How to work with recruiters to find your next role - a guide for software engineers

The key thing for me is at the top of your CV, have your skills summary. And that's what most recruiters are going to look to straight away. Okay, guys, I thought it'd be really interesting to talk today about how software engineers can work effectively with a recruiter. An awful lot of software engineers have no idea about that as far as they're concerned. Recruitment agent or recruiter is somebody you throw your CV at.

hope they get you a job. I'm sure there's a more effective way. What would you say it is? Yeah, okay. So speaking, first of all, from the kind of tantrum side of things, a lot of it is around kind of... I guess, relationship building. But I guess the context to be aware of with that in terms of what I see from candidates being frustrated, they're aware that they're meant to be building relationships with recruiters is that they're kind of not gets.

as much response as they would like to when they're trying to do that. I guess it's just about being kind of empathetic of where a recruiter is at, what their situation is. In the current marketplace, when someone's advertising for a role, they're going to have hundreds and hundreds of responses, sometimes even thousands on some jobs.

The kind of process of going through all of them, managing all of those applicants is pretty heavy and extremely time consuming. So it's just being aware of what their situation is and being...

empathetic on that basis and so handling it in a specific way. Reach out if you're applying for a role, I would definitely suggest follow up with a quick message to the recruiter saying, just applied for this wanted to make sure you received it is three bullet points as to why i think i'm a good match for what you're looking for um you know if you'd like to discuss that further then

Let me know some availability for a chat or something along those lines. It's just a really good way of getting your head above the Parabix. You're not just one of those hundreds of applicants. You've signposted your specific relevancy on that front. and you reached out saying that you're kind of happy to to chat that's always a good way of going about it yeah and um you know building building out a network so connect with recruiters engage with recruiters

You know, try to kind of be visible to recruiters. So, you know, regularly posting on LinkedIn and that sort of things is always important. So let's talk about that in a minute. For sending an email and a follow-up and the three bullet points, how many people typically do that? If you get 100 applicants or 500 applicants to a goal, how many of them are actually going to take the time?

and do that and how well does it work for making you stand out yeah so very few simply put so in terms of how well it makes you stand out very well particularly if the the kind of relevancy that you can point to is like clear it spots on or even if it's not spots on if it's if it's you know tangentially like if there's relevancy there

But realistically, someone who is not suitable is not going to do that follow-up step because why would they do that? If you're going out there and trying to apply it as much as possible, not too concerned about the relevancy.

You're not doing that. Whereas if you are relevant and you're doing that, you are going to stick out and you're much more likely to get some sort of response and engagement. So when you say very, very few people are doing it, what are we talking about? One in a hundred? Two in a hundred? One in 25? I mean, I would say probably...

Yeah, maybe something like 1 in 25, maybe. I don't have the fingers to handle it. I'm licking it up a little bit off the top of my head, but it's few. It's very few. So is it going to be effective and make you stand out? 100%. Yeah. Cool. Absolutely. You also mentioned being empathetic to the recruiter there.

And I think a lot of people forget that there are, and this is your area of expertise, not mine, there are very different types of recruiters. So somebody could be an in-house recruiter employed by the company that you're applying to. They could be a recruitment agent that's external to that. And within the degrees of being an external agent, they could be a small boutique agency.

Or they could be, dare I say, a Harlem High agency, where there's an agency with hundreds of recruiters chasing after hundreds of jobs and they're just looking at sheer volume. What are your thoughts on... how to work with those different agents? And have I missed some subtleties in between that? Yeah, so I'd say that that's a really important point.

For example, with internal talent acquisition people, it's worth remembering that, depending on the nature of the company, if it's a tech company, You would hope that the internal talent acquisition person is going to be relatively good in terms of their knowledge and understanding of...

kind of technical language but you have to be prepared for the fact that if for example i don't know let's say it's a finance organization who is recruiting for developer just being aware of the fact that you need to kind of tailor um to some extent your application needs to be available for all audiences so it needs to tick a box for an internal person that doesn't understand the tech quite so well so you've spelt and extrapolated

you know not making the assumption that someone knows that you know dot net and c sharp are so heavily interrelated um don't don't kind of or you know that someone working with react um you know a modern version of react is using typescript

They're not necessarily going to need to just spell out a little bit more, go to that extra step to help facilitate that. And in terms of the empathy tied into that is... being aware of the fact that tunnel acquisition teams from what i've kind of seen and heard from speaking to and lots of companies have taken an approach of well we get loads of applications now so um we don't need you to be as proactive so you can let them come in to you

But the deluge of people they've got coming into them, it's an enormous amount of work. They're not being resourced properly a lot of the time. And they're certainly not being given enough bandwidth to do their work a lot of the time. Being aware of that is definitely helpful and being a bit patient with it, I guess. So could I sum that first bit up, Guy, as saying that to the example of a finance one?

