We’re currently looking for a new web developer for our team and so the recruitment person here at the studio asked me to review a list of 20 or so candidates, with the idea that I could help prioritise and filter.
Being knee deep in project work and at the end of a sprint, it was a bit difficult to find the time. So unfortunately, I had to be fairly ruthless in sifting through these links. I don’t know how comparable that experience is to recruiters who do this sort of thing all day every day, but I imagine they also want to get to the meat of the candidate as soon as possible.
So I quickly gathered an approach. First, head straight to their profiles. I wanted to see the 3 holy grail skills in the bio para, “React”, “Next JS”, and “Typescript”. Beggars can’t be choosers, but we at least need to see React as a top skill as that is the framework we use for pretty much every enterprise website. If I see Angular or JQuery highlighted, it’s a red flag and I typically move on.
Second, scroll down to their work and education history. A principle is likely to be around 10 plus years in the field, so I’m looking for some signs of deep weathering there. What years they were in university, or when they first started working as a developer. Any experience working in an agency environment would be a massive plus, as juggling multiple demanding projects is the job. Gaps in the timeline don’t bother me so much, I’ve got my own quirks in mine! Just make sure you have a story to tell about them. Life is long and sh*t happens.
Third, if everything is looking good so far, I want to get some sense of how real this person is. Have they faked all that info? It’s very possible. Now I head over to the LinkedIn Recommendations to check out the testimonials. I want to see old colleagues and managers waxing lyrical about this candidate. I will also take the opportunity to see what they have said about other people, as this gives a window onto how they consider others they’ve worked with.
Fourth, I will be looking for a link to their Github repo or website. Seeing a shed load of recent commits signals that this person is a working developer…not someone who learned React from Udemy 2 months ago. If there’s a website there too, fantastic, let’s go see what and how they implemented it. Is there anything on their website that makes them stand out? How human is this person…do they have other interests and passions outside of devving? You want to hope so. If there’s a link to their Twitter, I would even go and check out that profile and see how active they are, and hopefully spy some non-agressive thought provoking interactions.
Ticking all those boxes will put the candidate right to the top of the list for me. So if you’re looking for a job right now, whether in tech or otherwise…go groom your LinkedIn profile! Start writing recommendations for people you’ve worked with over the years, and ask them to write one back for you. Get your Github looking active. And of course, if you would be interested in a Principle Web Dev role, you know what to do.