Posted: 01/05/2021
Job Search 2021 _ The End
After 5 weeks of looking for a new Senior .NET role, today I accepted an offer!
Its for a great company, with an exciting set of products, a great vision, a fantastic team to work with and most importantly of all a great work life balance for me.
In order to get to this point, I have found it exhausting, interesting, fun, soul destroying and very time consuming.
Here is a quick list of highlights that have occurred:
- Talked with an infinite number of recruitment agents about an infinite number of positions. Note - I turned a lot of options down at this point due to not fitting my requirements.
- More than 200 emails.
- Applied for 20 jobs via LinkedIn.
- Applied for 2 via reed.co.uk.
- Talked to 5 different companies through my friends.
- Talked to 3 different companies because of #TechTwitter.
- Head hunted by 2 companies who saw my blog or met me via virtual meetups.
- Interviewed in Australia, England, Scotland, Poland, Estonia, Nigeria & Canada.
- Interviewed with 18 companies.
- Attended 24 interviews.
- Talked with 32 interviewers (CTO's, HR heads, business owners & software engineers).
- 20 interviews via MS Teams.
- 2 interviews via Google Meet.
- 2 interviews via Zoom.
- 1 interview via telephone.
- 3 at home programming tasks (code available on my github).
- 4 online tests.
- 1 live programming session.
- 1 interview I terminated 10 minutes in because it did not fit my requirements.
- 1 role disappeared after interviewing.
- 2 roles changed the remote requirement after interviewing, so I declined before the formal offer was given.
- 5 weeks,
- 4 job offers.
- 3 declined offers.
- 1 accepted offer!
A lot has happened in a short time, and its nice to be able to get some of these thoughts out of my head, and reflect on the process.
Its certainly the most intensive Job Search I have ever had.
Not working while looking made that much easier, but also remote only interviews have made things faster.
In the last 8 years since I looked last the industry has grown a lot too, and there are opportunities everywhere. I would also add, that deciding to go Remote first, has allowed me to look across the UK, rather than just my home town which opened even more doors.
Things I have learnt
Getting your profile on reed.co.uk makes your phone explode with recruitment agencies. Although it nearly made my phone melt, it did prove to be the best way to find a lot of companies. Surprisingly there were very few duplicate roles.
Your "network" really works: The notification of the existence of the role I have accepted came from a post on Twitter. This was really helped by an initial retweet from MVP Dan Clarke which was then retweeted another 23 times. With a total engagements of 625 and nearly 10k people seeing it. Wow.
Being comfortable on a video call is so very important.
Have good lighting on your cam, and check your microphone levels.
Personally I found the auto blur backgrounds very distracting as people moved around, so I
don't have one.
Make yourself
memorable
on camera too, several people commented on my camera tag line, and many looked at my blog during the interview or soon after.
Don't settle for a "good enough" role, keep looking.
This requires you "Know your worth".
Don't be afraid to disable your "looking for work" status on the platforms you use. You need time to decompress from all the calls and interviews. Also when you turn it back on, you ping back up on everyone's radar!
If you are getting inundated with calls, set your salary expectations higher!
Stick to your requirements.
Be flexible on industry, at the end of the day, its all code.
Know what tech stack you want to work in, but be flexible. For me, I knew it had to be C# .Net Core and some Cloud provider. The rest was open.
Be sure about your motivations. Are you salary driven, or is the team fit most important?
You can negotiate on holiday allowance, pension contributions and working hours. Its not all about Salary.
Most importantly of all - Think. Think about the role, the team, the day to day work, how you will progress, how the role fits around your life. Always take time to think before accepting. And always see a contract before you formally accept.
So thats it. I don't have a start date yet, but it will be in the next few weeks.
If you want any job hunting advice or help with interviewing, then find me here.
Good luck!
Thanks for reading this post.
If you want to reach out, catch me on Twitter!
I am always open to mentoring people, so get in touch.