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Ask HN: How did you find your last job?

11 points by yarper ↗ HN
I'm looking currently and wondering the most efficient way to do it. Based near London, open to contract/perm & remote.

Edit; what I'm really wondering is if there's a place I can go that I pay the money to and they find jobs I might be interested in, for places I don't yet know about.

23 comments

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twunde
Make sure to keep in contact with old coworkers, especially if they've moved on to other companies. I've gotten contract work from former coworkers and actually got my first job because my boss' boss found out that I did some development and he was working with another startup that was looking for a junior programmer.

Otherwise I've had some success with recruiters, but the quality of the recruiter does matter.

yarper
I've had hit and miss results with recruiters too, and by large prefer to avoid them if possible. They tend to want to pick you up and shoehorn you into anywhere they can.
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sandeshd
Keeping good contacts with old coworkers seems to work, my friends believes in me and my capabilities, so they referred me in their existing company many times(even though I was not looking for change).
cm2012
Recruited on LinkedIn - best job ever. It was a really recruitment message though from someone who referenced very specific things on my profile, not a random generic one.
yarper
Out of the blue? Or was the recruiter already a second or third relation to your contacts?

I'm just wondering because linkedin seems to have pockets of good people and then pockets of spam recruiters. Right now I'm in the spam trap and 90% of my traffic is boilerplate recruiter spam. I'm not sure how I'd get myself noticed by good recruiters like this.

mirceal
for some recruiters it's a numbers game.

the more time/effort they put into understanding your background the better they can tailor their message / asses if you are a good fit for the target positions they have. Most good recruiters put a lot of time in before reaching out.

cm2012
Totally out of the blue.
fendale
I got my current job through LinkedIn too. Hadoop / big data position. I've got quite a few recruiter spam type messages though, but the one I got the job through was an in house recruiter for the company. I figured they were just doing key word searches as my profile isn't anything special. In my profile I put a good paragraph about each of my past positions highlighting experience with the technologies I wanted to work with. 5 or 6 months later this job came up.
MalcolmDiggs
My most recent job was from StackOverflow Careers (careers.stackoverflow.com). Before that, I got a job via Angellist Jobs (angel.co/jobs). In both cases creating a profile was all I had to do, then the companies reach out and say hi.
onedev
I was approached by a VC firm to consider a job at one of their portfolio companies and it has worked out fantastic so far :)
dyeje
I contacted someone in my professional network.
pmiller2
I met several of my now coworkers at a meetup group.
probinso
Find videos from conferences with technologies you are interested in. Watch any / all talks from that conference. Take note of company behind each interesting talk.

You know that the company is trying to make a difference with their community. You are gifted a topic to discuss during an interview.

You can also use the companies that host local meet ups.

yarper
This is a good idea I hadn't thought of. Thanks!
krisdol
My last job or my current one? Current: AngelList exclusively because I was new in town and knew no one. Last: I was asked to join by colleagues who left a former company after it was bought out.
yarper
You're the second person to list AngelList - are you located in SF (or near)? Would you use the same if in another location?
krisdol
Sorry for the late response. I'm in Boston, MA. I would definitely advise it in Boston, SF, NYC. Elsewhere, let's just say that I would also use it first, but depending on the market I would move to other resources. It's great for startups but don't go there for jobs at large companies. All in all, I would definitely use it again if I was jobless today.
zhte415
In addition to having a network with old colleagues and LinkedIn (which can be really good, if you have a network).

Do consider headhunters. Some can be very good and professional (my area is finance and IT). If you're not sure how to contact them, search via LinkedIn - for time efficiency, avoid the bigger shops and look for ones with small looking independent websites (again, finance IT type headhunters) as they're likely to have a personal network of employers to fit you against.

Non financial IT, I've little idea.

kleer001
A friend asked me to join up.

Since I've been in my industry for 15 years and since people seem to like me (dunno why) I haven't gotten a job but through personal recommendations in 8 years.

Please don't pay people money to get you a job. Just get your cold-call game on.

Go through the phone book and find any place that remotely looks like they could use your skillset.

Ring-ring "Hello, are you looking for what I do? No? Ok, thanks for your time." 10 times a day for a month and you should be fine.

yarper
It's not so much paying people to find me a job. What I'm looking for is a reliable way to find good leads at companies that do the simple things to keep their staff happy and are continuously looking to make whatever they make the best possible. So far I haven't found a good way to find that through just trawling the internet and hoping to find gold.

People such as yourself (and to a lesser extent me I guess) have a solid professional network. That network kind of pre-vets stuff before they send it on to us. That's really good because you tend to stay in touch with people you like, and we usually like the same things as the people we like.

Things like HN who's hiring do help because the kind of companies that post there are likely to have a similar outlook to me (after all we frequent the same place).

Edit: when I said I have a professional network - it's not that wide. While a couple of things have come up from it, it's not like other stories of just letting people know they're available and getting hired

kleer001
> reliable way to find good leads at companies that do the simple things to keep their staff happy and are continuously looking to make whatever they make the best possible.

Just word of mouth, right?