This series started with My Experience Job Hunting as a Software Engineer in America, where I introduced how much Silicon Valley was hiring and shared my own job hunt. The previous post, An Introduction to the US Software Engineer Interview Process, walked through each stage of the interview process. By now you know that in most cases you will go through 1. a recruiter phone screen, 2. a technical phone interview with an engineer, and 3. an on-site interview at the company. Details vary a little from company to company, but the basics do not change much. This post explores how to get discovered by companies and headhunters, what techniques can raise your visibility, and how much LinkedIn actually helps.

Job hunting is hard work. People joke that looking for a job is a full-time job in itself. But what if you could skip sending out resumes and writing cover letters company by company (resumes and cover letters get their own post later), and go straight to the first phone screen? The screenshot at the top of this post is an interview invitation I received from an Amazon recruiter through LinkedIn. Keep up your online presence, and in an America desperately short of software engineers, messages like this from recruiters and headhunters will come to you regularly.

What Does Your Online Presence Include?

So what does your online presence consist of? Which sites deserve your attention?

  1. StackOverflow: You could call it a software engineer’s best friend. If you can, answer questions regularly in the areas you know well: you earn points and build a reputation. A good friend of mine recently passed 3,000 points, got noticed by a recruiter who reached out on StackOverflow, interviewed, and ended up working at Google!

  2. GitHub: The collaboration platform for software developers, where countless open source projects live. Every software engineer should have an account to manage their projects. A senior engineer I know kept contributing to a popular open source project, and many of his pull requests made it into public releases. After his changes passed 2,000 lines and he became the number two contributor, he was receiving no fewer than 10 interview invitations a week. Inspired by him, I also tried to find places to contribute in popular projects. I have not spent much time on it, so for now I only have a few small pull requests merged into Facebook’s React project and Google’s Angular project. If you are new and want to learn how to make open source contributions, see my English blog post, Open Source Contribution: Ask Not What Your Industry Can Do for You, Ask What You Can Do for Your Industry.

  3. LinkedIn: Probably the most important one, and also the easiest to start improving. LinkedIn is basically your public resume. The advantage over a resume is that you have no length limit, and you can polish exactly the parts recruiters search. These days, recruiters at almost every company use LinkedIn to discover talent. Present the best version of yourself, and let opportunities come to you.

Your LinkedIn Profile, Section by Section

At the very top of your LinkedIn profile is your summary card: your photo, name, occupation, location, industry, your personalized profile URL, and your connections.

Photo: Use a somewhat professional photo. Avoid playful pictures, or photos that are not clearly you. This is your first impression.

Name: Put your name…

Occupation: I think this is the first big one. Put the job title you want recruiters to contact you about. If you want to be reached about Full Stack Software Engineer roles, put that. Some people worry that their current title is not their ideal title. But the title still has to match work you actually do. A title you have never held will hurt you the moment an interviewer asks about it. Some people add @Google to show where they work, but that is not really necessary.

Location: Put your current location. I am not sure whether a recruiter would find it strange if you list San Francisco while your current job is in Taipei, but choosing the location you want to move to is worth a try. Just note that you are willing to relocate, so recruiters do not assume you are already there.

Industry: Put the industry you want to be in. Internet, Computer Science, and other software-related industries do not seem to differ much.

Personalized profile URL: Mine is linkedin.com/in/brianpchsu. Change yours to something short and recognizable!

Connections: How many connections do you have right now? Try adding everyone you know: friends, colleagues, people you meet in all kinds of settings. The more connections you have, the easier you are to find. And think about it from the recruiter’s side: if you see two good candidates, one with 300 connections and one with only 30, which one do you contact first? Every company wants people who work well in teams and communicate willingly. Do not let this number cost you opportunities. Import everyone you have ever emailed.

Summary: Your 30-Second Elevator Pitch

Next comes your summary section:

If a recruiter at your future company has only 30 seconds to consider you, how do you give them your 30-second elevator pitch? You have to spend real time thinking this through and writing it well. Craft a summary that is complete but concise, and shows off your strengths. Check the spelling and grammar, and make sure there are no mistakes! If you have images from projects you have worked on, include them. Images attract far more attention than plain text!

Skills

The next focus is your skills:

Have you put every skill you have on LinkedIn? Recruiters searching for candidates rely partly on the skills you list yourself. Put your most important, strongest language first, so that when friends and colleagues endorse your skills, that one is most likely to get endorsed.

After listing your skills, spread the word on your social networks and ask friends to endorse them. There is a phrase for this in English: “no shame.” Let your future company see that other people vouch for your skills!

Projects

Now let us look at your past projects:

If you have any school assignments, open source projects, or pet projects (things you built in your spare time), list every one of them! If you followed my earlier advice and added your classmates and friends as connections, you can attach your teammates to the projects you built together. That looks professional, and it shows you have experience developing as part of a team.

Work Experience

The work experience section:

List all of your work experience in full detail. Unlike a resume, you are not limited to one page, so you can include all the achievements that got cut from your resume. One thing to stress: list your accomplishments as bullet points, but no bullet should be just a pile of adjectives. Quantify your achievements. Everything can be turned into numbers! You can see how I wrote mine:

Concrete, clear results that tell a future employer why they should bring you in.

Recommendations

The recommendations section:

Ask a former boss or an advisor to write you a LinkedIn recommendation. It does not need to be long, but that way a company sees your references right up front!

Education and Publications

For your school and your publications, just fill them in honestly. If your GPA is high, you can include it. If it is not especially high, the principle is to play up your strengths and leave the rest out (or list your major GPA instead)! Remember, recruiters can still ask you for this information later. But when you are being passively discovered through search, you want to show your best and most attractive qualifications, and earn a shortcut straight into the first round of interviews.

If a self-taught software engineer like me, with no computer science background and not much experience, can get contacted and invited to interview by well-known tech companies on a regular basis, then with a little polish, your experience can catch a recruiter’s eye too! One final reminder: your LinkedIn cannot contain a single typo or grammar error. It is just like a typo on your resume: if the one place meant to show you at your best is not error-free, recruiters will not bother contacting you. So after you fix up your LinkedIn, ask a friend with strong English to check it, and make sure every English error is corrected.

Next post: Going on the Offensive. I Am Job Hunting Now. What Do People in the US Use to Find Jobs? Which Sites and Platforms Give Me the Most Interview Opportunities?

This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」, on August 10, 2015. The blog is now offline, and the text is preserved via the Wayback Machine. It has been lightly edited for this site.