Finding a job after a coding bootcamp — Personal profiles
In my last post, I gave some ideas of where you can find good leads. Unfortunately, the chances are you won’t be able to get an interview on your charisma alone. Typically when you apply at a company or follow up, you’ll go through somebody on their recruiting team or HR, part of who’s goal is to filter out candidates and not waste the engineering team’s time.
You’ll need some sort of tangible presence that says you’re a good candidate and allows you to get your foot into the door and move into the phone screens. Below, I discuss my opinions on number of these ‘public documents.’
The Resume
This is of course the classic document for any job regardless of what field you’re in, so you’ll need one of these! However, I also respect this the least of anything. In the past I’ve frequently encountered people with great resumes who were terrible and vice versa. I think it’s generally a poor representation of a candidate.
Regardless of my opinions, it’s an extremely important document! A problem which you likely face as a bootcamp graduate is the fact that you’re coming from a different professional background. A lot companies even use software to sift through resumes.
It’s important that you highlight your development experience and related skills as much as possible. Luckily, my previous job, although 90% video production did involve some work with mysql, and basic php/html/css. Hence, I tried to highlight instances of projects that required those skills. However, that wasn’t enough to fully fill it in and many of you might not have anything similar from a past job.
The solution to this was to add a number of personal projects I’d recently worked on for fun or for the bootcamp. Surely you have some projects to add to it! Definitely list the technologies used in the project in addition to a link to the live product or github repo. Don’t hesitate to repeat listing technologies for different projects, as this helps pass the software filters which look for the frequency of terms like ‘Ruby on Rails.’
An example:
Revris (http://revris.fadetoproductions.com/) -A challenging variation on Tetris that reverses the board and controls on every line scored. Revris was created with Javascript, HTML, and CSS.Hopefully you can write better than me as well :).
However, be ready to talk about every skill or item you add to your resume. Interviewers often like to pick up on skills that they have in common and discuss those to figure out your depth of knowledge, although hopefully they’re aware you’re of junior experience.
The same with projects. I know some bootcamps have group projects, so be careful what you add there if you don’t have a strong grasp of how certain parts of it were built!
In addition, never say that you’re an expert at a technology. This is a clear red flag because either you’re so new that you don’t understand the full complexity of the technology, or you created it (and likely wouldn’t be reading this post).
Cover letters
I discussed cover letters a bit already in application strategy, but I generally don’t believe you should spend much time on them unless you have a particular connection to a company. Often they’re required, so I use a rough template and simply state what I’m looking for and what I’d like to learn about the company. They’re used to get your foot in the door, but don’t have much impact after that. Companies are generally more interested in whether you’re a good engineer and cultural fit, which they figure out from the interview rather than your cover letter.
Disclaimer: My thoughts are specifically in regards to software engineering and think that cover letters may carry much more importance in other professions.
This is a more interactive and informative clone of the resume in my opinion. If you don’t have a LinkedIn, you’d better create one… especially if you’re looking at joining the tech industry!
This seems quite important, as I can always see recruiters and interviewers looking at my LinkedIn profile before talking to me. This also gives you the chance to look at them and figure out what their background is! Plus once you throw a few projects on there, all sorts of recruiters start messaging you. LinkedIn is more flexible and can become a better representation of you than your resume.
A tip for your LinkedIn profile: make use of the customizable url. For example mine is https://www.linkedin.com/in/vonkunesnewton.
GitHub
Github is definitely the most important resource in my opinion! And certainly the most indicative of your ability as a developer. You should have a number of commits up there in the most recent months. It shows that you are always active and programming. It also gives interviewers a sense of the code you’ve written. You should definitely link to it from both your resume and LinkedIn profile.
One thing that I did to get a lot of attention was actually abuse the commit graph:
Personal site
I don’t think that personal site is necessary if you have solid LinkedIn and Github accounts. However, it does give you an opportunity to paint a bit more of your personality and present your projects in your own manner. I built mine way before App Academy as an exercise in Javascript and writing a CMS. However, there are plenty of better ways to get a portfolio out there if you don’t want to spend too much time coding the site.
Blog
Having a blog is quite beneficial to the job hunt, and even after it! Even if it’s only once a week, it’s quite easy to come up with a topic. What was the hardest problem you faced that week, what did you discover about it, and how did you solve it?
Having to write about a problem reinforces what you learned as well as allowing you to dig even deeper. Even if it’s a topic or issue that might not be groundbreaking, it still helps you and could help other people at your skill level in the future.
Like many other things you’re hopefully doing, blogging is a way to show that you’re actively programming and thinking about it as well as creating a stronger online presence.
My current team lead also makes the point that blog posts make an interviewer’s job a lot easier. They can see what sort of issues you’ve dealt with recently and talk about those rather than having to dig to find topics to discuss.
App Academy required us to write a post every day, which I think was too frequent, although I’m certainly glad I did. Although many of my classmates stopped afterwards, I continued and know for a fact that some of the interviewers read through it.
I don’t have strong opinions of Facebook asides from either keeping it private, or creating a ‘professional’ profile and hiding your other behind a less accurate name. I don’t want to put the effort into maintaining a professional profile, so I just keep my personal private (although there’s nothing too incriminating on it anyways)!
Do make sure to try and check out your own profile from somebody else’s account though and confirm what’s actually public.
Conclusion
Those are my thoughts on some of the profiles you want to have out there. In the end you’re looking to paint the best accurate picture of yourself possible so you can make it to the next step: interviews!
Originally published at newtonry.tumblr.com.