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Top-level
 I’ve never looked for work in public. Every position I’ve ever held has been through a referral or someone reaching out to me. I see other people posting about job-hunting in various ways, but I have no idea whether any of it is effective – mostly we don’t announce *how* we got work. The last 16 months in tech have been gnarly. LinkedIn in particular has huge hunger games vibes, but job boards have always felt like an inefficient and impersonal way to connect with people. 35 comments
While I'm thinking of it, here's how I got my last four roles: 1) Referral from a friend Edit: Thread continues here: https://mastodon.xyz/@meetar/111173056292745727 Previous to this I worked for many years as part of the gig-based vfx studio "holds" system, which is in *dire* need of unionization. It is a very weird mutual-plausible-deniability setup involving Employers of Record and no benefits whatsoever @meetar I don't know if I've ever gotten a job through an ordinary application process. Oh wait, that's not true! My first stint at Wired in 2010, I applied and got the job. But the vast majority were because someone thought of me @meetar Ministry gig-getting functions almost identically to med school residency match; I've heard similar things about some academic hires. Not sure where that stuff fits here, but we may not be who you're speaking to. We're only an hour in, but I'm surprised "job board" is as high as it is. I'd be curious to know if that rate has changed over the last 5 years. There are 100 more follow-up polls I could post, but I'll leave that opportunity for others :) @meetar that’s why I ignore “connection requests” and only reply to “InMail” from paid accounts.  @meetar Saw job ad on birdsite posted by an acquaintance, applied, got — so Referral / Network was what I picked  @tripofmice Hm! I would say that does seem unusual, I'd ask more but all the followup questions seem over-personal :D  @meetar I got my latest (part time, delightful) job from basically emailing the person in charge of the VERY small workplace and saying "I've always wanted to work here, here's what I can do..." and then, later, when there was funding, she reached back to me. We're both old internet people so maybe it was "through a friend" but had never worked together before. It's been great!  @meetar They had a demo night to show off their new software. I was the only person who came with copies of my resume. All the younger people there went “man, why didn’t I think of that?” The results are in: 2/3 of respondants got their last job via referrals, which supports my confirmation bias. Not quite 20% through job boards, which is a bit higher than I'd guessed, and only slightly more than cold contacts. Now I'm wondering whether there's any way to make a job board act more like a human network. I don't think it's 2000 people applying for a single position via a web form, to be processed by machine learning. @meetar anonymous 2-3 degree social network chatbot, I was a big user, I bet you were on there too back then https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) |
Gregory's Server
At heart I’m a prototyper, so I’d like to iterate on this a bit. I’m more of an “asker” than a “guesser”, and I like research, so let’s start there: how did you get your last job?