How to GET a Job Instead of Finding It
I was motivated to write this article after noticing how many troubles people have finding a good job and advancing in their career. As a case study, I am going to analyze my own software development career from start (2003) to finish (2009) and see how much my skills, my resume, and my relationships mattered, and whether they did at all. It still amuses me to see people make the same obvious mistakes I’ve made, while at the same time forgetting that just a few years ago I was just as clue-less about the job game.
Let’s start by going back to the fall of 2003, to my college years at Moscow State University in Russia. I was still a junior, studying for my Computer Science degree when my good friend Dmitry told me about a cool new language called C# that was rapidly gaining popularity. He was already working as a programmer at the university library at that time and invited me to do some part-time work for them, developing a new electronic reader registration system using C#. Result: I got a job without having a resume and the required skill-set. All that mattered was that I had an existing relationship (friendship).
When I started looking for my second job in September of 2004, I was already armed with a good-looking resume, listing my previous job experience and my supposed expertise in the new programming language. The job market in Moscow was hot at that time, and it was easy to line up the interviews. However, I was failing the tough technical interviews one by one, since my resume looked far better than my real skills and knowledge at that time. In some way, it was my resume that was failing me, telling me that I wasn’t standing up to the perfect image it projected. Finally, I got a job after my 6th interview. Even though I did pretty bad on that interview in the technical sense, I got hired because the interviewer himself was a graduate of the same faculty of the same university I was studying in! He even asked me how things were going at the faculty. Result: I got a job not by having a good skill-set, but by being in some way related to my boss.
In the summer of 2005, after graduating with a Bachelors in Science, I moved back from Russia to the good old USA and started looking for a job again. This time I had an even better resume and more experience, but I didn’t know anyone in the IT industry in St. Louis. The technical interview for my coveted position at Reuters was really tough, and I thought I probably failed it. To my surprise, I was still hired, even though none of my professional references in Russia were contacted and I wasn’t asked a single question about my two previous jobs. It’s like my previous experience didn’t matter at all. Result: I got a job without having any relationships and could’ve written anything I wanted in my resume!
By the fall of 2006 our team at Reuters was slowly disintegrating since the company management in New York decided to transition the website operation from C# to Java. It was time to search for a job again… Except I didn’t have to! A couple of months earlier, one of my colleagues, sensing a change in the wind, moved to a different company across town called Maritz. He e-mailed me, saying their department was starting a new project and they needed someone with my skill-set. I quickly went through all the necessary bureaucracy (agents, HR department, and a formal interview) and was hired within a week. Result: I got a job just by having a good working relationship with a colleague.
Consistent with my flip-flopping behavior, I quit my job after about a year and moved to California to start my own online business. After the spectacular failure of that venture, it made sense to move back to St. Louis and to start the job-hunt one more time. Only this time, having learned from my previous experiences, I e-mailed everyone I knew in St. Louis about my return from California and about my availability. And guess what, in just a couple days I was offered 2 jobs, without having my resume or my technical skills tested at all! The job that I ultimately chose involved a project manager who was one of my bosses two years before at Reuters. Result: I got a job by having a good working relationship with a manager.
As you can see, in all of the cases my resume was absolutely useless in getting me hired. After lots of thinking and talking to people who were actually responsible for making hiring decisions at some point in their lives, I came to a conclusion that a resume is really just a worthless piece of paper. Nobody, except the person writing it, will ever look at it longer than 10 seconds. Not only is it useless, but it can actually harm you by projecting a false, non-authentic image of yourself. The absolute worst way to look for a job is to start sending out a lot of resumes to people who’ve never seen you.
My technical skills, however, did matter a lot more than my resume, helping me pass some interviews and get my foot in the door. Nonetheless, it is the personal relationships that really turned out to be the key to open great career advancement opportunities. Without utilizing relationships, you will rarely get noticed, most of the time your resume thrown into the trash. Even if you do pass the initial screening, you will be faced with more competition, making your quest for the better job very difficult.
Moral of the story: the best way to get a job is not by finding it, but rather by establishing good relationships that will get you a job. A good lesson to be learned for sure, one that I will definitely remember in any future endeavors.
