker 1:We can point fingers at everyone, but whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're not going to be able to solve those. You have no control of those. But of the 250 candidates, I closed the roll off after three days. I did a bullying search and I made sure to include every single key, every single skill set, whether it's you know Python, any data engineering or data science, you know tools and methodologies. Pulled up about 12 folks. I didn't even think about it. Auto emailed. Hey, thanks for applying. We'd love to meet you. Imagine being a candidate applying. Within 24 hours you get a request to have a chat.
Speaker 1:That's an amazing experience already right For sure.
Speaker 2:So if you join that conversation on LinkedIn, recruiters have too much to do. One, we're not doing it efficiently. If you think about it. If you're going to read the resume, read the resume and all that, but know that there's a trade-off right, you're going to be pulled into a meeting. You're going to have an interview to go to. So what's the best case scenario here? If could think about data structures and algorithm, like if there's a brute force method that takes the longest, or you can I think it's called merge sort where you can kind of split things.
Speaker 1:Like divide and conquer.
Speaker 2:Divide and conquer, yeah. So in my mind I was like I have an objective to hire this planet in 30 days. How do I do it with being and still be fair? So how do I do it with being and still be fair? So I relied on Boolean searches. Nowadays, if I were to have the same scenario, I would just have chat GPT, write a Boolean search for me. Same thing, but have it right. Take the job description that we have. Hey, gpt, write up a Boolean search for me to input into my lever database, so my Ashby database, so my greenhouse database, and then output the resumes that match. That's all we're doing, is we're looking for keywords, we're looking for some phrases and stories.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's impossible. I, I and I'm going to die on this hill. If you say you're reading every single resume, end to end, for a single role, it's probably all you're doing and it's a very antiquated process, right? There's no speed. That's the brute force method. There's no speed involved, and speed is one of the best, the most advantageous thing you can do for a candidate Quickly make a decision.
Speaker 1:A hundred percent. Yeah, it's better than eight months, right?
Speaker 2:Exactly Better than causing somebody to die in eight months.
Speaker 1:Hey, my bad. Do you want to interview now? I'm like well, not really you know.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, like it's kind of weird. So that's my answer to that that competition has been going on for decades, jeez.
Speaker 1:That was really insightful actually To you. That probably is like something that's normal. That gave me a whole different mental model for what you're doing. I never would have. I knew something like that was probably happening but I didn't know. To be honest, I worked with a recruiter when I was working at a big company and I was hiring, and you know she would send me some resumes. We'd get like 300 candidates and then somehow she would send me like 20. I'm like I don't know how you did that. I don't know where these 20 appeared from and I didn't ask which I probably should have. I should have been more curious, but I was busy with my own stuff and then I'd get 20 on my desk and then I would go through them one by one and actually read through them. But she was doing that initial filtering for me before I ever saw them, which was interesting. And I wonder if she was doing something similar to what you did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think her approach could have been along the lines of you know, when you hire a recruiter and let's say, I'm new to Parsley and this is like a 200 person organization I have a sliver of time to gain your trust.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's the first two weeks, through emails, introductions, slacks, whatever power. My communication is my work style, my documentation. That's for me to prove to you that I'm going to be a good recruiter and good partner. And on that same note, you know, caveat is you're always in an interview, you're always interviewing, your work is a representation of you and who you're going to keep in contact with after X company, right. So what I typically like to do is, when I go through the resumes, if there's any resumes I'm unsure of, I would tag the hiring manager and say, hey, I'm unsure about this part of the resume, what do you think? And nine times out of ten they'll come back like, oh, they're actually pretty good, let's top some at least. Because even though, although this is a hiring manager speaking, although we're kind of concerned about this area, let's just have a chat with them. Yeah, obviously, as a hiring manager as well, you kind of want to be empathetic because you understand, you know people deserve opportunities and recruits are more the gatekeepers.
Speaker 2:And what I think she did was she knew well enough and she experienced enough and trusted her gut that these people are going to work well here, right, when you read through it, we see kind of some signals around. I don't want to say pedigree, but the way things are written, the way the story is told, uh, technologies, the schools, all that comes into play and so like one big product, right, let's say, if the resume is a product that has done really well, we move it forward because we know you're going to be delighted reading the resume, right. So there's this continual transact or transactional experience. So that's probably what she did, whether it was a Boolean search which I assume it was, or some tool. Yeah, you know, our job is to get, but somehow to filter this massive amount.
Speaker 1:That's funny. I mean, I'm pretty impressed that you knew about MergeSort too. That was a pretty accurate way of pretty accurate. That's what I'm studying. Yeah, yeah, I'm that note too.
Speaker 2:I enjoy this too much, I guess. But on that same note, there could have also been questions in the application process for that data science role. That data science role. I had a question. You have four plus years of experience in these technologies. If folks had answered no, it would auto-tag them with two juniors Gotcha. If folks had answered yes, it would tag them strong candidate.
