So you are looking for a new position working with great people on cool technology. You saw a Vertalo job posting and want to apply. How do you make a winning first impression?
You can rely on your headhunter to persuade me that you have exactly the skills we need. Just remember that headhunters are rarely technical, and are unlikely to convey the substance of your great work as effectively as you do.
You can write an amazing cover letter and describe how passionate you are for what you do and the role you want. A great cover letter goes a long way, but shows off your essential communication skills more than your capabilities as a developer.
Vertalo looks at many more applicants than we hire. We’re looking for great talent, and are very picky. How do you prove we should cast our lot with you? Better to show rather than tell. Show your work.
Make work easy to find
My first stop as a technical hiring manager is your GitHub account (or equivalent – choice of tools is not the question here). Make it easy to find! If I ask for a link, provide it. Don’t make me click through or cut and paste from your resume. That’s bad UX!
Of course also put the link on your resume. Add it to your LinkedIn profile, too. Portfolio pages are great if you build apps. But show me the code as well. Make it easy for me to navigate to your code. If you let me find your GitHub before I look at your LinkedIn, you go up a notch. Making me work for it is just annoying.
Demonstrate a compulsion to code
When evaluating you for a developer role I look for a compulsion to code. A vigorous history of commits shows that. On GitHub you can enable or disable inclusion of private commits in your overview stats. Enable this! Don’t shortchange yourself by suppressing commits to private repos!
You can game this by making high-volume trivial commits programmatically. This shows a small amount of cleverness in automation. And it also comes out very quickly in an interview that you have faked your commit history. If you want to make it more obvious, write “Hello, World!” or display emojis into your commit history. Gaming it is cute and wastes my time. This is not the place to fake it!
Highlight your real interests
Coding bootcamps typically provide students with a set of repos for their coursework. Having repos from a bootcamp and nothing else says “I just completed a bootcamp.” rather than “I have become a developer.” That’s disappointing.
Some people try to bulk up their credentials by forking a lot of repos. Unless you contribute to those repos, they don’t count for much. Fake interest comes to light the moment we delve into details. Better to have fewer repos of genuine interest to you.
If you want to impress, implement some hobby projects! These are self-directed, unlike the bootcamp work and forked repos. You can explain what interesting problems you encountered and show how you solved them. Highlight your real programming interests by building something for fun!
Look for the right match
Not everyone is well suited to join our team, and we’re not the team for most people. Each of us needs to find the right match. Focus on what interests and motivates you. Look for the right match, with Vertalo or elsewhere. If you think you are a match with Vertalo, we expect you to follow the advice above. Interviewing will be much more fun when digging into details about projects that genuinely interest you. Show your work!