Never used to have any trouble finding employment. But it seems as of recently my CV is toxic waste. If recruiters reach out, I give them a good time to call and never hear back. If I reach out to them, silence.
Did I do something recently with an unpopular technology? Did I piss off someone powerful? Did I get too old? Who knows!
Lots of coding experience; bosses have always been happy with my work. I've written stuff about programming online that has been well-received. Several personal projects under my belt, and plenty of OSS contributions too. Suddenly nobody wants to know.
Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Did you fix it? How?
CV in case some kind soul wants to take a look: https://foon.uk/robin-allen-cv.pdf
I am finding that more and more people are looking for extremely specific and narrow experience. Like, if you haven't used <x> technology and worked in <y> domain, they don't want to even speak to you. They'd almost rather higher a new grad who happened to work in <x> than someone with experience in many languages and domains. It's really weird. I've been thinking a lot about how to make my own path, because it's exhausting trying to apply and work for myopic places.
Things should loosen up when the Fed and EU announce rate cuts this year. Hang on. I know this isn’t the answer you were hoping to hear. Perhaps try your luck with contracting? There is more openness to that in this climate (lower threshold to commitment).
Inflation numbers came in hotter than expected this week. Consumer sentiment is improving. Employment is still high. Investment in manufacturing was massive in 2023.
these same people predicting rate cuts were the sames ones predicting a recession in 2023.
The economy is weird now.
Such a simple statement, but it does help. Thanks. :)
Similar to you, I chatted to companies who were looking for concrete experience doing exactly the one thing they were currently working through. And the rug was pulled out from underneath me a few times.
It’s brutal out there, and it will fill anyone with self doubt. The only positive thing I can say is that interviewing for my new role felt normal and nice—the way I thought it’d be. That at least made me feel a lot better about myself.
Exactly why I left this industry permanently.
Even with a resume tailored exactly to requirements, crickets.
Some copium going around - "it's just interest rates", "thinks will pick up soon". Nope. This is what the end of the industry looks like, at least for a great many developers.
Had 3 offers, chose 1 but denied 2 while trying to say "let's stay in touch" because you never know. That time came after 2 years - got canned with many others due to financial reasons, got back in touch with company that had sent me an offer previously and, damn, if it didn't feel like those dry responses you get from your ex after dropping that "wyd?" texts at late evening - simply rejected with no seeming continuation for this potential business relationship.
All in all, not a great time to lose a job. Been digging for about last 4 months and there's nothing really out there - a lot of rejections for fitting jobs and only getting interviews from places that need senior level coders for chump change. Some even have the nerve to pay too little and step back from the mutual agreement of not needing for me to come to office.
If there is a lack of talent, companies hire whatever is even close and trains the new stuff.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
I've been an engineer for 9 years and not once have I gotten so much as an acknowledgement or a call back on a job that didn't use a very similar tech stack to what I had on my resume.
That was my experience as well. If a candidate doesn't claim to have over 5 years of experience in a specific tech stack then recruiters just downrank of completely eliminate them from their short list of candidates.
And I won't even start on the hard skills screening process.
I believe this is a reflection of low-level HR technicians with zero tech background taking over the hiring process of some companies. Their work is to filter out unsuited candidates and present a short list of best fits. Thus they follow a pattern matching strategy with the candidate's CV, otherwise they have no way to tell if someone is even competent.
I get a lot of resumes, and that is definitely not the case anymore. Two to three pages is perfectly fine. I would suggest:
1. Add a list of skills and/or technologies you're particularly good in. You can include stuff you've used but aren't current in, but make sure it's annotated as such
2. Add a high-level summary that hits the aggregated highlights of your career. Especially important for making sure that the resume reader quickly understands your specialties and focus, depth and breadth. Your Blender work is badass and should def show up in that summary
3. If you have education, I'd add a small thing about that at the bottom. For smaller orgs it doesn't matter but bigger ones it will make a difference. Ditto if you have any certifications
Overall though, I heartily agree that it's a vicious hiring market right now so don't take it personally. You look like a fascinating candidate! If we had open slots and our markets lined up more, I'd be shooting you an email. I'm a little weird in this regard, but I am particularly impressed by open source work that people do. It shows passion, motivation, and a willingness to make the world a better place, which are three things I really appreciate.
1. Make it easy for someone reading your CV to quickly know your core skills and experience (i.e. your points 1 and 2).
2. Don't just say you did the job, that's a given. Talk about specific points for each role you are particularly proud of. These will become talking points in an interview.
Saying something like "worked on front end and back end systems" tells me almost nothing about you. What did you do on them? Anything interesting about it, any tricky technical or business problems you solved?
I also don't really understand why some people with decent CVs are getting literally no bites at all. Has the number of incoming resumes increased a lot in the last year or two? Is it because everyone across the country is applying for the same remote jobs?
- "We got literally thousands of resumes for this position"
- "We have had so many bad resumes, its been hard to find the good ones"
Truth is, right now the tech job market is fucked. Theres been too many layoffs without enough places for others to go. Add to that, that the large companies are laying people off too, and the smaller companies would salivate at having an exgoogler or some other in their ranks
I agree there's nothing wrong, but (respectfully, truly) I think you're actually missing the point, possibly the is/ought fallacy? The point isn't to have "nothing wrong" with your CV/resume (which I agree OP has nothing wrong), the point is to get noticed. Generally speaking for most people, the whole point of a resume is to get you an interview. When you're competing against dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other resumes, standing out is hard, and failure to do so usually means no interview, which means no job, even when you are the most qualified candidate.