Speaker 2:So in that same Boolean search I can actually just do a tag search in Lever or at the time it was Greenhouse and it pulled up all the candidates that were tagged strong the time it was greenhouse and it pulled up all the candidates that were tagged strong. So I knew this, that I was using, you know, greenhouse as an assistant to myself in my eyes, and I would review them. Right, if there was only four or five that were strong candidates, I would review them like cool. Yep, this sounds good, this looks good. You know, check to see if they need a visa or not, to check to see if anything was off with the tenure, because if they answer four plus years and it's only like an intern, that's my fault.
Speaker 1:I got to check that real quick. Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2:So there's two things inbound questions that actually makes sense for us to sort in the back end, and then using Boolean to quickly take 250 down to 12. Yeah, and then the cool thing is email all of them. They have a great experience up front. I imagine it gets a resumes within 48 hours. Everyone's happy, right? We're just now having to massage the uh the situation because Murphy's law is going to come up. Someone's going to miss an interview. You know someone's going to be rescheduled. Yeah, you know there's going to be a referral coming in from the CEO that you have to take the call no matter what, regardless if they're good or not. You know all that stuff happens in life. So so I get ready for it.
Speaker 1:I got to ask you one last. I know we're coming up on time, but I got to ask you one last thing. What's like the biggest mistake you see candidates make when it comes to either resumes or the initial screening phone call.
Speaker 2:Top of my head. First of all, I don't care if it's one, two or three pages, right, okay? The hero section. Right, that's what I call it the hero section. On a resume. The first half have to be invited, have to give me the information I initially want you know what company you're working at, and Sam Struan does a really good job at this, explaining on his LinkedIn profile Wherever you work, how long you've worked there, what tools, technologies you use, what you solve for.
Speaker 2:If I can initially look at the first half of the first page and see everything I need, then now I'm locked in. I'm going to go down to the next experience Okay cool. I see certain acronyms in Python Okay cool. Then I go down to the third and then at the same time I'm adding up years of experience in that resume and then I go to the second page. I see if they have hobbies education Education is typically okay cool. They went to school. You know what I mean. But if it's something like you know they double undergrad at Harvard and went to Columbia, then I'll look deeper into that, like why they do that right. What else did they study? That may be adjacent, but at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:It's like a webpage hero section, you know, maybe testimonials or whatever you want to call it, and that's what really gets me excited spending more time on our resume. So in order for me to do that well though, the font has to be big enough, and that's the one thing I would just say. Font size matters, line spacing matters, indentation matters, neatness and readability matters. If you think about when you're writing code, right, if it's all mashed up together, it's going to be like I don't want to do this For sure.
Speaker 2:Like using a manager obviously is like, yeah, you have to have it formatted. Yeah, I didn't think about this. But yes, that's a pretty good point and that's how I screen resumes and folks will tell you like, we spend most time in the top left corner where the sheet map says this and we're in the it's really. Again, if the job is Python developer and your title says, you know, solutions Architect, what are we doing here? You know I'm going to automatically pass, but you have Python experience five years ago. Like in bottom line up front right, that wasn't military term, bluf bottom line up front. What's the most important thing you can share with the reader, the very top, and it's not like an elite thing, right, right, it's like, if you're communicating nowadays digitally, we're competing with instagram, we're competing with linkedin, like, if you want someone to read your stuff yeah, let them know what's going on there.
Speaker 2:So that's what I would say in as far as the application resume process and this goes with how many one in their entire career, if you were just out of college or at a coding program make it compelling to read. You know no gimmicks. No, nothing about you know I don't know, um, what am I?
Speaker 2:I might say roblox, I don't know. But just don't no gimmicks. Straightforward, um, the resumes are readable, the fonts large enough. Makes straightforward the resumes are readable, the font's large enough and I think folks will understand. There's the whole idea about don't use Comic Sans. But there's also another idea about don't use any of those other fonts, that fonts have their own emotions. If you study that in style guides and design, you'll understand which fonts to use LibriArial, times New Roman. It was a bit 1990s but it's readable. Some folks prefer that. And the second piece in interviews you got to here's my best advice. I always tell folks If you're on a phone call, take it standing up and walking around so you can breathe.
Speaker 2:It's a sales call, right? You're going to pitch yourself. Need to smile over the phone? People can definitely, you know, feel you smiling. The energy changes. Yeah, it changes incrementally. And when you're walking around with and also have earbuds wired if possible, I wouldn't do two. Two if you avoid it and as you're walking around you're pacing, they ask you tell me about yourself. You're not sitting down. There's energy moving through the conversation and I 100 guarantee you the other person on the phone can feel the energy, can feel you smiling, and you may have been likely the only person that day of the five or six conversations that did that. Now you're moving to the next round. There's a. There's an element of emotion and body language that people don't talk about often. So resumes, readability, interviews you've got to be like yourself or something.
Speaker 1:You got too much game, dude.
Speaker 2:This is why we're here, man I'm proud to share.
Speaker 1:That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsityio, and if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.