The internal recruiter might be familiar finance, but might not be a technical recruiter. They could be, say, used to recruiting for an office staff and not used to recruiting software engineers. So you need to be a bit more aware that... they might not have that technical background and you might need to lay out a clear path for them and sell yourself a little bit more of how you fit the goal. A hundred percent. Okay, cool. And I guess in contrast,

Boutique agency, what's that going to be like? A bit more, far more knowledgeable? Yeah, so broadly speaking, I now run my own agency and I've been doing tech recruitment for coming up to 11 years.

can't read or write code and I wouldn't pretend that I ever could but I can hold a good conversation with an engineer and you know and understand on a high level basis the suitability um to a certain extent but if i look at for example i'm fortunate in terms of the fact that because i am beholden to no one i am my own boss um I can kind of work in a way that...

that suits me and and you know i'm not worried about what someone else is thinking whereas in a lot of um you know boutique agencies or some of the larger ones as well um you know

Wherever there's a market which is more difficult for candidates, it tends to reflect in terms of how difficult it is for a recruiter. So if... it's more difficult for candidates as a lot of candidates are saying it is at this moment in time that tends to recruit in turn they're reflecting in terms of how it is for recruiters and so you then have to look at the pressures that they're under

So typically when it's a worse market, the pressure that the recruiters are under from their bosses is to focus really hard on winning new business. being aware of that that's often their priority because they're getting hammered from their their boss or whoever saying you know you're spending a lot of time talking to candidates that's great

but we need you to be going on winning more business for all the candidates you've spoken to. And it's finding that balance. So I guess it's just, again, being aware of that being the case, being a little bit patient.

um but i'll put a big asterisk over all of this because i don't want to get absolutely roasted by all the engineers who's listening to this and going like yeah but i get ghosted all the time that's never acceptable you know you should always as a bare minimum gets some sort of response back saying you know you've not been successful you're not being taken forward and if you had an interview i would also say that the bare minimum is actual proper feedback

um to to say you know where you could improve and you know what what didn't go so well while you're not being taken forward or while you are being taken forward yeah absolutely so Thinking about that agent then, you said that they're out chasing new business. From the candidate's perspective, when it's a bad market then as a candidate, it's a bad market for recruiters as well because...

they are chasing down the vacancies just like we are. So if there's fewer vacancies for us, there's fewer vacancies for them, and they're spending more time trying to find those vacancies, just like we might be as a candidate. So we're not going to necessarily get the responsiveness we might get in a...

strong market for candidates where there's few others available and they're trying to chase us down and fill lots and lots of vacancies. So again, it's that kind of inverse of the supply and demand really, isn't it? Yeah.

It's 100% what it is. We're in a market where our product is people. I think it's really important that from a recruiter's perspective, people need to... be treated like people they need to be treated with respect they need to be communicated well with and and hence why i say what i say about feedback but but ultimately when you look at it in those raw terms um you know recruiter can speak to candidates all day long if they're not

kind of dedicating a sufficient amount of time and balancing that with where the supply and demand is then that's great they can have lots of good conversations with candidates but they're not going to have the opportunities for those candidates

in the first place, basically. I suppose you could say that's just like us as candidates from the candidate side, networking. If you go and network with a bunch of your peers and have some lovely coffee chats with them, but never reach out to some hiring managers. you're probably not going to find a job. Yeah, absolutely. If you start leaching out to hire managers and start finding the right people and talking to them and doing that outreach, you've got a far higher chance of finding a job.

100%. Okay, cool. So let's say I'm a candidate. I'm out there looking. I've got my CV already.

