"Pressing submit on a tech job application = balling up your resume 📝, throwing it in the trash can 🗑️, & setting that trash can on fire. 🔥" - Leon Noel
This is the biggest mistake tech applicants make.
Your current job search process:
- Search through job boards/Indeed or you Google "Software Engineer Jobs"
- Find a job posting, upload your resume and cover letter, press "Submit"
- Repeat
Next: you've applied to 200+ jobs and most of them ignore your application or sent a rejection email without even reading your carefully crafted cover letter.
No more. We're not doing that any more. Stop playing the game. Beat the system. We are going to use Twitter to apply to jobs.
Here is the process:
1. Search Hiring Keywords
Input a few keywords into the Twitter search bar. You can use "hiring software engineer" "hiring full stack developer" "looking for a software engineer" or similar keyword pairings.
Select: "Latest" to see the latest Twitter posts first.
2. Go Through The List
Look for posts from people who seem like they are the hiring manager, or they have a close relationship with the person who will be the hiring manager. Listings made by company Twitter accounts are not as helpful for this goal because we want to make a human to human connection. So take note of posts from company accounts saying they are hiring and come back to those after you have found all posts made from personal (human) Twitter accounts.
3. Choose A Post:
Lets take this example, this is perfect:
Note: Dana has since deleted their Twitter account and this job post is no longer available. However, use this as your how-to-guide for reaching out to other engineering/hiring managers.
The post above shows that the account is an actual human (not a company logo, which would signify it is a company account). From this post we can see this person says their company (Netflix) is looking for a Senior Software Engineer who will be remote but based in North America. The tweet's author also took time to specifically let applicants who are women, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color know that they are strongly encouraged to apply to this job. (An incredibly inclusive Twitter job post, thank you Dana Jones!) They also included a link to the specific job posting.
When we hover our cursor over the person's image we see this lovely human is a Netflix EM (which stands for "Engineering Manager"), and some personal information about their family life and passions.
This is exactly who we want to talk to. Because this person is an Engineering Manager, this person will most likely be making the final decision on who to hire for their team, so we want to reach out to that person directly and introduce ourselves.
4. Send A DM (direct message)
Send that person a message. Here is what to write:
- State that you saw their twitter post about X position.
- Write a sentence about your experience/skills.
- Add a sentence or two about why you'd be interested in lending your own experience to the team/company that person is hiring at.
- Ask if they would be open to 15 min call about that person's experience at the company, what they are looking for in candidates, and give them some example dates/times that work for your schedule with your cell phone number to chat.
Now just wait for a reply :)
5. Do Your Research Before the First Call
After you send the DM and have a conversation scheduled, research the company very extensively so that you show up to the initial conversation well versed.
Research questions like:
- When was the company founded and by who
- What are the main products the company is selling
- What are some major hurdles and wins that the company has had
- What are some of the company's biggest competitors
If you can find information on the engineering teams, make sure to include that in your research. Sometimes for big companies they have engineering specific Twitter pages such as below.
Use any job posting you find as a start-off point for your research and further, use any official company blogs, TechCrunch or HackerNews or general search engines like DuckDuckGo or Google.
You Did It! You are now in the hiring pipeline and have made a human connection with your potential new colleague or boss! You avoided getting your resume and cover letter filtered out before you got a chance to show you are a brilliant human being and the company's best next hire.
You will definitely get drastically more responses and interviews than just "pressing the submit button".
Remember: Don't play the hiring game, beat the system.
See you at the finish line. We're all rooting for you.
Thank y'all so much for coming to the end of this article. This is my first Hashnode article and my first public tech-related piece. I wrote this piece because members of my #100Devs family were asking how I utilized twitter to get my current job. I wanted to document this fully for them and for you all. I hope this piece is helpful to you. Feel free to share or comment with your thoughts <3
You can find me on Twitter where I talk about tech accessibility, tech career tips, and ya know - basic civil rights.
Welcome to the community.
<3 Tech4Abolition