Chapter 5
IN THIS CHAPTER
Finding out what your online image is and learning to rebrand yourself
Cleaning up your social media profiles to impress companies
Making your résumé stand out from the pack
Writing an effective cover letter
When you’re looking for a job, you’re in the image business. Just like any celebrity in any field, you’re trying to project the best image of yourself you can to fit the role you want to play. (However, we highly discourage wearing fake hair and/or Spanx shapewear as you work to fill the programming role at a company.)
Your résumé and cover letter give a company its first impression of you. Even if the person (or people) responsible for reviewing résumés likes yours, your image management is not yet complete. Today, companies also look very carefully at applicants’ social media profiles not only to see that the experiences on those sites (like LinkedIn) match what’s in your résumé, but also to confirm that they don’t see anything, such as past inappropriate behavior, that could place your résumé in the “to shred” pile.
In this chapter, we show you how to find yourself online using tools like Google so that you know what your current image is on the web. If you’re unpleasantly surprised, we show you how best you can rebrand yourself.
Next, we show you how to clean up the social networking profiles you use (and we mean all of them) so that you don’t have anything that screams, “Don’t hire me!” to the company. We also remind you that you may need to fill in some gaps in your social media presence, such as adding or fortifying your LinkedIn profile because that’s where companies and professionals are online.
When you’ve finished checking yourself out online and you’re ready to write your résumé, we tell you about the best approaches to doing so, including when to write it yourself and when to hire a professional résumé writing service. We tie up this discussion in a bow by reminding you about the information you need to include in your résumé.
Finally, at the end of this chapter, you learn about how to write a powerful cover letter to go with your résumé. Afterall, the cover letter is what the hiring person will read first. We guide you along to make sure you not only add the right information to match the job’s description, but also include all the parts of the cover letter you need to make it shine so brightly that said hiring person will need to wear shades to read it.
As a programmer, you know full well that the Internet is pervasive. And so you know that whether you intended to or not, you have a presence on the web. But you may not know what that presence is and how others perceive you because you’ve never searched for yourself online. When potential interviewers look you up online, they’re going to form a notion of not only your skill set, but also who you are as a person.
Potential interviewers, or anyone else for that matter, can find your information in two ways: using the user’s favorite search engine and on social networking profiles. For this chapter, we use Google when we talk about searching for your information on the web since Google has more than 92 percent of search engine market share worldwide as of May 2019 according to StatCounter (http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
).
When you go to the Google website (do we really have to say it’s at www.google.com
?), all you have to do is type your name into the search bar and press Enter. As shown in Figure 5-1, the results page displays all the results of your search. You can expect that if you’ve sent your résumé to a company, everyone who’s looked at it have Googled your name.
What they see on the first page of results is what’s going to pre-suade them. The term pre-suasion was coined by social psychologist Robert Cialdini, a best-selling author who is, as of this writing, the Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University.
By pre-suasion, we mean that interviewers will convince themselves from what they see on the first page of search results if they want to hire you or not. An interviewer who has seen your search results and is tasked with screening you on the phone will be excited or skeptical about talking with you based on what she sees. If you reach the interview stage, different interviewers will have their own opinions of you even before you utter your first word.
What do you do if the first page of search results about you makes your stomach churn? Start by opening a notes or spreadsheet app or just (gasp!) get out a piece of paper. Then create two columns: one that lists what you want to see on the first page of search results about you, and the other that lists what’s showing up on the screen.
When you’re done typing or writing, take a look at your list. Do you feel good? Bad? Meh?
This is where your network of friends and perhaps former colleagues can help. Ask them to search for you on Google and get their first reactions to what they’re seeing. Getting extra sets of eyes looking at your results will help you get even better control of your image and how to improve it if you have to.
Once you decide that your first page of results needs a makeover, where do you start? Your friends will likely get you moving and offer suggestions whether you want them to or not, because that’s what friends do. We’ll get you moving, too — block out time every day for the next few weeks (yes, really) to create new online resources. For example:
www.squarespace.com
) shown in Figure 5-2. Or you can create a full-blown website to show off your website development skills.You need to remember two things as you create these new resources. The first is to check job postings for programmers and talk to people about open programming positions, which you learn how to do in Chapter 4. (If you haven’t looked at that chapter, bookmark this page and read Chapter 4 while we take a coffee break.)