What are some of the top three things I want to make sure I like about that CV lesson made before I send it to you as a recruiter to give me the best opportunity? Yeah, absolutely. So put yourself in the shoes of recruiter. You've got...

let's say, 800 applicants on the road to go through, and you've only got a certain amount of time because, again, your manager's hammering you to get on the phone and do some business development to try and win more business. So... you've only got a finite amount of time to kind of go through and review cvs um so you you need to kind of stand out and be visible as being suitable

as immediately as possible so um the key thing for me is is at the top of your cv um and and please put it at the top have your skills summary and that's what most recruits are going to look to straight away. If I'm looking for a full stack TypeScript developer with AWS, then I want to be able to see straight away.

great this person has got experience of working with you know node react aws landers or whatever else i want to be able to see that at the top straight away and go like a blurb of the book yes this person looks like they are suitable at a high level basis now i want to see where have they used that skill

How have they used that? What's the context that they've used that skill and how long for? So then you're kind of going down through from there to the jobs. You want to see within the job, the tech stack listed within that ID as well. So you can identify where and how they've used it and then brief in a detail of what you did. But also including details around achievements. And that's something that I think.

It's really difficult for developers to do often because lots of businesses won't give the full detail of what the kind of commercial impact of what they did was on the business.

um the key thing is to really kind of try and spell out what the kind of value you added and you might not be able to make it pounds and pence but just ask yourself why like what was the reason that we were doing this because you know you whilst you may not have known the full commerciality of the scenario okay it's probably unlikely that you were told to go and build something and when you said okay so what what's what's the reasoning what's what's the the need here that you just went they went

As we said so. Okay, cool. Normally. That's a great point, Guy, and I'd like to really pull that foot a little bit later. Yeah. But before we do, can I just come back to something you said there in describing that you want the CV, you want the top saying, I've worked in React, AWS, et cetera, and all the buzzwords.

the tech stack for each role. That's great if you're an individual contributor, you're working through that. What would you advise a manager to do then in a similar position where it's not going to be a list of technical skills? Yeah, so I guess that does come down more to... size and technical makeup of the people in the team um but really i would focus in more again it's the value added piece so

How much were you kind of doing the technical side of things, if at all? Were you getting involved in the kind of architecture? Was it more from a kind of... you know the involvement more from a delivery basis or was it pure people management um you know obviously provide that that kind of detail and context but i'd say even the more the more senior you get

the more the emphasis should really be on that kind of impact and achievement, whether that is where we started, is where we finished, or whether it's here was our need, here's what we did. Here was the commercial impact. Okay, cool. So let's go back then and pull on that thread. As you've likely said, a lot of software engineers struggle with that. They find it very difficult to describe the impact.

I think that's something that most software engineers should address, whether or not they're looking for a role. Because, again, as you rightly pointed out, for every single task we get given, there should be a business reason. We are building software to support the organization.

The organization has some goals and it's spending money paying us to build software to help achieve those goals. We can best do that if we understand what is the problem, why are we trying to solve it, and what does a good solution look like?

So for every single bit of software we get asked to write, we should be asking those things because it enables us to do the best job possible. Engineering is all about trade offs. Should we build this? Should we build that? Should we use this technology, this technique?

You know, are we building something that's going to be thrown away? In which case building a solution quickly to get an answer because the answer is valuable is more important. Are we building something that's a product and we want to be sustainable? In which case.

Quality is far more important. So I would encourage engineers in every single step of the way to ask, what's the problem we're trying to solve? Why is this problem important? Why is it the most important? What does a good solution look like? If you start asking those things.

we start getting an understanding of the impact of our work and we're better positioned to work out what the right solution is. Yeah. Otherwise you run the risk of a product owner comes and asks you to build, yeah, build me a car. when the problem they're trying to solve is to get 300 people to a festival, taking something we just talked about. In which case, building them a bus might be a far better answer, but if you just take their requirement to build a car...

You're going to build a car for four people. It's going to have to do 90 odd trips to shift your 500 people, where if you built them a bus that could take a hundred passengers, it would do three trips. So a bit of a contrived example, but if we ask what's the problem we're trying to solve and what's a good solution look like, we might propose a completely different solution to if we just take a ticket off a product owner says, build me an X.

And then we'll have that understanding, we'll have that impact. And something we talked about before when we're planning this session is that it'd be good then to take a note of this. When you get that information, write it down, create a blog document or something that we've got this. Details.

