exposing the interview process - all things open 2024

my name is Taylor Desseyn. I am— I actually just got a really fancy job title called the VP of Global Community, which what all that means is I'm a professional friend maker. And so basically what my goal is, is I want you all to join the Torque.dev platform and basically be a part of our community. So Jason's passing out cards to join our platform. We are a jobs platform. We hire across the world for both part-time and full-time type of job opportunities, and anybody in tech is welcome. So I'm really excited about joining Torque because the last company I was at was like solely focused on just engineers, and while I've been recruiting engineers now for 13 years, I'm really happy to help other people in tech aside from engineers, because believe it or not, there are other people in tech aside from just engineers. So again, if you did not sign up for the meetup tonight, it's gonna be great. We did overspend, so I would like for you to show up, please. And then also join our platform as well. Basically, my job, what we wanna do, and again, Brianna and Jason here, if you see us, please come say hey to us. And we want everyone to be a part of this, right? What our goal is, is if you're on the job search, we do not want you to be alone, right? How many people in here have gone through the job search in their last year, 2 years of their career? Raise your hand. 3 years? Yeah, so pretty much like the most room in 3 years. Hey, come on in. Everybody scoot in. Come on, let's just get close. Like, we're just— yeah, we got a seat up here. We got a seat up here. Yeah, whatever. We'll be fine. We'll be fine.

There's 2 seats up front.

Maybe we got— maybe, maybe, maybe, Bronwyn, maybe we should go find some more chairs. You know, maybe we should tell the director to put me in the Ballroom A next year. I'm just kidding.

All right, so this is exposed.

Exposing the interview process. So I had a question before we started. I said, is this conversation more towards the hiring manager or the job seeker? We're gonna talk about both, but at the end of the day, this is gonna be more geared towards the job seeker. But what my goal is, is this is a class involvement type of talk. Like, I am not the type of talk where you're gonna go to and you're just gonna sit on your computer and not talk to anybody and you're gonna take notes and you're gonna leave and you're gonna be like, well, that was boring as hell. That's not gonna happen here, right? My goal for everybody in here is I want you to raise your hand. I want to have questions, 'cause here's the deal. If you have a question, somebody else is gonna have a question as well. And so this whole thing, my whole ethos is to allow people to not go through the job search alone. And so everything in this talk, I want you to ask any questions. We're gonna talk about some topics. I have some things that I made up like last night around midnight that we're gonna talk about. Otherwise, I wanna hear from you all, okay? So again, Exposing the Interview Process. If you want to join the meetup tonight, scan that. Jason just passed out all of our cards to join our platform. We'd love to have you. If you like me rambling as much as I like to hear myself ramble, go join all my social media @tdesseyn across the board. But again, a little bit of background about me, Taylor Dessen. I have been in the software engineering talent space for 13 years now. So basically I've placed, I did the math, I've placed over 600 developers in their next job, their next stage of their career. I've probably met at this point 20,000 engineers in my Rolodex, quote unquote. And I basically put my entire life online, and so if you want to follow me, we'd love to have you. And what I've realized is over the course of recruiting is that I can only help 10% of the people that I meet. That's it. 10%, right? Real quick, who are the recruiters in here? I saw some head nodding. Are there any recruiters in here? There you go. Sweet. So my favorite thing is having recruiters in here because we can all like kind of agree on things together. So we can only place 10% of people, right? So if I meet 100 people, I'm only placing 10 people in a job. So what I've realized is later in my career, I was like, what am I doing to help nurture the other 90% of the people I meet? And so again, that's where community comes in. That's where I'm so passionate about this new opportunity to help guide you through the job search. But what I've realized, this talk is a culmination of 13 years. This talk is a culmination of me helping hiring managers scale their engineering teams by tens and hundreds of engineers. This has come from 13 years of experience of seeing engineers go into interviews and saying, man, I crushed it. And then, then that as a recruiter, that means you bombed it, right? Let's just call it what it is. So I've seen that. And so this conversation, I just want to help you. I want to help everybody in here. My goal is, my goal is, is I want you to have one thing that you learned that you can apply tomorrow in your career and you feel like you level up. That's my goal for today. Okay, we ready to go? Oh, we are. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, cutting right to resumes. Okay, we get right into it today. Let's go, man. I gotta give you applause. You're the first guy that's ever asked a question before I even started talking. This man's ready. This man's been writing down last night. He's like, I got all these questions. Go ahead, go ahead. You're gonna feel like you're at the White House. Okay, here we go. Resumes. I've been told drop everything after 10 years, keep it all on one page, but I have a slight problem. By the time I get through the 2 sentences for your profile and listing my certifications— in fact, I don't even list them all.

Sure.

I'm down to 11 points. I've been told to not go down to 10 points to get it through the ATP.