When you know what skills companies are looking for, be sure to include those keywords prominently and frequently in your blog, video descriptions, and/or website. Some examples of keywords include:
The more a search engine sees your keywords, the more likely it is that companies searching for your name and a particular programming forte will find it on that first results page.
Social networking profiles are even better at showing — and exposing — who a person is. For example, if you’ve ever looked at a Facebook or Instagram profile, you can get a feeling for whether someone is arrogant or friendly, their life priorities such as staying in shape or drinking a lot of beer, and what their political leanings are.
What’s more, your interviewers will have their pre-suasions reinforced or changed based on what they see on your social networking sites. If they find photos of you volunteering to help kids code at your local school, they’ll probably like you better. But if they see a lot of photos with you partying every weekend, interviewers may see you as a liability. (If you don’t understand why that’s bad, then we can’t help you no matter how many times you read this book.)
What’s more, an employer can run background checks and hire private investigators to thoroughly investigate your background, and part of those checks include getting access to your public and/or private social networking profiles.
Even if you don’t think they can find your private profiles, there’s no way for you to know for sure. So, rely on the trite saying “better safe than sorry” and follow our helpful tips for checking and cleaning up your social media profiles before you send out one résumé and cover letter.
Delete any photos on all your social media profiles that don’t show you in a good light. For example, showing off nice photos of you and your family at a cookout or other event works in your favor. Just make sure you have more photos that show you working in your field in a variety of capacities than photos of you and your cat.
Join LinkedIn if you haven’t already, and ensure that what’s on your résumé matches what’s in your LinkedIn profile exactly. That is, ensure that the dates in your profile and résumé are consistent. Don’t lie about your job titles, such as saying you were the CEO of a company when you were really a freelancer, or you were an employee when you were a contractor.
Once again, always presume the company can find out everything about you. If you’re not convinced, take the advice of Mark Twain: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
If you have an existing LinkedIn profile, go through it carefully and cross-check it with your résumé so you don’t have any red flags such as a missing job on your LinkedIn profile that’s listed on your résumé. Then go through your profile and update it wherever you can. For example, add information about the professional organization you joined recently and replace your headshot with a new one so you look the same way you will when you attend an interview. (A profile photo taken 10 to 15 years ago doesn’t work on dating websites, let alone LinkedIn.)
People expect you to have more personal information on your Instagram and Facebook profiles. However, on LinkedIn you may have received a message or two in your newsfeed forwarded to you by a LinkedIn contact who didn’t quite get the message that LinkedIn is for professional, business-oriented information, not personal stuff.
If you’re using LinkedIn to promote something or someone else that isn’t related to your job, stop doing it and remove past posts from your profile that aren’t professional because (yes, again) presume companies can find it.
Now that you know what won’t help you get an interview, what will?
Start by building a complete LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn takes you step by step toward creating a complete profile and will let you know when you’ve reached the magical 100 percent completion mark. What’s more, LinkedIn tells you where your profile is deficient, and occasionally offers advice for making your profile even better. One of the pieces you need to fill out your profile is a photo, and if you’re going to be taken seriously by any company, you need to have a professional headshot on LinkedIn. If you don’t know how to get one, bookmark this page, read Chapter 15, and we’ll be ready to go when you get back.
Next, what do you need to show in all of your online materials to get an interview?
Competency in one or more programming languages you specialize in is the key that opens the door to an interview room. Earlier in this chapter, we tell you about the various online media you should invest time and a little bit of money to create, such as a blog and a YouTube channel.
But don’t stop there: You can create and operate a podcast, self-publish books, ask to speak at conferences, and engage in discussions on social media groups such as those found on LinkedIn.
As you chat online with others, someone may think you’re wrong about something and won’t be shy about denouncing you. In this case, don’t take your ball and go home — it’s a valuable opportunity to defend your position … or even change it if new information requires it. Companies like to know a prospective employee can not only defend a position like an adult, but also knows when it’s time to change it.
Share your knowledge with others and don’t just tell people how you mentored team members in the last company you worked for. Show how you helped kids in your community learn to code. And if you’ve spoken at conferences, have videos of you speaking on your YouTube channel to reinforce that you don’t just share — you lead.
You also need to tell people in social media posts about what you’re reading and what you’re learning. These posts can foster discussions where you further show your competence. Later in this chapter, we tell you how to write your cover letter and turn a gap in your employment history into an opportunity to show you’re learning.