So when you come back to play your CV or resume, you've got this to refer back to. 100%. And I know some people who will, they just stick it into, they've got like a kind of long version, long form master CV that they then kind of take stuff out of.

add stuff into to make it more relevant as they apply to things but same thing is what you're talking about that the key thing is to keep a record of what you've done what the impact was um because you've got that information you're able to to apply for stuff straight away with the most relevant information and also when it comes to that you're not going

really do with knowing that information about what the impact was of that and you're not going back to someone in your business going what was the impact that we did that like what was the commercial game we had from that and then going why do you want to know that

That's a bit suspicious. As you said that about having that long form list and picking out the bits that are relevant, I kind of thought that that might be something that many people these days would argue that AI would be a great answer for. Take your long form list of here's everything I ever did.

Write me a two-page CV for this job spec. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that would be useful and productive? Or do you think AI might hinder your application? I mean, like, as with anything... AI when used responsibly and sensibly and with.

a shed load of attention to detail and buckets and buckets and buckets of salt yeah great um if you're just going to copy paste it no don't do that um ultimately we all know it's got the capacity to hallucinate it's it's got the capacity to you know just make wild mistakes or just lie um so so it's just being really careful with it and then you know thinking about things like grammatical instances and that sort of things. But also, you know, whilst...

I think most recruiters really don't mind people using it. You've also got to consider that a lot of the language becomes quite generic, so your CD can read quite a lot like... a lot of other cvs so i would say a better way of using it is to kind of go rather than letting it rewrite the whole thing is to kind of go pick out specific examples that you think i should um

emphasize in relation to what they've they've given here with these details in the spec and etc etc and then take that and put that into it and do it yourself because you also think about other things that um you know ai may not have thought of that ai may not have the information of like you might want to extrapolate a little further and i think llms are great but But generally, it's an iterative process. You're bouncing off the things it gives you and kind of tailoring that down.

give it back to it, see what it gives back to you. Yeah, it makes sense. Thank you. Another thing you mentioned there is personal brand and engaging with people on LinkedIn to get to know the recruiters.

How important do you think that activity on LinkedIn and your profile on LinkedIn is for finding a role? It's difficult because I know that there's lots of people out there who've got really good presence. They still struggle. There's so many factors. What I'd say is, you know, with anything in, you know, applying for a job in terms of recruitment, in terms of, you know, recruitment is a form of sales, ultimately, there's an awful lot of luck involved.

And anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong, frankly, because it's about getting hold of that person at the right time, being in front of that person when they've got a role or whatever. But the key thing is you make your own luck.

um by which i mean is that the more that you do to increase enhance your luck the better your chances are going to be so being visible on LinkedIn with content, with engagement on posts etc. always going to make you more visible if you're doing that consistently with recruiters they're going to recognize you if you're doing that consistently with you know hiring managers in companies that you want to work in you're going to be more visible to them inevitably so

That's really important. And then the other thing I would say is in terms of that sort of things, the number of people who neglect their LinkedIn profile in terms of the actual content within the profile itself is astounding. you know you've effectively got a public facing cv there make sure it's as detailed as your cv at the very least

And make sure it's hard coded with the skill set that you've got. So you're more searchable in the way that LinkedIn works from a recruiter's perspective on their back end. OK, cool. How important in that. are some of LinkedIn's features like what location you set and how you list your skills, which elements there will impact the search when you're looking for a candidate.

So, again, it all depends on that there's more than one way of kind of using LinkedIn from a recruiter's perspective. But with their kind of AI tools that they keep. that aren't that good in some cases and that really push some of their functionality to kind of push you to to use um ai searching as opposed to kind of more traditional Boolean searching to bring people up. It's the hard skills, the kind of coded skills when you're adding a job.

onto your career history it gives you the option to add in skills that you used in that role that's become more important because you can then search if i wanted to search by people that have had x number of years with this skill set then that's how it kind of calculates that as I understand it so that's important location wise so from what I've seen some people will have

a united kingdom listed on there rather than bristol for example um and that's okay as long as your location i think the way that it works is you have a display location and then there is a location you give links in your full location basically just make sure that's correct because whilst you know you can look at it in one of two ways as long as that detail is correct then you're still going to come up in the search for something that is based in bristol and

you know they're going to kind of prioritize someone who's more local a lot of the time but also at the same time you know if you've got uk then perhaps you're more likely to be in for a shower parole that is further afield and less frequently in the office because they're going to think that you're going to be more happy to do

those trips to the office when you do it so it's there's no right answer really with regard to that but the key thing is to just make sure that you know it's it's correct at least thank you very much That's the end of part one with Guy. Join us in part two, where we'll discuss how hiring managers can work effectively with recruiters like Guy.