Yeah.

You know, yeah, use generic language.

I'm not getting any hits.

Sure. Do I need to, or should I Branch it back out to 2, but I've been told by several people, managers are like, okay, that's about as much time as I got. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's the deal with resume questions. First off, you have a lot of friends, it sounds like. I don't know who makes the rules, and I don't either, but also, I curse, so if you don't like cursing, I'm sorry. You can leave, it's okay. I don't know who the fuck is telling people this. Like, it is absolutely absurd. Like, why the hell are we writing a 1-page resume with 10-point font It doesn't make any sense. Let your resume fucking breathe. Right, now, don't send me a 14-page resume. I've seen multiples of that, right? I think, hey listen, here's the deal. You can shop this advice around. You know what's great is that I'm a recruiter that's talking up here and not many other recruiters are talking, so you can listen to me and you can tell the other recruiters that. But a lot of recruiters are gonna have different pieces of advice. For me, 2 to 3 pages. 2 to 3 pages. Yes, if you have ColdFusion on your resume from 15 years ago, And you don't want to get called to do ColdFusion jobs, take that off your resume. I had developers back in the day get mad at me because I was calling them for ColdFusion roles. And I was like, well, take it off your damn resume. I did not tell them specifically that. So does anybody have any questions? I mean, we can go all Q&A here. But yeah, question in the back.

I have a question.

I was going to say, I haven't seen the 65-page resume. Jesus Christ, that is a short novel. Yes?

This is more specific, I think, to Tor. I've joined certain job platforms, and LinkedIn, too. How do you protect your applicants from spam? Do you vet the people that are posting the jobs?

Yeah. Yeah, so this is a great question. So first off, we're actively building and evaluating our assessment platforms. So one of the things I'm really big on— and again, I know everybody, developers, like, oh, I'm so sick and tired of recruiters sending me assessments. We still do that, right? Because we have to see how, how, like, are you actually want— are you actually actively on the job search, right? 'Cause at the end of the day, if you don't take it, it's like, all right, well, you may not be actively on the job search or you're not that interested. And I get it, it's fine. Like, we don't get upset about it, right? So we do evaluations. We also have subject matter experts that help tech out our individuals as well in the tech community. A lot of those are from my network, but also from other people's networks within the organization. And so by the time you get somebody, they're gonna have A Zoom call by us, a tech out, and an assessment. So that's what we do. I do wanna get to some of these points 'cause we can all go Q&A, but I do wanna talk about some things I'm seeing right now. You gotta do the small stuff right now. You have to do the small stuff. I say this all the time, people that are getting jobs right now over you aren't actually better than you, they're just doing the small stuff better than you. Prime example, had a buddy posted online and he was like, He's like, hey, for the love of God, please put your email and contact information when you submit your resume for a job. That's the shit we deal with, right? Like, it's the small things, right? Like, do you know, is, you know, the small nuances of like, like prime example, Kelly's my dear friend back there. Kelly's a director of engineering at Spot.ai. They are hiring. Kelly, are you guys hiring?

We have, I think, an AI role in the systems side.

There you go. There you go. Talk to her afterwards. So for me, we text all the time. But it's like Kelly goes, hey, please do X, Y, and Z. And the person goes ABC. It's like, that's not what we asked. If I say, hey, I have a spot open. Please email me at taylor@torque.dev. You know how many DMs I get? Some of y'all just don't fucking read.

Right?

Do, you have to do the small stuff right now. It's incredibly important. Another thing I wanna talk about when it comes to the small stuff is I'm hiring right now and I put out a tweet that like really got misconstrued on X, which typically happens. But like I basically was just saying the signs I like to see from people is like, is the email follow-up, the engaging of my content. Like if I put out an article or a blog or something on LinkedIn and it resonates with you and I'm interviewing with you and I see you took the time to read that, that is going to signal towards me that you actually care. Of course, X was like, oh, this guy's egotistical, and the most egotistical manager probably there is. I don't know if Brianna and Jason can attest to that, but probably not, right? So X is ridiculous. So all that being said, do the small stuff, right? One thing I like to see is like, if I interview with you, send me a thank you note on LinkedIn. I had somebody message me like, Taylor, I am like trying to figure out like, when do I send it? Do I send it in the morning? Do I send it at night? Do I send it like at 12:00 AM so they get it the first time and 6:00 AM the next day? It— relax, relax. Be human. Send the person a DM just right after. Hey Chris, it was great interviewing with you. Thanks again for taking time with me. I love that we talked about ice hockey and, uh, and our farms. Hopefully we'll talk soon. Okay, Chris, I'm assuming that probably will go pretty far with you, right?

Yeah.

