2024.7.27

Get Job

A process for finding and applying for job applications and avoiding the paper shredder.

I’ve been applying to jobs. In the past year I’ve applied to 130 odd jobs, gotten 11 screens off of those applications, gone through 5 full interview processes, and received 2 job offers. I’ve been applying for things using a resume that I’ve first wrote maybe 10 years ago, and have been maintaining since. I’m not sure how good of a resume it is, since of all my interviews and job offers, all but 1 have been kickstarted through a personal connection. I figure it’s time to rebuild my resume, shore up my application process, and see if I can’t get a cold application response rate that’s better than, say, 5% or so.

If I’m really lucky, maybe this can help you too.

Sieve

The goal is to find interesting, relevant job potings and submit applications for each one that make it as easy as possible for the recruiter and hiring manager to see that you’re qualified for the role. The plan is:

0. Write your baseline resume.
1. Search major job boards for roles.
2. Collect the URLs for postings that might be a fit.
3. Create a custom resume for each posting that highlights your qualifications.
4. Fill out and submit the application.

Write Your Resume

Grab a resume template, and fill it out. Mine provides Personal information: Name, Location, Website, Email.

A Company also has a short Description.

Your Education is a set of relevant credentials, which is a School, a Degree, one or more Majors, and an End Date.

Also write out a collection of Skills, each one with a Description and a Theme.

Once you have the raw content of your resume, you can lay it out into a resume template.

Automation opportunity: collecting this content as structured data could make it re-usable later on, as well as allow quick resume templating.

Searching for Job Postings

For a collection of job boards, run a Google search for the job title your interested in, filtering for postings from the last week or so. That looks like this:

site:https://jobs.lever.co/ “engineering manager” AND remote – Tools > Past Week

Job Boards that I’ve found use are Lever, Greenhouse, Ashby, Wellfound, and Workable.

Grab each Listing that looks interesting.

Automation opportunity: It should be possible to create a custom Google search engine that performs multiple searches simultaneously and aggregates the results. A dashboard of saved searches would make this process quick and simple.

Filtering Relevant Roles

Go through your pile of Listings, and read each one for qualifications, skills, and role description. Discard any postings that you don’t feel like your qualified for, or otherwise don’t seem like a good fit. The goal here is to get as many recruiter screens as we can, so applying to roles that are not a good fit or you don’t actually want is counter productive.

You should have a set of Listings for jobs you want, and are qualified to land.

Automation opportunity: Collecting these into some sort of To Do List or job posting CRM-type of thing could help keep track of relevant roles, if you’ve applied to it or not, and roles that are not good fits but keep showing up anyway. I’m looking at you, Canonical.

Customize Your Resume

Some updated thinking on this in the next section.

For each Listing, copy out each Qualification from the posting. For each of these, write a brief Summary of how you’ve demonstated this. Use similar keywords, but avoid exact repetition. Mark which Role you demonstated the qualification at, and drop in the Summary as a bullet point in your resume template.

Copy verbatim the soft and hard skills the Listing requires into your own Skills section as appropriate.

Automation opportunity: it would be neat to rip out the bullet points and skill keywords directly from the listing (avoid more copy pasting) and create a form workflow for quickly summarizing and attaching the qualifications to the appropriate role. This could automatically feed into the structured data and template of your resume.

Tune Your Resume

It was suggested, and turned out to be the case I think, that the fully custom resume per posting is more work than it’s worth. It might be worth it to convicne a dream role kind of place, but I’m uncertain. Instead, I wrote a set of maybe 4 or 5 bullet points for each role, and will pick 2 or 3 to use for any given application. This should make it faster while still getting benefits of a tuned resume.

Automation opportunity: Different sets of qualifications could have themes, so I pick the themes I want to highlight and it spits out the resume from there. Or maybe the resumes are pre-backed, and I pick the most relevant.

Make the Application

Export a PDF from your resume template, and upload it to the Listing. Fill out the rest of the required fields – including a short paragraph of a coverletter, probably focusing on values alignment.

Done!

Automation opportunity: each job board has a set of standard questions it always asks, like race/ethnicity, disabillity, and veteran status. The answers to these questions will probably not change over the course of your job search, so it would be nice to have a bookmarklet fill them out automatically.

Results

So far, this process is just a theory. I’ll be giving it a go in the coming weeks, and adjusting the process, and making notes as I go. I’ll also keep track of my metrics here:

Elsewhere