How to Get the Tech Job in Europe ??????

Hi there! Warm greetings from snowy Berlin. I’m Anastasiia. I’m a tech recruiter, so every day I am surrounded by super smart people- the engineers???????. Yes, I need to reject people sometimes, but the good thing about my job is- I could give the person a chance to change their life, relocate and work on the project that the millions are using, cool, huh?

In my free time I love to travel, Lisbon is my favourite, I’ve been there 3 times already, my favourite dish is Neapolitan Pizza, I hope you are team pizza too :) 

I was thinking about the topic that might help people thrive and also give some inspiration and action points, everyone wants to be happy, right? Everyone wants a great job with a cool product and a fun team who has Friday nights crazier than anyone. The topic of today is - How to get the job you are dreaming of. 

Hey! So where do we start? As a recruiter I will show you the places and things I look at once I contact people myself, take what's good for you, ready-steady-go! 

Your Social Media Presence matters.

I'm a big fan of social media, Insta, FB, LinkedIn, they are already here, everybody is online, that's why we need to take the best out of it and use it to our advantage (the Friday fun, remember, we still want it :)).

Those are the places I will go look for you as a headhunter- 

LinkedIn, you say, simple, lol, everybody is there, what I’d say is your profiles there are old, you get annoyed when I reach out to you to offer you a PHP position and you no longer use the tech. Keep your profiles active, mention what tech is interesting to you, mention the tech you used, as the recruiters we are using keywords to find you, our stars, there are so many synonyms that we are using, make sure you have them all in your profile, be it JS, JavaScript or Javascript, you want to be searchable, right? There is no harm in adding your favourite dish there too, because why not? It would be easier to get connected with you if you seem fun. A MATCH! Whooho.

Twitter do you twit? Why not, an article or a sentence every week, month etc would not hurt.

Xing This site is good if you are targeting some German companies, from what I’ve noticed, the old companies are there, and they will find you, if you have a profile in XING too, 

StackOverflow We see your badges, we see the answers you have given and the ratings you are having, when you apply or when I search I look at those, I want the coolest beans, right? Being helpful is cool.

"KAGGLE is an online community of data scientists and machine learners, owned by Google LLC. Kaggle allows users to find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.” I think if you are in Data, that’s your place to shine.

GitHub are you open sourcing? It’s time to start, Github is a good place to learn about your code, your style, your preferences in languages. Learning sth new or working on your own project, put it on Github, sharing is caring they say.

Behance is very good for the designers, there is no better place to put your portfolio then Behance or Dribble :)

Meetup- I know, you’d say COVID and meetups are not going well together, I really think they do, virtual meetup could inspire and connect you to the people as good as the live one.

Stay up to date with the market.

Interviewing- 

You might be comfortable and not actively looking for a job now, but you never know what might happen tomorrow, it happened to me that I joined a new company, fresh, excited, looking to chance, hire and develop, what happened was, the company was acquired by another company and we all got fired. That’s why you always have to be ready, ready to interview, ready to pass the coding challenge, because you care and you are the best! You would not be reading this if you were not :) 

Don't lose your interviewing skills, you need to always be ready. The more interviews you have, the better you become, the more questions you know answers to (different interviewers ask the same questions in a different way) . If you are reading this, you already are the cool one who wants to develop. I would recommend to have interviews with recruiters every half a year, just to know what the market looks like, what teams/topics/technologies are trendy and worth looking into, and the favourite topic of all, the salaries, talking to the recruiters from time to time gives you the opportunity to see what are the salaries the engineers like you are getting in a different place.

Follow who you want to be-

The people <3 

I would say take the best of the best people, follow good engineers on Medium, a lot of them are writing what they are currently doing, what problems they successfully solved,

The companies- interact with the brand, like comment, follow, read the tech blog, this will make you stand out, you would know more of your dream company then anyone else. When I talk to the candidate I could see the excitement in their eyes, I could definitely see if they are engaged with the brand.here you go for inspiration-

https://tech.just-eat.com/

Pump your programming muscles.

Always be ready to pass the tech assignment, sometimes we work too much and forget to repeat/renew the basics, the algorithms, etc. Those are the places that could help you pump your programming muscles. Be it Leetcode, Codility, Hackerrank. All the places have the trial/monthly challenge, etc. Solving those you could get acquainted with the layouts, environments and the challenges that you might face in your next interview, plus they will make you feel like a King or a Queen, yes, I solved it! 

Happy Job Hunting, you could do it!