Another one from an inquiry — not exactly a question, and not on Quora.
A developer with several years of experience, let’s call them MJ, sent me a message on LinkedIn:
Hi I am M––––– J––––
Ruby on Rails (RoR) Developer, NextJs Developer, Full-Stack Developer📧 Email: m–––j–––@–––.com
Phone: +––––––––––rofessional Summary:
esults-driven Full-Stack Developer with 3 to 4 years of hands-on experience
[snip several lines of such]
echnical Skills:
anguages: Ruby, JavaScript (ES6+), TypeScript, Shopify
ramework: Ruby on Rails, NextJs
atabase: PostgreSQL, MySQL
rontend: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, TypeScript, NextJs, React
ersion Control: Git
esting: RSpec
eployment: Heroku, AWSinks:
ortfolio: https://–––––––––.vercel.app/
ithub: https://github.com/––––––––
inkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/–––––––––––
Notice anything missing? Aside from the first letter of almost every sentence! (The first letter of each link was also not “linkified”.)
It was also missing any clue of WTF they wanted me to do with this info! Of course they probably wanted to know if I had any appropriate job openings at my company, but just in case there was something more realistic, I replied:
And . . . ?
To which they replied:
I’m looking for a remote Ruby on Rails job
Which prompted my reply:
And you think sending me your credentials will help because . . . ?
Them:
If you have any opportunity regarding this please let me know (Edited)
Me:
If I have any opportunity, meaning, at my company?
Them:
Yeh in your company or you know other opportunities regarding ROR job
And now we finally get to the bits that you, dear reader, may find helpful. ;-)
===8<–––cut here–––
No, but I will help you in other ways. First, I see you are looking to connect. I accept most connections from fellow techies. This will raise your visibility to lots of recruiters, executives, and other techies.
Second, advice:
1) Ask for what you want. Some cultures call this rude, but it’s even ruder to waste the other person’s time making them guess what you want.
2)Â Be concise.
3) Do your homework before sending a company a job inquiry. Sending them an inappropriate job inquiry can wreck your chances of getting a job there, or anywhere else that may find out about it.
4) Watch the correctness of what you send, including the spelling, formatting, etc. Some subtle errors are okay, nobody’s perfect, but having many obvious errors makes you look sloppy.
5) Find ways to make yourself stand out. Tell companies what you’ve done that others haven’t. If you don’t have any such things, start thinking of some and doing them.
6) Related to the above, go beyond the mere technical skills. Train up on communication, leadership, mentorship, teaching, business, and so on. Look at what the people on the next few rungs of the ladder above you do, both the technical and other skills, and learn those.
7) Find ways to stand out, even aside from the jobhunt. You never know who might stumble across a post (blog, LinkedIn, group, whatever), newletter article, conference presentation, open-source project (or at least contribution), or other content you’ve produced — plus, they give you something to point to, in the jobhunt.
That’s it for now. I’m off to turn this exchange into a blog post. (See #7.)