Navigating Job Searches During Layoff Periods: Advice for Engineers
It’s harder right now to land a tech job than it has been in the past 10 years.
Usually, my posts focus on how to succeed after you’ve landed a job.
However, given the difficult job-seeking environment, I’d like to share a set of tips and tools to stand out and succeed in the interview process.
For those who are not currently seeking opportunities, feel free to just bookmark this post for reference.
Main takeaways
In this post, you will walk away with…
Ways to improve your resume so you can land the interview
Ways to come across more senior in interviews so you can crush the interview
A treasure trove of places to apply and bonus resources
Making your resume stand out
Act as if you are a recruiter. Take a quick look at my resume below. Don’t spend longer than 15 seconds. Make as many judgments as you want.
Think about what you like and don’t like
If you’re on mobile, feel free to view the resume here
Did you do it? What did you find? Tell me in the comments below!
Let’s jump into the good and the bad.
Disclaimer: This is for analysis and educational purposes. My intent is not to come off as bragging, but to teach what I’m thinking about as I write my resume.
The good
Each bullet is concise. A lot of info is packed in just 3/4 of a line.
Example: “Reduce loan recovery CX touchpoints by 95% by building a self-serve payment portal.”
There’s a mix of “responsibility” bullets and “outcome” bullets
Outcome bullet: “Reduce user dead name usage by 80% by leading 12 mission volunteers in a company-wide name migration”
Responsibility bullet: “Work with designers and other engineers to drive UI components from draft to public consumption”
There’s a mix of qualities shown
Bullets include a wide range of skills such as mentorship, leading cross-functional projects, refactoring, showing specialization in a subject area (accessibility, frontend, GraphQL), user impact, technical documentation, etc.
Each bullet uses a consistent format
Each bullet has the following format. “X outcome achieved by taking Y action.”
Example: “Speed up local testing by 5-20 minutes (outcome) by building a demo company builder for generating sample data locally (action).”
No “hanging” words on their own line
Whenever you have a single word on its own line, try to shorten it so it snugly fits on 1 line. Alternatively, add more detail and make it hit the halfway point on the second line, but don’t have just a single word or two on its own line.
No “mission statement” or personal branding at the top
I’d argue that recruiters generally won’t care about the intro blurb about yourself and they just want to know if you’re qualified.
It’s 1 page
Having greater than 1 page is a big no-no. It means you’re likely not being concise enough or you’re including things that aren’t relevant.
It’s easy to read
Sizable whitespace between each bullet and section.
Important statistics are bolded. The recruiter can easily scan each impact area.
It doesn’t get too technical. There is a good balance between technical terminology and impact. It allows engineers and managers to ask about any one of these bullets and get a great story out of it with much more detail.
Ordering starts with Experience
After 1 year out of university, the “Experience” section should come first. Sometimes I still see people putting their “Education” section at the top which isn’t necessary.
Recent experiences = More bullets
The most relevant experience for the recruiter is what you have been doing most recently. They don’t want to see 10 bullets for things you did 5 years ago. My first 2 sections have 4 and 6 bullets and the rest have at most 2 bullets.
Skills are split into “Proficient” and “Prior Experience”
I often see a list of 20 skills on the resume and my first question is, “Do you really know all of those?” Splitting it across 2 sections makes it clearer to the recruiter what you’re known for and what you could relearn quickly.
The bad
The “Projects” section is a bit dated
To be honest, I don’t do side projects much outside of work. In my next resume, I’d probably drop the Projects section and add more “Experience” bullets, or make some relevant side projects.
Bullet ordering in the “Design Systems” role could be better
The order of the bullets should be based on impact or relevancy to the role. Both the 2nd and 3rd bullets should probably be first.
Missing areas of leveling up the team in recent experiences
It would be nice to see improvements to team processes, like on-call, or more mentorship activities in recent experiences. Looking back on it, I see it’s very self-focused.
How about you? Do you agree with the good and bad feedback? Is there anything you’d add? Do you notice areas you could update your resume? I’m super curious! Comment down below.
A bonus example
If you’ve got enough resume advice already, feel free to skip to the “Getting your foot in the door” section below for a ton of info on where to apply.
Manav, a friend of mine, graciously volunteered his two resumes—one before applying these tips, and a refreshed one after applying these tips.
Before
After
Notice the difference in readability, conciseness, and clear impact statements. When Manav showed me his renewed resume, I was blown away. He did a really great job making this resume stand out and something recruiters would fall in love with.
Thanks for allowing me to share this, Manav!
Getting your foot in the door
Alright, you’ve got a beautiful resume. Now what?
Don’t feel bad about applying literally everywhere.
Every response back is a potential opportunity. You might think you would never work there, but maybe you go through the process and realize you really like the company and the people you meet. If not, you got some good practice!
For finding places to apply, here are the resources I recommend:
Join sites where companies reach out to you
Find companies through the following sites…
Nailing the interview
Ok, last step! You got the interview. Now how do you get the job?
This warrants a full post on its own. But here are the top set of tips in short:
For each question your interviewer asks, ask yourself, “What is the interview actually trying to get at?”
Example: The interviewer asks, “Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a coworker.” The interviewer is thinking, “Will this person have trouble getting along with people here?” Your answer should answer the underlying question. It shouldn’t be about a time you and your coworker disagreed and you had to move to a new team. Instead, it should be about a time you had a disagreement that seemed impossible to overcome but you showed your teamwork and collaboration skills to come to a mutually-agreeable solution. It seems obvious, but in practice, a lot of people miss this.
Prepare 3-5 stories such that you can answer the following:
A time when you succeeded—or a project you are proud of
A time when you failed or made a significant mistake, a project that didn’t go well for example.
A time when you had a disagreement and how you handled it
A time when you had to make a difficult decision, how you chose, and the result
A time when you took initiative, leadership, or grew the team
For each one, consider what you learned from the experience and what you would do differently, even for when it went well. This is the most common follow-up question interviewers ask.
If you have 3-5 stories that cover the above questions, you should generally be able to answer most questions that come your way.
For detailed advice on a storytelling framework (modified version of STAR) you can use to not downlevel yourself, check Steve Huynh’s video here
Lastly, here are my top 3 tips for appearing more senior during interviews
Give clear, concise answers
Figure out what the interviewer is asking and give enough of a story to answer that, and no more. If they want more detail, they will ask. A 1-2 minute response should be good enough.
Show technical expertise in a focus area
The team wants to know that when bringing you on they will level up the team in a certain way. By bringing you on, what will that be? Will it be API design, database skills, frontend UI, accessibility, concurrency, or something else?
Show leadership and influence
Be prepared to show how you led projects, mentored, and had an influence on projects or direction outside of your typical scope. Also, speak to how you handled ambiguous requirements.
Resource treasure trove
At this point, we’ve learned how to…
Make your resume stand out
Get the job interview
Ace the interview with proper preparation
On a final note, I’d like to share with you the Google doc I used to prepare for every aspect of the interview process.
Here it is: Interview Prep Strategies Google Doc
It covers the following…
Data Structures and Algorithms
System Design (I also recommend Grokking the System Design)
Strategies for solving Leetcode problems
Mock interview examples (to practice mock interviewing, I recommend pramp.com)
Salary negotiation examples
Behavioral interview framework
Questions to ask interviewers at the end
Note: It’s not formatted pristinely, but there are a lot of goodies there.
Alright, that’s all I got! I wish you the best of luck in your search and I hope you’ve found this post helpful.
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Finally, if you’d like more personal and specific advice, feel free to schedule a coaching session with me on Superpeer here.
Excelent! Thank you for sharing!
Good stuff, thanks for sharing