Hi,
I am looking for a remote senior software engineer position. Most of my career I have been using connections to move from one job to another but this time I haven’t had the luck, so I am mostly blindly applying through LinkedIn.
I know the general tips but I would like to get some more specific tips to improve my chances.
How can I make my CV stand out? I feel I am getting rejected by positions that are way below my qualifications. I have wondered if I should be updating my CV according to the stack of the position I am applying for. Throughout my career I have focused on building transfarable skills and as a result I have worked with a wide variety of technologies and it feels like I am being penalized for that.
Are there any job boards that may be better than LinkedIn? I am tired of skimming through ads about fintech and AI positions. I am not interested in those and I would prefer to work somewhere that I genuinely I am contributing something in the world. Also, I would be interested on job boards on the Fediverse, especially if it meant that my resume is read by humans and not machines.
How can I avoid time wasters? I had applied to Canonical, after 8 interviews and a bunch of offline steps, I was rejected. While the interviews were fun, I feel I have wasted a lot of time and energy for a someone that was not genuinely interested in hiring.
Anything else I should be paying attention to?
I had the same experience with Canonical. They advertise hundreds of jobs in LinkedIn, in every major city around the world.
I applied for one that matched my skillset well, and the recruiter was enthusiastic about my application.
After my application was accepted, and passed the first round of scrutiny, they wanted a long and detailed cover letter answering some very specific and personal questions about your education and career. Eg. “How would your friends describe you in High School?” and “What was your least favourite subject in high school?”. Man, high school was 20 years ago, how is that relevant? And weird stuff like “how can Canonical become a global leader in Software and compete against Microsoft, Apple, and Google?”. I’m a senior software engineer, not a CEO.
I did a whole series of tests, did their online exam and weird online IQ test thing. I passed them all with very good results. Then suddenly got the rejection letter out of nowhere.
I don’t think they actually want to recruit people. They have no budget to put on new software engineers. They just want to advertise hundreds of jobs on Linkedin and send candidates through meaningless hoops for weeks to make it look like they’re recruiting.
I remember those questions! As soon as I read high school my mind went from “working for Canonical would be nice” to “let’s justify not writing an essay by reading everything bad about Canonical”.
Lucky for me it was easy as r/recruitinghell was full of post about people doing the whole process and being rejected. Also the CEO had a reddit account and the way he was justifying this process didn’t jive with me, at all.
For some reason it never occurred to me to check if others online were sharing their own bad experience of the canonical recruitment process. That would have lessened the impact a bit at the time if I knew it wasn’t just me.
I was going through two other recruitment processes at the same time, so I didn’t stop too long to think about it.