The size of the employer you’ve applied to join may determine what types of information you can have on your social media profiles. Startup and small companies may not be as concerned as larger companies about your questionable choices when you were younger. They may only be interested in your skills and your ability to get their product out fast so that they can secure that next round of funding.
Companies of any size that are more established — that is, have one or more products or services that are bringing in steady revenue — will be more conservative in terms of risk. Established companies have human resources (HR) departments (or an HR company they contract with) and larger companies have their own legal departments.
These companies are well aware of legal liabilities and don’t want to hire people who could invite a potential lawsuit because of their political views, religious views, and/or attitudes toward different races and genders. What’s more, companies will discriminate because humans are hard-wired to do so.
So, now you know why we’ve told you that you need to be more conservative with your social networking profiles. You shouldn’t hide the fact that you’re a human being, but if you follow our guidelines in this section then you’ll have a far better chance of getting a phone screen and/or interview. (We’re not George Zimmer, so we can’t guarantee it.)
You have to presume that when you send your résumé and cover letter to a company, your application is going to be one of dozens, if not hundreds, that people responsible for hiring their new programmer have to sift through. So, you have to give those people a reason to read your résumé.
You can’t physically make your résumé stand up and dance when it comes out of the envelope — or when reviewers open your PDF-formatted résumé from their websites or email messages — but you can make it stand out.
We recommend you hire a professional résumé service to write or rewrite your résumé. Period. Full stop.
It’s natural to ask if hiring a professional résumé service is expensive. Set aside $300 to $500 for your résumé and cover letter service budget. (You may have to pay more if the service needs to write multiple résumés and cover letters.) Companies that charge in that range will produce a great résumé and cover letter that you can tweak for each job opening and that can lead to better offers and higher pay.
Yes, you can write your résumé yourself instead. The CEO of a company can also learn how to write Python code so that she can do the programming herself and doesn’t have to hire you. Do you think a CEO will do that, or will she focus on what she was hired or started her company to do, which is to grow the business?
If your brow is still furrowed, just open Google, type software developer resume writing service into the Search box, and look at the list of résumé writing services just for programmers. There are so many of them for a reason.
Now that we’ve convinced you to use a professional résumé service (we hope), it’s time to find the right service for you.
As you might have guessed, you need to search for a résumé service that’s tailored to programmers specifically. The next best option is to find a company that offers résumé services for all sorts of information technology jobs including programmers. Avoid a résumé service that writes primarily for non-technical jobs because it’s more likely that company won’t understand what information you need in your résumé.
This doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for providing information to the service as you learn about later in this chapter. But résumé services that know what programmers need in their résumés and how to format them correctly so they get noticed is a requirement, not an option.
Professional résumé services should have a website that contains a portfolio of past work so you can see how they format résumés and what information is included in each one.
If you can find a technical résumé service locally, excellent (in the way Mr. Burns says it). It’s always better to meet someone in person and talk with him and learn if this person is a good fit. But if you can’t find someone locally, be sure the website allows you to contact the company online or by phone so you can ask questions.
Don’t limit your search to one service or to one writer within a service. Though this isn’t a life or death situation, finding the right résumé writer can lead you to a higher quality life for years to come, so be thorough.
You should ask your friends or colleagues to review the résumé writing firms to get their thoughts — and ask if they have any recommendations. If you know a recruiter or can get in touch with one through a friend or colleague to get the recruiter’s thoughts, that’s the equivalent of having your new program run the first time.
We’ll leave it to you to negotiate what the price is for the efforts of your friends and colleagues, but remember that it’s all part of the investment. Hey, you may even get brownie points by helping one or more friends who are looking for a résumé service themselves. (Never underestimate the value of brownie points.)
A professional résumé service is not a vending machine. You don’t put money into the bill slot and have a résumé tailored just for you come out the bottom slot. The service relies on you to give them information about yourself.
You know the old saying: garbage in, garbage out. If you give your résumé writer garbage, you’re going to have a poor résumé no matter what the résumé service does. When you’re ready to give them information, here’s what to do:
As you read your résumé, ask yourself: Is this résumé effectively advertising what I have to offer to the company? The last three words in that question are the key to getting to the phone screen or interview stage.
Consider your résumé to be like a car advertisement in a magazine. If you saw an ad for a BMW and the ad asked you to buy one of the company’s cars because it wants to be the greatest, most profitable car company in the world, would you buy it? Or would you be more inclined to buy if they show you a driver with a beautiful significant other sitting alongside you driving on the open road that tells you subliminally that you could have this lifestyle if you buy a new BMW?
