Clojurians Log v2

@vemv thank you so much for sharing about your experiences and always being so open with your expertise and knowledge. can you share more about how you showcase your Open Source work and other portfolio stuff? You don't have to link to it or anything, but is it mostly a portfolio page? Or just urls to source code? curious)

In my case I picked 3 projects and posted urls to them in page 2 of the CV, with a 2-line description each (what it is, what I did). Nothing too excessive - it shows confidence and invites people to find out more. But it seems just as fine to pick a single project and give it a more generous description.

i'm fairly convinced any "cold" application is a lottery ticket. i think we're in an arms race between automated applications and automated application filterers, as others have said. if you have any network at all, leverage it for "warm" applications, at the very least. i've also found great jobs by identifying key players in a company, then reaching out directly with an extremely relevant demonstration of ability and desire to work on their problems. even when I know a company "isn't hiring", this has worked for me.

Applying for Clojure roles has always felt more 'personal' that when I used to apply for java roles (although there were a couple of good recruitment consultancies locally for Java). There have been exceptions in both languages though. I assume its mainly down to the ratio between the number of applicants verses number of available roles. Also most 'recruiters' are paid a very small salary and often work on a commission basis, so they have a significant incentive to optimise their communications just to be able to earn a basic living standard. Recruiters I have a relationship with have always been good at communicating (otherwise I wouldnt have a relationship with them) I set very low expectations for the random people contacting me directly about roles.

It's not just you. Professional 'ghosting' is happening more and more

I've been hearing the same from others. An educated guess would be it being caused by fewer jobs + more applicants for said jobs + fewer recruiters/HR to field those applications

They're also using scanners for resumes that will just auto reject you if you don't have the right keywords or whatever AI nonsense they're using now

And then, on the flipside, if you include every keyword under the sun, then the people who actually review it will penalize you

So you are left trying to satisfy both a machine and a human that are looking for different things

Oh, well, I don't know if I like this info or not - on a bright side, it means it's not only me, on the not-so-bright side it means the market is still cold 🥶

it's colder for niche languages than for more popular ones, and it depends a lot on the country

or at least that's the gist I get from different communities i'm a part of

Trends have been pretty brutal over the last year or so. Thankfully things are becoming normal over the last few months (in my case, to the degree that I could secure a new job after averaging 1 interview / day). I recommend accepting this scenario, which can mean a few practical things: • play the numbers game - multiply search efforts, become desensitized to rejection • be within the first applicants (you should apply the same day of the job posting, the earlier the better) • have a few distinct (but truthful) CVs and cover letters. Never skip a letter. I have a Clojure, Ruby and a Java profile • show recent, hard work - anything from OSS to a personal project (especially with AI) - important IMO to stand out To be clear I hated that game, but if you're not playing it, someone else will

> So you are left trying to satisfy both a machine and a human that are looking for different things Made me think of the old XML joke: > Some languages can be read by humans, but not by machines, while others can be read by machines but not by humans. > XML solves this problem by being readable by neither.

I saw some recent analysis of market trends around hiring in 2023 and it said 35% of people got their jobs via networking, rather than cold applications to jobs, but it also said that "most" job application funnels provide zero feedback to applicants unless they actually get called up for some sort of interview (and then, often, it's multiple rounds of interviews spread over weeks and occasionally months -- and even getting the interview call can happen weeks or months after the application was submitted). Much of it depends on the size/type of the company you are applying to -- and to a lesser extent the tech stack (mainstream tech stacks often have many hundreds of applicants for each role -- since so many people have gotten into the "numbers game" now).

> have a few distinct (but truthful) CVs and cover letters. Never skip a letter. I have a Clojure, Ruby and a Java profile I think this is very important. Tailor the cover letter to the job (and tailor your CV/resume to the job and/or industry too, if necessary).

I agree with @jr0cket . I just signed an offer for a Clojure job after 6 months of looking and most of the Clojure jobs had much better responses and interview etiquette than the more common tech stacks.

At our place, HR uses Jira to track every applicant and the HR board has transitions defined to ensure there are appropriate "candidate notification" stages so we don't just ghost anyone. I'm surprised more companies' HR departments don't track applicant status more efficiently so they can always at least send an email saying "No, thank you!"... 😕