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I added a bullet point list of groups of related technologies, each group paired with a number of years of experience. I had feedback from several headhunters that this list had really helped them promote my resume.
I can't see any job titles - which is frankly more important than the company and makes it easier to skim sections of experience
Definitely go into more detail than just "Worked on" and "Used" - anything on stuff the company uses in the CV is not confidential and you can put on your CV.
Finally put months on your CV - it's not clear if your most recent role was 12 months or 1.
I've stopped doing that because it gets tiring why I changed so frequently in recent years. It's not my fault places go bankrupt, startups do layoffs, or teams just up and dissolve after you join, and it gets tiring explaining that rather than discussing my experience, skills, and interests and the role at hand. It was a total mistake to enter into the startup world.
You're handicapping yourself with the lack of transparency. It just comes across as shady. Why are you worth the risk compared to the overflow of excellent candidates in this market?
You need to suck it up and share this information. Briefly explain each situation on the resume (i.e. "fixed contract ended" or "startup shut down due to loss of largest customer").
Edit: spelling.
My automatic response there when filling out is "start date is always first of month, end date is always last of month".
The other thing I'd suggest is tailoring your CV to the roles you're going for - the last time I had to write my own I had a two page appendix of the awards won by my projects as that's the sort of thing the hirers I was targeting would be looking for. And as someone hiring now I'm far more likely to interview someone who's CV shows some interest in the kind of work we do and who we do it for.
A lazy recruiter will see that as a watermark as your education and assume the rest is amateur stuff. This makes it look like you have less than one year experience.
For some companies/recruiters they often like to see month and year for each position. It can be a red flag as it looks like hiding of career gaps.
Lack of personal statement is a lesser problem. Recruiters won't necessarily care, but it makes a hiring managers job harder. The job positions should be seen as supporting evidence for the claims in that statement.
That said, despite these problems, the jobs market is at the slowest it's been for years. Particular for more senior roles.
My company has a hiring freeze despite being profitable and growing and we're cutting costs to avoid making people redundant.
I'm UK based and have reviewed hundreds if not thousands of CVs.
CVs used to have a choice of layouts, you write in a form you prefer. What's wrong with non-chronologicals now?
I'm not calling anything "wrong" but I definitely don't have time to have tea with your branding or whatever.
Besides the standard callouts of “it’s an anomalously hard job market right now due to a recent layoffs flooding dev supply of interviewees, due to a post-covid hiring frenzy hangover, due to anticipated US tax code changes discouraging hiring, and due to high interest rates in the US currently discouraging risks including hiring” the thing that may be actually in your control is I notice is a lack of quantification of project deliverables and accomplishments on individual projects.
Looking at the first point as one example, it could be summarized “created app”. Especially as your most recent work, I’d want to see you go more into the experiences the app enabled - perhaps the user counts who were using it, what the experience was for them, any metrics you might have that you moved the needle on, or what your changes enabled people at the installation to do. Quantifying the impact of your work with each work item I think would go a long way towards making the CV better.
I'm in the UK so not sure how much the US situation is contributing, though there might be knock-on effects.
I appreciate your feedback about what details to add and about that most recent point. I agree, and will spend some time rewriting.
Again, thanks so much for responding and I'm happy to hear you enjoyed those games. Cheers!
For the first time in 20 years there are more applicants than jobs again.
I'd argue that happened during 2008 and 2009.
Source: I graduated and had to get a first job during that time. For every 100 positions I applied for, I got a call for 5, and had on site interviews for 1. Sounds like that may be the case again.
First jobs are usually the "first" to go FYI.
I'm a senior dev, and even back then I had a ton of experience.
I agree with OP. This is easily the biggest down cycle since the dot com bubble.
Just remember, things will recover. Eventually.
I'm in the UK. Strong skills. Good CV. Ghosted constantly.
Half the jobs you're applying for ( or more ) are fake, and the recruiters are just trying to collect CVs to drum up future business.
The economy is absolute garbage right now.
I'm in the US and the situation is similar here. I've never had an issue finding a job before either, but I've been unemployed since the middle of 2023.
Assuming you aren't under financial hardship, my advice is to spend more time on your hobbies and check back in around July/August. That is when the layoffs are projected to drop and hiring is expected to keep up.
Maybe Canada is worse due to how insane housing is but for the average person life does not feel anywhere like it used to pre pandemic at least.
Low unemployment means nothing without also referencing workforce participation rates. Economic data is also effectively useless if, for example, inflation data excludes common expenses like groceries, housing, used cars, etc.
I don't think this was always the case, but economic data today is so easily gamed that its little more than political theater.
i think many orgs overinvested in tech during the pandemic. we've swung too far, so it's time to work out the excesses.
[0] https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-pred...
Or this could be the new normal.
Lately, I get maybe one person reaching out every month. I responded to one last week, even though I'm not looking, just to see what the job market is like. I was ghosted.
I think we're just not in a hiring frenzy right now. People don't want to leave their jobs and risk it on something new. Some companies are laying off. For the companies that are hiring, they are probably seeing many more applicants and a higher conversion rate.
Things will come around.