Exactly. See, I don't make this shit up. All right, next thing, turn interviews into a conversation. Listen, if we sit there and I go, hey, so-and-so, how was your day? Good. OK. What do you do right now for your job?

I code.

God. Let's be honest here. Any hiring managers in here? Any hiring managers? How many of those have you guys had from an interview perspective, those type of interviews? Nobody has put their hands down after that. Like, listen, like, hiring managers right now, we— people want to work with people they like. Like, it's just the end of the day. Like, it's just— that's it. That's it. Find some sort of commonality, right? Like Todd Lewis, who puts on this event, right? Like, I messaged Todd. I was like, hey, go Gamecocks, right? We both went to the University of South Carolina, right? Boom, hit it off immediately, right? Talked about our families, talked about where he lives in Columbia, where I grew up in Columbia. Right? How many people actually research the people you're interviewing with before you interview? Raise your hand. The fact that it's not 100% is alarming to me, or some of y'all are just lazy as hell, right? Like, interview the people or research the people you're interviewing with. One of the best things I like, I felt it made me feel like this person really cared. I was back at my first company, Vayco, and I was building a division from scratch. And this one guy like did a bunch of research on my LinkedIn. He's like, hey, I saw you've been at Vayco for like 10 years or 9 years at the time. Like, Like, tell me about where you work, you know, tell me about your time working there. And I saw you went to South Carolina, like you went from South Carolina to Nashville. Why'd you go to Nashville from South— like, and I was like, holy cow, this, like, this guy pays attention. That's what it takes right now. If you go into the interview and the worst thing is like, hey, tell me what the company does. Y'all, come on now. Let's be honest here. Quick, no judgment, a lot of judgment, no judgment. How many here has not researched the company before they interviewed? Raise your hand.

All right.

Hey, I appreciate it. I appreciate it, right? Thank you. This is a safe space. I'm still judging you. Safe space, though. So, like, again, like, one of these, when it comes to this stuff, like, again, research the company, research the people. That's going to elevate you, what, 75%, 80% more than most of the people interviewing? Incredibly important. And final thing is, hold on real quick, I'm gonna get this out and we'll do some questions real quick. Final thing, understand the problem that you're trying to fill or solve for the position you're interviewing for.

Yeah.

Let me say that again. Figure out, like just, I mean, zone in during the interview process on the problem they are trying to solve. Prime example, at my last position when I was at Gun.io, Right? Not there anymore. That's— I scratched that out back out there on the— by the way, I did that. No one else did that. I just wanna make it perfectly clear. So basically, when I interviewed at Gum is that they were looking for a salesperson, right? So like, I interviewed, I was like, hey, like, what do you guys look for? They're like, we look for a salesperson. Like, the initial chat I had with the head of sales was like, we're looking for a salesperson. I said, great. I said, do you guys do community? We don't know what that is. Okay. Do you guys do conferences? We— no. Okay. Do you guys do any sort of content social media? Nope, not at all. Okay, great. So basically, what did I do for the rest of the interviews? I zoned in on— they don't— they were looking for a salesperson, right? And I was able— I've been able to drive millions of dollars of revenue throughout my career through content creation and recruiting. You know, when it comes to community, I myself grew my own Discord from 0 to 600 people at Vayco, just my own personal Discord, right? And it was thriving, it was great. It's about social media. I average around 3 to 5 million impressions a month through social media, right? And so what I did is I went into that interview and I said, I've done this, this, this, this, this. Most of y'all just get the interview and just are happy to be there and just forget. Like you guys just black out. Right? Like when you go to the interview and I interview with Pat, right? And I go, Pat, I go, hey man, nice to meet you. How'd your hockey team go last night? Sounds like not that great, right? No, not good. I'm sorry. So basically like, you know, I want to be like, you know, what are you looking for to hire right now and why are you looking to hire it? Right? As a manager, should be able to tell me, correct?

Yeah.

Great. Are you hiring right now?

No.

Damn, I wanted you to kind of play along with this right now. But anyways, all right, so— Sure, Taylor. I'm hiring. OK, well, give me an example. What was the most recent hire you just did? Junior front-end developer. OK, why were you hiring that person? We needed an extra set of hands to help us build a new education platform. OK, what specifically? What technology? Technologies? React stack, looking for someone with TypeScript experience, but not a must-have. But we want to bring in someone junior so we can foster them along. I love that. I love that. So if I was a junior, I would figure out, like, one, I'd research Pat, right? I would, 2, try to figure out what the technology is, see if I've done any sort of side projects for that, right? If I haven't, I'd probably immediately start something, right, to show Pat, hey, here are the things I'm doing, right? Again, it takes that level of intentionality. Also, the final thing before I open up for questions on the job seeker side, is right now, y'all, it's about depth, not— yes, depth, not width.

