Surviving the harshness of the job market

About a year ago I moved to Poland, which meant also finding myself a new job. It was a process that took time and patience but eventually I started my adventure at Akamai¹. Part of the challenge was also the language barrier that made it impossible to apply to smaller companies.

What I would like to share is the strategy I used to “survive” the recruiting hell. By survive I mean using my time and energy efficiently.

One thing you can’t go around is it will take effort. However effort will be appreciated.

Strategy

Forget the spray-and-pray, it simply won’t work. Your CV must be slightly adjusted for each job position, but we will see that LLMs can help a little bit.

I’d categorize job hunting in three phases²:

1. Searching
2. HR interview
3. Technical interview

Searching

This is the phase where most of the time is spent and can feel hopeless. It tends to feel like nothing is happening and you are just browsing job offers with ridiculous requirements for ridiculous salaries.

Here two thing are important:

1. Filtering fake postings
2. Extracting candidate requirements efficiently

Let’s start with the fake postings. First of all find the company’s website, if the same job position is not posted there it’s a fake job. Using a combination of your search engine and an LLM do some background check on the company itself. If it looks suspicious, move on.

Now that you know the offer is legitimate, you can invest time into reading it. I suggest both reading it and getting an LLM to extract what’s wanted of you (two eyes are better than one).

How I approached the situation was making a default prompt (tweaked over time) to extract all skills needed of me. Something like this:

I will give you a position and a job offer and you will provide me with the hard and soft
skills needed for this position.

Position: Full Stack Developer
Job offer:
"""
<offer here>
"""

List them in the following format:
"""
Programming Languages
    • JavaScript • TypeScript
    • HTML • CSS
    • Java • PHP • Python

Frontend Frameworks
    • Vue • React • Angular
    • Webpack • Gulp • TailwindCSS

Backend Frameworks
    • Spring Boot • Hibernate • Maven
    • Django • DRF • FastAPI
    • Laravel • FilamentPHP

[...]
"""

Make sure to:
- put related skills on the same row.
- don't put more than 3 skills on the same row.

This should give you a good starting point. Next you want to add/remove skills from the list you were provided. Make also sure to keep only relevant skills, don’t list firmare development in C for a front-end position.

PS: you can tell a small lie and add skills you are confident in learning within a week. However be ready to get them asked at the technical interview!

Submit the CV and save a PDF copy locally. Personally I organized my folders as follow:

Curriculum
├── Prompt.txt
├── Curriculum.docx
├── Active
│   ├── Google
│   │   ├── Offer.txt
│   │   ├── Notes.txt
│   │   └── Curriculum.pdf
│   └── Microsoft
│       ├── Offer.txt
│       ├── Notes.txt
│       └── Curriculum.pdf
├── Waiting
│   └── CompanyX
│       ├── Offer.txt
│       └── Curriculum.pdf
└── Archive (if you want)
    └── Facebook
        ├── Offer.txt
        └── Curriculum.pdf

• Prompt.txt³ the prompt we posted above
• Curriculum.docx the editable for the CV
• Active companies with scheduled interviews
• Waiting companies without interview/waiting
• Archive companies that ghosted/rejected (I was moving from Waiting to here after 1 month)

I suggest saving the offer as well with the Curriculum because companies sometimes delete the posting from their website/platform but the recruiting is still going on. And you don’t want to forget what they asking of you and what you sent them.

At this point do not invest more time and effort into this specific offer. Repeat the process for more postings until you get interviews.

HR Interview/Screening

You made it! You got your interview, this is where the Notes.txt file comes at play. Re-read the job offer, double check your CV and prepare yourself.

HRs want to know your story so prepare some bullet points to assist you. It’s not a crime keeping notes open while interviewing. This story should include some wins you are proud of. Some say you should use the S.T.A.R. format during your narrative. I’m personally neutral towards it, it can be a good approach.

Now that you have a pitch/story, prepare yourself to answer uncomfortable questions:

• Why do you want to work (specifically) for us?⁴
• Can you explain this gap in your resume?
• What is your expected salary?
• […]

Lots of useful example questions can be found here.

Finally, make sure to take notes during the interview. You will often get hints for technical interview topics or even information that will help you negotiate a higher salary.

Technical Interview

Same as with the HR interview, prepare some questions. Especially if you are having this interview with the team. This can help you understand what the work environment will be like. A question I personally like to ask is “What makes you better than your competitor?”.

Next, keep practicing tech listed on the job offer. You can also often find example questions on platforms such as Glassdoor. Sadly Glassdoor requires an account, I’d suggest to make a throwaway email and use that one.

Make a discussion out of questions you don’t understand or don’t know the answer. Don’t stay quiet or answer with “I don’t know”.

During an interview I was asked if I worked with “DDL” and after a brief silence I simply answered that I didn’t. Turns out DDL stands for “Data Definition Language”. Yes…defining and altering SQL tables… You can imagine my face after once I knew.

Final remarks

Approaching job hunting this way made it more manageable. However this doesn’t stop interviews from going bad or the majority of applications being ghosted.

What you need is patience and persistence. Think the journey of learning opportunity, every interview you put hard work on for, it will make you better. And then it’s only a matter of time until you land that dream job.