Resume & Job Hunting Q&A

[00:00:00]
>> Student 1: Is this resume tailored to just USA or do you think it would work just kinda anywhere?
>> Jerome Hardaway: I have tailored it to USA, but I will make it international. I know the UK does a lot more, has a different style from the United States, and I believe India also has one.

[00:00:17]
It's more they want the education more upfront than the work experience, but American market prefers more work experience up first than education. So I can tailor it based upon those other markets, but the data still stands strong.
>> Student 1: Are there job boards to apply LinkedIn, etc? Are you gonna cover places where you can actually submit your resume.

[00:00:42]
>> Jerome Hardaway: All right, so two places that we've tested this that that we are getting very good metrics was indeed.com and LinkedIn. So we're using LinkedIn. We literally just had a troop, we did their resume. I had them to easily apply and just easily apply to every job that they saw and see how many jobs they would take before they're getting hits and then on same way on Indeed, all right play with this resume right here.

[00:01:10]
And we wanted to see just how good it is without the extra tailoring. This person already had a job so we weren't planning on someone's life, of course, right. [LAUGH] that would be cruel. So a junior already had a job doing informational work, and that is the data and resources, the data that we learn.

[00:01:29]
Yes, sir.
>> Student 1: A common resume question about how far back to go in history? For instance, this person has 14 years of experience in Network admin, sys admin before switching to web development, is that something that you would.
>> Jerome Hardaway: Which role do they wanna stay in? They're trying to stay in software engine.

[00:01:48]
>> Student 1: You're trying to move to web development from a network sys admin type?
>> Jerome Hardaway: Well I don't go past ten years, that's the simple, cuz even when going to fintech or legal or anything like that, they don't go past 10 years on their background checks. So I don't know.

[00:02:07]
>> Student 1: What if the job was 14 years at the same company?
>> Jerome Hardaway: I would just put 14 years at the one company, 14 years. But the real problem that we're having there is how are we gonna try how to leverage those skills that you learned a job and then say how that would help in your current journey for software.

[00:02:32]
You're moving from hardware to software we wanna know how that translates and that's what you have to really focus on. You have to take down those hard skills, you have to do a pattern matching translation of those for the new hard skills that you're gonna be doing.
>> Student 1: A bit of a motivation question.

[00:02:53]
If I'm constantly out there applying for all these roles, how do I manage energy between making my projects better or volunteering or these kinda things?
>> Jerome Hardaway: Well, I know you're not constantly applying. You are time boxing. You should be able within 25 minutes, apply for a few roles a day, right?

[00:03:13]
But don't apply the whole time you want, it's like an iceberg. The majority of your time should be focused on networking, building long-term relationships with all networking and building meaningful projects, right? We'll go further into this, but you could use your projects to build your network that will help you with your job search.

[00:03:36]
One of the things that we learned during our studies for this past year is, when you're building products and you're out there on the market. The jobs that you'll get recommended for or the jobs that you'll get hired for probably won't be the jobs that you apply for, right?

[00:03:54]
So I'm a living testament of that. The jobs I have today, I did not initially go looking for it. I was minding my business on Twitter when the hiring manager slid into my DMs and was, hey, I would love for you to come work with us at Microsoft.

[00:04:10]
I was like, what? I don't know about that and then here I am at Microsoft. So that is when you're building things, people notice.
>> Student 1: Assuming you're gonna cover this a little bit later, but, tips to deal with ageism or if you're advanced in your career for instance, this person online said she has 27 years at one company.

[00:04:33]
It was a great job, but now she's back on the market. So how do you think about that?
>> Jerome Hardaway: Well 27 years wow, I would love another job to keep you there for 27 years. But it comes down to being able to showcase your growth within that company one if it was a tech job and two how those skills translate and how you've been staying current on the market.

[00:04:58]
Cuz when you see people are accustomed to people jumping now every two to five years, right? So once you get past that sweet spot of the five year mark, people assume that you've gotten comfortable and you aren't growing at a the clip that the external market is, right?

[00:05:16]
Because of how fast Tech changes at a job versus how it changes externally. People are assuming you're not keeping up with that stuff. So you have to showcase how you're keeping up with the modern tools and technologies externally while working internally, even if you're not using it. That's one of the reasons why we do while we continue, even when we have jobs to build projects to showcase, I am still keeping up with the kids outside, right?

[00:05:45]
So that we could definitely that's a very good use case that we could dive deeper in later.
>> Student 1: Yeah and then we have the other end of the spectrum on the chat where he's saying he has very little experience, and it's trying to build that experience to get coz he's not getting Coldax at all.

[00:06:01]
>> Jerome Hardaway: Build products. The first thing I hear when I see someone say they're putting their resume out, and if I see more than 50 applications, the first thing I'm going to is their code. And then I'm going to what is live, and then I'm gonna go and see what is live, and I'm going to chop that up and see, okay.

[00:06:19]
This is what you haven't done. This is what you need to do. There are certain things that, I on here, I call myself, if you look at it, I say the roles that I am doing on this resume, but I still use to turn full stack. I don't say I'm a full stack engineer because that's a red flag in all ATS systems, right?

[00:06:38]
And hiring managers, when they see, they want you to talk about full stack and in terms of that, you've built on a full stack, but they don't want you to call yourself a full stack engineer. I call myself software engineer. That's what I do. I build software, but I've worked on the full stack.

[00:06:53]
I've worked in different components of a stack that you might not even think of. I've worked on the product side, the data side, the DevOps side. I've done, I've touched all of those, right? That makes me a software engineer, right? But I've worked under the entirety of that stack.

[00:07:10]
So it's not just what you say, it's how you say it. It could be red flag, right? Putting, I said, very meticulous, very wild world we're living out there where I could have work experience at Tech Corp and call myself a senior full-stack engineer and that would get flagged.

[00:07:26]
But if I call myself a senior software engineer, it'll get greenlit, right? So that's how the market is.
>> Student 1: How do you handle imposter syndrome and comparing yourself and your abilities to everybody else constantly?.
>> Jerome Hardaway: One, I'll start from second question first.
>> Jerome Hardaway: Don't look at scoreboard. Focus on what you can do and train, right?

[00:07:49]
I find that I have the most imposter syndrome on the things that I train for the least, right? If you asked me to go and build something and go, I would have crazy impostor syndrome, because I have touched absolutely no go. I don't know anything about that. But you asked me to do something in Python, my imposter syndrome would not be as strong cuz I have three years of I'm doing that at an enterprise level.

[00:08:20]
If you ask me something in JavaScript, I'm of course, yeah, let's do this. Yeah, I have almost like a decade of experience, right? So that is how we do deal with imposter syndrome is you keep doing things, practicing. You keep doing things publicly, right? You're part of your imposter syndrome is you're not getting feedback negative or positive, right?

[00:08:45]
No one's saying anything good or bad about your work, so you're not understanding where you can improve. So, and human beings are naturally negative and hearing just the bad voices in their head. So if the only critic you have in your life is you, you're gonna tell yourself you're trash all the time.

[00:09:04]
But if you are getting external feedback and people are showing you, hey, you can improve here. I really like what you did here, you should do more of that, that is how you get better, right? And that external feedback makes you better than you get more good jobs than bad.

[00:09:19]
And now your imposter syndrome is down. I can really do this cuz somebody actually liked the thing I built, that's cool.
>> Student 2: So one issue that exists in general in the job market, especially with COVID and schools being closed and everything is people have these so called gaps in their resume.

[00:09:43]
Maybe they have to attend to having children who aren't in school, or elderly family members, and so they have what LinkedIn calls a career break. Have you seen if that is a red flag to employers that flat? If there's not a continuous line of time in a resume that the AI system is gonna drag it up.

[00:10:12]
>> Jerome Hardaway: Negative I'm not seeing that as long as it's placed, right? Where the AI doesn't red flag like hey, are you still stopped in this job and then you started this job just says your bounty years of experience. It doesn't pick up the career breaks. But people on LinkedIn, and you can say career break and new kid or taking care of loved ones, things of that nature, right?