Whatever position you’re applying for, go through the job ad, and tailor your CV. Highlight or add any relevant experience you might have.
2. Highlight achievements
Highlighting achievements, projects you’ve delivered and their impact is a great way to get attention. Very few applicants do this, but it shows a business mindset, and awareness of your work beyond the code you write.
3. Focus on hard skills
A software engineer resume is all about hard skills. There is no need to show communication training. Recruiters generally assume you’re fine in that department, and don’t even think about it before they call you for an interview.
+1 Resumes are a poor way to filter candidates
The resume process, especially at big companies isn’t working well. There is no efficient alternative, but there are methods to make it better. It may be hiring outside help, doing coding challenges, and some other options.
There is no room to get deep into the details here, so check out the full interview for a deep dive on the tech resume topic:
Senior management certainly has to be on board, but it's best if your entire engineering department is clear on why creating a career ladder for them is necessary.
Here are some key takeaways from the interview for leveling up engineers:
1. Pair programming is the most effective way to learn. If you want developers to grow quickly, pair them up with a more senior engineer, and it's guaranteed that both people will take away a lot.
2. As an engineering manager you can hand out stretch projects to your developers.
They get an interesting piece of work, and get to see if they want to grow their skills in that direction. You get to see if they show promise for another role.
It's a win-win.
How do you build an open feedback culture like GitHub?
0. Before anything else, you have to know, even if you’re at a small company, you can’t start it early enough. You need to set up a feedback system with a regular cycle.
1. Have everyone do self-reviews
Wherever you are, it can’t hurt to think about what you’ve been doing over the last months. A bit of self-reflection is a great first stage for your feedback system.
1. I use one on ones to give both positive and negative feedback. It's a frequent opportunity to do it. You want your direct reports to always know how they are perceived, rather than only learn about it at performance reviews.
2. You want to avoid giving critical feedback out of the blue. I tend to put a note about the broader topic of my critical feedback in the meeting agenda. It helps them to prepare.