I dread few things as much as the job search grind and mind-numbing interview slog.

If this isn’t you, I want what you’re drinking. For the other 99.99999 percent of us, read on.

Why Recruiting is Such a Mess

As a hiring manager, I don’t have the training or experience to interview effectively. But I know who I want when I meet them.

Pretty much nobody will admit that, but it is true for the vast majority of hiring managers.

The key part of that quote is

… I know who I want when I meet them.

What is missing from that quote is the core issue:

The trouble is, we don’t know how to find the ideal candidate, so we wade through hundreds of resumes, hoping that someone in that resume pile is the best fit for our opportunity.

Why Outside Recruiters Exist

Recruiters (“headhunters”) get paid a big chunk of money (typically 10 - 30 percent of first year’s salary) to place candidates in open positions.

Good recruiters (the actual pros) know the best candidates.
Great recruiters are known by and know the best hiring teams.

Before we had GitHub, personal blogs, side projects, podcasts and the other ways to become known, being known by professional headhunters was the best way to shortcut the job-hunting grind.

Getting referred by good recruiters still works, but it’s hard to get on the radar of the best recruiters–especially earlier in your career.

Torture by Trying to Avoid Mistakes

As job candidates, the job-search process is seldom fun, and we aren’t very good at it. Guess what? Recruiting is no fun for hiring managers either. It is puzzling that so many people struggle with one of the most important parts of their job; on the other hand, hiring doesn’t happen every day, so it’s hard to become really good at it.

This angst is compounded by our natural human tendency to avoid making mistakes.

Hiring managers really don’t want to make a hiring mistake, because they:

Need the right person in that role.
Have to admit that they failed in a key part of their job.
Have to spend extra time and heartache to correct their mistake.
Have to endure the whole recruiting process again.

Job candidates really don’t want to accept the wrong job offer, because they:

Need to be with the right team in the correct role.
Have to admit they made the wrong choice.
Have to spend extra time and heartache to correct their mistake.
Have to endure the whole recruiting process again.

This is definitely not fun for anyone. We don’t look for jobs very often, so we aren’t experts at it. Hiring managers don’t hire that often, so they aren’t experts at it.

Given all this pressure, it’s not hard to understand why this process is so painful for everyone.

It does beg the question:

Isn’t there a better way?

Becoming Known

All things being equal, we prefer to work with people we already know. When navigating the stressful recruiting process, we do better with familiarity.

The risk of making a mistake is dramatically less when we interview with people we already know.

This is why becoming known is such a powerful cheat code that can turn the recruiting process from something we dread into a series of enjoyable conversations.

When we already know someone, we have pre-screened them, so the focus can be “do we have a great fit now?” instead of “will this work at all?”

It’s still possible to make mistakes, but the risk if much lower.
When we have less fear about making a mistake, we tend to make better decisions.

Known How, Exactly?

Becoming known is like enjoying the result of compound interest. Each bit of evidence adds to our running balance of value-adding capacity, and that compounds (multiplies) over time.

We all know personally (or know of) someone who is known as the go-to person for a particular thing. For example:

If you listen to a podcast regularly, you get to know the podcast hosts, and you grow to trust them as authorities on the podcast subject.
Contributors to open-source software become known (and trusted) by the core maintainers, other contributors and users of that open-source project. Being an open-source project contributor is hard evidence that you can: 1) Produce peer-reviewed production code; 2) Collaborate with a real development team. This is a super-power.
Blog authors who write consistently become known to their audience as a trusted authority on the topics they cover.
Developers (especially juniors) become known as competent from their growing portfolio of projects–especially when accompanied by solid documentation or (even better) from articles they write about how they approached the projects or a specific technical challenge.
- Super-power: Demonstrating that you can express yourself in writing is a key differentiator. Juniors who can (for example) describe the implementation trade-offs they make are signalling to hiring managers: “I will add value immediately.”

Becoming known presents hard evidence of your capabilities. You don’t have to talk about it for the first time to a stranger in a pressure-cooker interview; you are showing it. The more that people know about what your capabilities–as demonstrated by examples like these–the less risk there is in adding you to the team.

But I Need a Job NOW!

Sure; this material takes time to put together. But you have that time.

Spend less time slogging through unappealing job postings, and spend the time you save to publish a blog article, or work on the next open-source PR, or your next portfolio project, or enhance your GitHub profile.

Do a little bit each day to grow the evidence of your value.

All of this will help you prepare for your next job interview, but most importantly, it will add up to you becoming known–as a credible candidate … then as a leading candidate … then as a proven candidate … then as the go-to person who can select from opportunities that come to you.

Become Known. Jobs Come to You.

by JSH