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Comment by ryanobjc | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, the first step is: have a job at a well regarded company.

There is no stronger signal that you're a good developer than already having a job at a company that has stringent hiring standards.

I get multiple serious recruiter contacts a week. Mostly via Linkedin, but also via direct email for the enterprising recruiters. All from companies most people would kill to work for. I even get linked-in email from linkedin recruiters.

I ignore most of them. They know it's part of the game. One day in the future I may need them, and there's no point in pissing them off - they're only doing what they can. You gotta have a huge funnel to hire even 1 person (it's probably 1000:1 for contacts/hire)

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This is absolutely true and was how I found my dream job or more like how a recruiter found my dream job for me. I'm using Xing since I live in Germany but I think it should work similar on LinkedIn.

I can understand that if you are starting fresh you won't be able to be already employed by a well known company. However you have to start somewhere and it's important that you get some experience in the field you want to work in. Obviously this depends on the job you are applying for whether it's a junior or senior position etc.

I think it's important that you don't have big gaps in your CV and can show or present strong social/soft skills. One of the most important things for me is to be honest. Be absolutely honest about what you can do and not. Don't flood your profile with all the latest buzzwords and technologies if you never worked with these before. This might attract couple recruiters but it will be most likely the black sheep amoung them.

Be serious, honest, friendly, open minded and just yourself. :)

Thanks for mentioning Xing - I might be looking for something new around the beginning of next year, and while I enjoy working remote (in the US), my wife and I were just talking about how a job Europe might worth moving for :)

But of course, I'd only ever heard of linkedin as "the" professional networking site - I didn't even realize they had competition!

You are welcome. https://www.xing.com/ is very popular in Germany at least. Sadly I don't have any numbers on how they do in Europe.

True. I interviewed once and they told me flat out that they didn't really read my CV but they saw I was hired at a big company and they liked that.

People are just people no matter what role they have in that moment and most people are susceptible to be impressed by superficial things (like your current company name).

Also most interviewers failed the interviews I was in... :)

Makes you want to give them a joke CV with a section "Companies I have not worked at yet" and just list some buzzwords like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.

> have a job at a well regarded company

This is already highly contentious. Some consider startups who produce write-only code fast to be a joke, some consider slow moving behemoths like Microsoft, Apple or IBM as less than ideal.

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