June's step-by-step guide to finding a job in IT

The guide will help if you:

• You recently got into IT and have little experience

• You respond, but no one calls you for an interview

• Come to the interview, but get overwhelmed by the questions

• Are you thinking about changing jobs, but don't know how to take the first step?

After reading you will be able to:

• Make your TOP employers where you would like to work

• Collect your skills card

• Improve your resume and increase interview conversion, write a cover letter and get 100+ responses

• Find your strengths and weaknesses, write yourself a cheat sheet with questions and train a story about yourself

• Formulate the purpose of your job search and understand what company you want to work for

Seven steps from responses to offers

Step one: set a goal

Setting goals is difficult and uncomfortable, but they help you focus your efforts on one thing and get what you want faster. This also works with careers.

To get started, ask yourself two questions and try to answer them:

1) who do I want to work with?

2) what is most important to me in a new job?

The output should be this:

1) product manager

2) salary 150K-200K, remote work, white registration and voluntary health insurance

The above is just an example. You may have a different position, a different fork and a different wish list. The essence remains the same: you are a developer, a manager or a marketer.

Let's try to formulate and write down your career goal. This can be done in different ways. I propose a simple and convenient SMART framework.

Let's use examples.

Smoker's goal: I want to work in IT.

The goal of a healthy person: I want to get a job at “Company name” as a product manager for a 150K-200K fork with a remote control, white design and VHI.

In the first case the goal is set incorrectly:

• no specifics, IT is big

• It’s not clear what conditions you want

• It’s not clear what profession you are considering

In the second The specifics are already enough to start working on your Wishlist.

“Company name” can be any company. If you already know where you want to go to work, that's great. If not, no problem. Read on.

Step two: compiling top companies

Open a headhunter, create a table in Excel or Google spreadsheet and write down the top 10 companies where you would definitely like to work. Remember your search criteria from step number 1. Select those companies that can offer you this.

Below is a table with an example of what should approximately happen. If you have difficulty compiling a list, use mineshould make the task easier.

Step three: collecting your skill map

See vacancies that are suitable. Write down the skills that are asked for in a table. Select the most frequent ones. Then put numbers from 1 to 5 next to each skill, where 1 means I know almost nothing, and 5 means I understand it very well.

Be honest with yourself. Not knowing something is ok. This competency map will help you understand what to upgrade first.

For inspiration, you can use a ready-made example of a skill map for product managers this link.

Step four: improving your resume

FirstWhat you need to understand about a resume is its purpose. It is simple and complex at the same time: make sure that you are called to social security.

SecondWhat to remember: Recruiters are short on time. Therefore, your resume needs to be written briefly and clearly, so that reading it diagonally in 10–15 seconds will make you want to call you for an interview.

You will be very tempted to cram all your experience into your resume, including an internship at a university ten years ago. Every time such a desire arises, ask yourself the question of how this experience fits the vacancy.

The checklist below will help you look at your resume with a critical eye. Perhaps you will throw out a lot of unnecessary stuff from it, or completely recycle it.

Format

The resume should be formatted in such a way as not to interfere with the recruiter’s task of quickly studying it. Hence the rule follows: the simpler the better. While you do not have much experience and want to quickly find a job, use the standard PDF from HH.RU.

Volume

The number of pages in a resume is always a balance between the amount of information that you want to cram into it and the time of the recruiter who is willing to spend it reading your writings. For the Russian market, you can focus on 1–3 pages.

I recommend leaving three pages only if you have done this exercise: looked at your resume, asked yourself the question “what can you throw out?” and if the answer is “nothing”, leave all three.

Job title

There is one simple rule here: the job title in the resume must match the title in the vacancy. If you are applying for a product manager, then the title of your resume should include “product manager.” Don't make HR think. He already has a lot of work to do.

Photo

There is nothing to be done, people want to know in advance who they will have to deal with. She better be there. To understand which photo to put, open a dozen public pages on Linkedin with a designed profile (job titles, cover, etc.) and look at their photos. Most likely, it is “like a passport, only more cheerful and with a smile.” This will be your reference. Do something similar and you are irresistible.

Specifics

Write down what exactly you did at work, what you were responsible for and what results you achieved. Ideally, use numbers.

For example:

• Responsible for section X of the site, the main metrics were conversion to cart and average check.

• I made feature X and increased the conversion from 1.5% to 2%.

• Redesigned the Y pop-up window and increased the average check by 5%.

Salary

If you plan to go to training interviews with everyone, then the salary may not be indicated. This will allow you to expand your funnel a little and get more attention.

In other cases, I recommend specifying a specific number. Not a fork. To reduce the potential of bargaining not in your favor.

Step five: write a cover letter

This is another point of contact with the recruiter. Use it wisely. The maintainer has four tasks.

Quickly explain why you are suitable for this position

Write a few sentences without fluff about how exactly your experience fits into the job requirements.

Highlight your motivation to work for the company

Here you need to talk about why you want to respond here. The easiest way is to describe your approach to job search, goals and criteria that we outlined in steps 1 and 2.

The more difficult way (if you are really interested in the employer) is to do the same + spend time on research and searching for “hooks”.

For example, you can write that you are interested in the company’s development vector. To understand it, Google the latest press releases and interviews with founders, look at reports for the last year, read industry news where the company is mentioned.

Tell us about important things about you that did not fit into your resume

When you shortened your CV, you most likely threw something out. Important, but not critical. You can try to carefully insert this into your letter.

Handle the recruiter’s objections that may arise

For example, you worked at a startup for several years, and now you are applying to a corporation. It will be great if you tell them during the interview that you understand perfectly well where you are going and can quickly adapt to the new format of work.

Step six: send responses

First, you need to lower your expectations a little. There can be not just a lot of refusals, but an indecent number. On average, aim for 150–200 responses from the start of the search to the offer. Start responding. Minimum required: for 25 vacancies per week. This will allow you to try to draw the first conclusions within a week.

The purpose of these responses is to measure your conversion and practice interviewing.

Step seven: collecting offers

Your path from responses to an offer in a new company can be thought of as an inverted pyramid. At the very top of this “funnel” are your responses, just below the interview with HR, below the test task or technical interview and job offer.

The steps may vary. For example, you can go through all the stages in a corporation in a month, but get a job in a startup in 3–5 days.

The general rules for working with the hiring funnel are simple:

1. To get more offers at the “output”, you need to place more responses at the “input” into the funnel.

2. You need to improve the quantity and quality of your offers by improving each stage of the funnel.

3. You need to start improving your funnel from the “end” – from the very last stage where you failed.

For example: you made 2-3 dozen responses and there is no response – most likely the problem is in the resume or accompanying

They call you for an interview, talk to HR, but then they dump you – you need to strengthen and train your story about yourself, prepare answers to popular questions, improve your confidence in dialogue

Another case: they responded, talked to HR, came for a technical interview with the manager and didn’t get any further. In this case, you need to try to get feedback on what you lacked and go download what is missing.

Don’t try to pump all stages of your funnel at once. Focus on one thing, the most problematic one. Once you feel improvements, move on to the next one.

Good luck searching!

Take this one guide in PDF along with a selection of useful links on my Telegram. There you can also find other posts about upgrading your IT career: