Transcript from the "The Three Hiring Users" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> One of the things that developers are notoriously horrible about is it then they build their portfolio or their profile size or anything that showcases them, they think only about what they want to build. Or how they can build or what the bootcamps telling them or the colleges or what people are saying on YouTube.
[00:00:23] They're not thinking about the user, which is a very important skill that we have to have. We have to focus on our users. Then that's the same way when you're looking for a job. You have to focus on who are gonna be the people or things that are gonna be interacting with the things that you build.
[00:00:41] So before this, we have to know, in military we call it knowing our enemy, getting intel, getting recon. Like so, our situation report is currently, we are in the middle of a pandemic, outside is closed, there have been some layoffs on people. So you the new developer has to get recon on who are the users that are hiring, while also competing with people who may have more experience than you.
[00:01:07] So you have to figure out every blue piece of intelligence you can get to plan your portfolios, your resumes, your CodePens, etc perfectly. So let's go through the three users. User number one, this is the big one. This is your first layered defense against getting your job, getting your goal.
[00:01:35] And this is HR Tech and Bots. Their strengths is they quickly find the parameters that are set by the hiring team. What that means is they usually they scan your resumes, they scan, your portfolios, they scan your LinkedIn. They see those keywords, they see how many years you've been in keywords like same way is when you go to a website and ask how old are you for like drinking or something and you had to put in like your birth date.
[00:02:04] Well, it's looking for those like that year date, to be able to say, okay, this person has this amount, this person's experience level starts at, let's say, 2015 and then this person is qualified. This person starts less than after 2015, then this person isn't qualified, right? 2015 or before they're good, 2015 or after they're not good.
[00:02:27] So that was a green red type of paradigm. Same concept when it comes to keywords. I actually saw this in real time when you can upload a key, upload a resume, upload your keywords and see how many of those keywords appear on a resume and how many times you have it set for your parameters.
[00:02:48] So you be like if they need every single keyword to be said or at least 70% or something like that, right? So these are the two things that the bot is looking for. Well, that's its strengths. Is to minimize the amount of time that the HR personnel have to use, but it's not a real strength for you.
[00:03:11] So you have to focus on the keywords that it would use to make your resume as strong as possible as well as your portfolio. Weakness is, it's not empathic, hard data only, there's no real workaround for this beyond making sure that you're using the right word, you're using the right words often.
[00:03:33] The gotcha is you don't know what the parameters are. So we have to do that well more intel or we can focus on, what I like to do, which we'll get more into our entire resume an offensive protocol to write in our resume. So that we play offence, not defence and we'll get more into that.
[00:03:56] But it's a robot, so you get what you get with it. Now, here is user two. This is the second adversary or ally depending on how they are helped to you getting your job, right? These are the HR recruiters. Their strength, they're human, so they have empathy, they have creativity, they can be influenced.
[00:04:28] So you can have them like, Pause, like you can influence their decisions to assumptions at a greater level, you can pique their interest. Weakness, they don't have much time. The average resume website is about six seconds of time per resume per website. So you have to make sure that what you're doing pops or has all these keywords readily available so it can grab their attention.
[00:05:03] They tend not to be the technical ones, their specialty is HR, not not tech. So while beyond the key words, beyond the things that the tech team is telling them what they need, they don't really have that deep understanding which can be can be a win or a loss depending on how you use it.
[00:05:27] The gotcha, like I said earlier, decisions can be influenced by what by design or what you build. That is very important because, you have to understand when it comes to websites, when it comes to anything that you're building as a developer, deep down the 8020 rule of it is 80% of people care about is, does it look good, is it fast, does it work?
[00:05:54] So those are the things that can help influence the HR recruiter. All right, and here you go. These are big bats, right? These are people that you tend to be a little more intimidated by if you're selling your first job because these people, they already had the job and they've been at the job and they are the ones basically saying you're go, no go, right?
[00:06:20] So the tech lead or tech team, their strengths is that they are very technical. So all those terms you've been studying on like beyond interview cake, on the Mozilla MDN, reading through over and over and over again. These are the people that you're gonna be able to use them on.
[00:06:41] These are the show, right, these are people that are gonna ask you about FizzBuzz and Fibonacci sequences and all that other boring stuff that you have to get through just so they can pay you to change the color of an href. We never say interviewing was perfect, but we have to deal with the world the way it is not the way we want it to be.
[00:07:04] So their gotcha. They can be influenced by building rapport based on product or company values or community. That's one of the things we're going to your virtual meet ups and talking on Twitter and writing your blogs and things major. That's where that influence to assumption comes into play because the more they know you, in the end, they're trying to find people who can do the job or people who have the potential to do the job that they can spend eight hours with and not end up having to go to HR themselves for something negative.
[00:07:41] Weaknesses, the harsh reality is they may have gatekeeping practices built in. As I just said earlier, going through FizzBuzz to change colors on a website is a pretty weird thing that we do in tech. That we have to work around and we as a community have to be better.
[00:08:03] But until then we have to train for the worst case scenarios versus get upset about the worst case scenarios and react negatively. So you have to be cognizant of that, especially some of them may have biases against bootcamps, against self taught things that nature or against CS grads, I've have actually seen that.
[00:08:24] So we have to prepare to adapt and overcome for those things that we see that we might interact with.