If you’re looking for your first professional role as a developer the number of first round interviews you get will be determined by your experience, how you talk about that experience in your resume, and the number of jobs you apply to.
Fortunately you can exercise some control over all these things.
Your Experience
Companies prefer candidates with prior professional experience. This is a problem for entry level engineers seeking their first professional role.
If you have the time and the financial wherewithal, you can consider seeking out internships, offering to work pro bono for either technology companies or small businesses, or building something on your own.
If you opt for the latter route, try to build something for other people to use. Whether you’re successful in this or not you can pitch the months invested in the project as an attempt to start a business on your resume. This will make you significantly more employable if you’re applying to startups.
Note that you also don’t have to choose between applying for roles and building on your experience. Depending on your situation, it may be possible do both at the same time.
Your Resume
If you’re applying to jobs that require 1 or more years experience, you can increase the number of first round interviews you get by creating a version of your resume that is structured to resemble the resume of a professional software engineer.
Emphasize any and all experience you have writing software that is intended for use by real people. Paid or unpaid work you did for a client, a passion project you built for yourself or others, or an internship all count. List this experience as a job/position you held, not as a project.
When listing positions, try to make sure there is no overlap. When companies see that you held 3 positions at once, it makes it seem like you were un/underemployed. For example, if you were freelancing as a marketer at the same time you were freelancing as developer, consider just listing the developer experience for that period of time.
Consider removing things from your resume that signal a lack of real world experience. These things include:
- A projects section on your resume. Professional developers don’t have a projects section on their resume.
- A recent bootcamp degree. If you graduated from a bootcamp 3 months ago, that’s a clear signal to companies that don’t have that 2–3 years professional experience listed as a pre-req on the job description.
- A profile website that showcases projects you’ve worked on. Again, this is uncommon among a professional developers.
Try to avoid a summary that reads something like “Young developer with a lot of potential seeking a great team to learn and grow with”, opting instead for something more along the lines of “Engineer looking for an early stage, product-focused technology organization”.
Don’t put things on your resume that aren’t defensible but don’t be afraid to emphasize and de-emphasize experience to better align it with the role to which you’re applying. Remember: you’re in control of your own narrative — talk about what you want to talk about.
Job Application Volume
The more jobs you apply to, the more first round interviews you will get.
Don’t be afraid to apply to jobs that require 1–5 years experience. If a company comes across your resume for one of these roles and thinks you’re not a fit they won’t be angry at you and they won’t remember you. They’ll just skip over your resume and move on.
A few things that help when applying for jobs:
- Level set. If you are looking for your first role as a professional software engineer, it’s not uncommon for it to take 30–50 applications to get a single first round interview. And chances are you will have to apply to 100s of jobs to get an offer.
- Keep your foot on the gas. Don’t slow down interview activity just because you’re far along with a single company. Try to make a list of at least 500 jobs you can apply to and apply to at least a dozen or so jobs every day. If you’re having trouble finding jobs, check out these job boards.
- Keep track of all the jobs you have applied to or plan to apply to in a single place. A spreadsheet can work well for this (e.g. something like this).
- Always apply directly on a company’s website whenever possible. Companies often overlook or are slow to respond to applications that come through third party platforms like Angel List, LinkedIn, and so on.
- If a job application requires a cover letter or other free form response, tailor your response to the company and keep it to a few sentences.
- Stay busy. If you have a lot of unstructured free time on your hands, consider building an app or finding some pro bono engineering work to do as you’re applying for jobs.
Getting your first job as a developer is hard. It’s a psychological gauntlet that invariably involves dealing with tons of rejection.
Know that job offers are hard to get because companies generally avoid hiring entry level developers. Of the 904 startups on angel list hiring software engineers, only 13 are hiring for roles with the word “junior” in the title.
If you are an entry level developer and having a hard time getting a job, it is not because you are incapable of becoming a professional software developer. It’s because you're competing with people that have more experience than you for most of the roles you're applying to.
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