How to Get Hired Without an Inside Connection
If only there were an easy answer to how to get hired without an inside connection. Most all of us have faced this situation at one time or another during our careers.
While it’s definitely easier to have an in, it’s not a requirement. With some preparation, I believe it’s a hurdle we can overcome and ultimately improve ourselves in the process.
Sales Call
Finding a job is essentially a sales call. But not the sleazy used-car salesman kind of sales. Instead it’s the kind where we have to find out what the prospect(Hiring Manager) needs. And then clearly show and explain why we are the solution.
A manager has a very difficult job when it comes to hiring. Especially when the candidates are unknown to her and her colleagues. It stands to reason that as an unknown quantity to the hiring manager, the bar to getting hired will be higher.
We can certainly understand this predicament. A hiring manager will be judged on how well she hires. And if she consistently hires turkeys, the pock marks will be on her record.
Moreover, it’s not only critical to impress the hiring manager, but to also be someone the hiring manager can confidently present to her boss for final approval. Primarily we’re selling our skills to the hiring manager and technical lead. However, we also need to keep in mind the ultimate decision maker who may not be present.
Trapdoors
I expect every manager has some version of a trapdoor in her hiring process. A trapdoor being something that candidates might do or say that would instantly disqualify them. Some common ones are badmouthing former employers or overt arrogance.
Most of these come down to emotional intelligence. In other words, recognizing what’s appropriate behavior in the interview process. It’s of course unwise to regale your interviewer with your drunken exploits on a boat cruise this past weekend.
Given our context here of how to get hired without an inside connection, the numbers of trapdoors we must avoid will be even greater. This includes being likable, knowing when to talk and when to listen, and not boring your interviewer with irrelevant stories and details.
Stock Behavioral Questions
This mostly arises when you’re asked the “tell me about a time” stock behavioral questions. Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult coworker and so on. There are endless resources online for these and given their popularity, it’s time well spent to prepare for the most common ones.
One thing I’d emphasize is to be focused and brisk with your answers. You don’t want to drag this part of an interview out if you can help it. These are mostly trapdoor questions with a bad asymmetric risk profile. Meaning, you can easily fall through a trapdoor and disqualify yourself on these questions, but hardly ever win a job based on good answers.
Bad Online Presence
If you do nothing else when searching for a job, please make sure your social media presence is clean! And by clean I don’t necessarily mean deleted. However, if you have anything that might be embarrassing or controversial, it should be made private.
You may love to talk politics on Twitter or Facebook, though if I’m your hiring manager I’m going to Google your name and look up your social media accounts. The interview process starts before the interview. And if you haven’t taken the time to scrub or lock down your socials before job searching, I’m going to be unimpressed with your attention to detail.
A hiring manager is going to present you to her boss after all. If her boss finds your Twitter account with you ranting like a lunatic about politics, it’s not going to go well for you. Doing such legwork is part of the hiring company’s due diligence. So make it easy on yourself and your new boss by privatizing anything you wouldn’t want out in the open on your socials.
Good Online Presence
Now to the good online presence that can help as much as a bad social media presence can hurt. In truth, having a good online presence is crucial these days and becomes even more so the less the hiring company knows about you. This is especially relevant for those seeking remote roles.
A filled out LinkedIn profile is table stakes in this realm. LinkedIn will probably be the first stop for any prospective employer when encountering your name so it’s worth taking the time to do well. There are plenty of resources available for crafting a good profile, so definitely do some searching if you feel yours could be improved.
Github
Everyone may and should have a filled out LinkedIn profile. A Github presence however can provide a way to differentiate yourself from the pack.
It’s an unfortunate reality that as developers, most or all of our work will be proprietary. Meaning, we can’t very well share all of the brilliant code we’ve written, because it’s been written for a business and we do not own the code.
Our personal Github repositories provide the means for us to publicly share code we’ve written freely. It also helps answer the biggest question an employer is concerned about when hiring a developer, specifically “can this person really code?” There’s no better way to answer this question than having examples of your work available to a hiring company right up front.
This also provides a great opportunity for us to learn new technologies and show our competence in them. It’s just not feasible to wait for our employers to adopt the latest tech stacks before we start learning them. We have to do it on our own and Github serves as our public proof of having done so.
I’d contend this is also a good way to minimize the impact of the less enlightened developer interview mainstays. Specifically, white-board interviews or live coding tests which are far too common these days.
These much maligned practices survive largely due to the absence of clearly better alternatives. If you have some real code in a Github repo to discuss in an interview, you might even avoid these altogether.
Other Good Online Options
There are many additional avenues to create a strong personal brand for yourself online. A personal website or blog is a great option though it requires a bit more work than some of the others. Dev.to is a growing platform that makes it easy to get up and running.
Being active on stackoverflow can also be a great way to establish technical credibility. I’d also recommend Twitter as a great way to connect with the leaders in the developer world. Twitter can be a wonderful place if you focus on the tech world and avoid the cesspool of politics.
Contributing to open source projects seems to be highly regarded as well. I haven’t personally done it, but it’s definitely something that’s on my radar as I believe it could easily open up future opportunities.
Summary
Developing a strategy for how to get hired without an inside connection is important. Most crucially we must make it easy for a hiring manager to choose us for an interview in the first place.
Crafting a professional online presence is a great way to do this. Equally important is to avoid online behaviors that would deter a prospective employer from considering us.
Once we’ve secured an interview we should have strong credibility built from our online presence from which to proceed. This should inspire confidence in our candidacy and allow us to focus on interviewing the company as well as them interviewing us. Additionally, with good preparation we should easily pass the common trapdoor questions.
Ultimately we want to make it easy for a hiring manager to present us to her boss for final approval. The hiring process begins long before we ever submit a job application. Acknowledging this fact can help overcome the disadvantage of not having an inside connection.