Your résumé should also send a subliminal question to the people at the company reading it: Wouldn’t you like to have this software developer working for you who can do all the things you want and more, who’s raised the bottom line of companies he’s worked at in the past, who’s mentored people, and who is a leader in the software development community? If the person reading your résumé is saying “Yes!” in her brain, have your smartphone at the ready to take her phone call or receive her email asking to talk with you.
After you receive your finished résumé, you need to ensure that it can be easily tailored to a particular job description. Unless fortune smiles on you, like the aforementioned new program running the first time, you’re going to send a lot of résumés with cover letters to a lot of companies you think you can help.
That means that every skill you list on your résumé that isn’t in the job description is worthless, and you need to take those out. For example, if you’re applying for a software developer job that requires the applicant to program in Python, the company won’t care if you can program in C++, C#, and Java. That information will show up in the job history section of your résumé, but you need to feature your Python skills and experience prominently and frequently.
You’ll know a résumé service is worth researching and investing in if it also offers cover letter writing as part of its résumé development services.
A cover letter is necessary for you to be taken seriously by any company because it introduces you and tells the person reviewing your résumé how you can help her company succeed. A cover letter that gets noticed, which is the one you want to write, fits the job description to a T.
It’s easy to find cover letter templates that you can use, but most people who hire new employees, especially experienced ones, can tell which cover letters are generic and which ones aren’t. The generic ones tell the reader about the applicant’s experience and what the applicant wants to do.
A résumé service should be able to show samples of how it fits its cover letter to match a job description. In other words, your cover letter is a companion advertising piece that needs to tell how the company will benefit, not what you want from the job and in your career.
To illustrate what a good and bad cover letter looks like, let’s start with a sample job description:
We are currently in 13 professional sports across 46 states and in 8 countries! We offer daily leagues for fantasy football, baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, college football, and college basketball. Our mission is to bring fans closer to the games they love via a unique combination of daily fantasy sports, sports betting, and media platforms. We are currently looking for a Senior and Lead Software Engineer to help establish and lead a team centered around the mission of providing a best-in-class experience for our products and customers.
Now here’s an example of a bad cover letter for this position:
I’m excited to talk to you about how my software development skills can benefit your team and how my experience would make me the best fit for this position.
So, what’s wrong with this? The text is generic and feels like a letter that’s used for every single cover letter sent to every company. This text is likely copied and pasted into a new document and the only differences between that new document and any other cover letter is the company’s name and address.
Here’s a much better cover letter to submit for this job posting:
I’m very excited to talk to you about how I can help build and lead a team centered around bringing fans closer to the games they love, as I’m also an avid fantasy football player myself.
This makes it clear that the applicant is applying for this job in particular because he’s restated what the company is looking for specifically and the company’s mission. The approach is much more personal so it’s much more likely to get a response.
We recommend using the popular four-step AIDA model when you write your cover letter. The acronym AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. When you follow these steps in order, as illustrated in Figure 5-3, you’ll end up with a powerful cover letter that will get a company’s attention.
The first paragraph of your letter should get your reader’s attention. There are several ways you can do this:
If the job description says the company is looking for Java programmers, you can follow up the attention-getting paragraph noting that you have ten years of Java programming experience and you can apply what you’ve learned in your past experiences to mentor team members and solve the company’s most pressing problems to get projects done.
In other words, you’re showing the company the value you can bring to it and how it’ll benefit by having you as a member of the team.
Now that you have the reader’s attention and interest, you need to create desire for that person to at least put your résumé and cover letter into the “review” pile so others in the company can determine if you’re worthy of at least a phone screen.
In the desire section of your cover letter, you need to point out the parts of your résumé that pertain directly to the job description. For example, you can point out that you’ve worked for some of the best companies in the world and that you’re a leader in the software development field by giving presentations and writing a popular blog.
As in a movie or book, you always want to leave the viewers or readers wanting more. So tell them that you feel that you can provide exactly the results the company is looking for and that you can’t wait to meet them, tell them more, and show them how you’re the right person to solve their problem.
Finally, you need to call the readers to action. That is, tell readers what action to take next, and they’re more likely to do so if you tell them directly. For example, say you’re available by phone and by email to schedule an appointment to talk more about the position, thank them for their consideration, and that you’re looking forward to talking with them further.