Right.

Right? Can I get an amen? Right? There you go. Right? Depth, not width. You applying your resume to like 600 places right now, like, is not going to cut it. And of course, I have one person in every crowd.

It's like, well, I got my—

I got a job from 600 resumes. Great. Props to you. That's not normal, right? Like, again, right now, it is being meticulous with your resume. It is crafting your resume, which I have other tips too if you want to get into it about each job posting, what I look for. It's going to the LinkedIn. It's connecting with all the hiring managers. It's sending messages after every hiring manager that you interviewed with, right? It is those things right now that are going to separate you. And the problem is, is we as society, we think activity is productivity. And that is not the case. Not all activity equals productivity, right? And so I beg you right now, the more human you can get— and again, this is why I'm so passionate about what we're going to build at Torque with Brianna and Jason and the rest of the team. We want to be as human with you as possible. Because the more human you can get and the more you can get out from the bits and bytes of things, the more successful you're going to be in your career and your job search. Questions? Yes, in the back. So how— I'll say, how important is the assessment versus the interview? Because say if you can't complete an assessment, I feel like if I get into an interview, I feel like I can talk to you.

Sure.

You gotta figure something out. I think— did everybody hear that? Assessment versus the interview. And if you're not a good— who in here is not a good assessment taker? I'm gonna be honest, I scored like a 2 on my SAT, right? Literally, I scored like a 900. I think you get like 800s putting your name on there. So like, I'm a horrible test taker. This is where it depends who you're working with. If you're working with the agency recruiter, like, that's where the relationship's got to be there. And you're like, listen, like, when I was an agency recruiter, I would let you take the assessment as many times as you wanted. To take it, right? And like, I would send the best assessment to, right, the, the, uh, the hiring manager. If you're working with internal, I would just set expectations like, listen, I'm not a great test taker. Is there anything else I can do? Can I have an extra conversation? Actually, I'm great interviewing. I'll take an extra 2 interviews if I need to. But set that kind of, um, set that expectation on the front end. Setting expectations on the front end for the interviews is massive. For all hiring managers in here, you could probably agree with that too. Hiring managers got to do a better job setting assessments. That's kind of one of my next things too. I think all hiring managers slack off. I don't think most hiring managers treat other people they want to be treated. If you were a job seeker through your interview process, would you want to go through your interview process? How would you feel? I feel like a lot of times we get into the interview process, the hiring managers, and we're like, haha, we're in control, right? So again, set expectations, okay? Yes? I'm just going to answer that. Please go ahead. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I look at, for me, assessments as a hiring manager, and usually what I look at is like if the candidates are on the right track. Maybe if they haven't completed the assessment completely, like with a total success, that's fine. So we look at, you know, if they're on the right track.

Love it.

Looks like, have they been following logical process and flow? That's some of the things that we look at. So it's key, like it's not always like a, you know, black and white answer, like yes or no. Now there is one caveat. If you have too many candidates, too many people in the pipeline, Then you get ranked. You get a rank. Yeah. People who have made further obviously get ranked higher.

Yeah.

That's how the filtering happens, right? For the candidates. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Kelly. Yeah, one more thing. It's also right place, right time.

Yeah.

There are times when we're hiring, we need somebody in quickly, and so we need somebody who can just hit the ground running, and so we're going to need a better assessment out of them. But if we have more time to get you onboarded and take time with like ramping you up and educating you, we're much more lenient on an assessment like that. So don't be discouraged if one place denied, like rejects you because you didn't do well on that assessment. It's not going to be the same across every company and even within the same company.

Yeah, absolutely. Pat, go ahead, buddy. Yeah, one thing I did when I actually interviewed for my last job that I currently have now, it wasn't a— I didn't have to produce anything. I did a code review. I like that. It was really just a PR process, or, you know, I was commenting on something that someone else created. So it wasn't— it was a way to demonstrate some technical skill but also some conversational skills. And I found that that actually softened the blow for a lot of people that came through the interview process after I joined and then was interviewing them. Yep, I love that. I love that. Real quick, I want to take a quick pause. I forgot to do this at the beginning, and I really— this is the biggest thing I'm most passionate about. Everybody pull out their phones real quick. This is going to be a 30-second break. Pull out your phones real quick. Everybody pull out your phones. Pull out your phones. Pull out your phones. You guys still aren't pulling out your phones. Pull out your phones. Open up LinkedIn. Open up LinkedIn. I already know where you're going. Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

All right. Yeah. Go, and I want you to connect with the person to the left or right of you real quick. 30 seconds. Go. Please go connect with them. All right, all right, all righty. Yo, shut up. Just kidding. All right, cool. Hey, did everybody connect with people? You got it? Good. Here, here's the deal. I, I want to say this too.

I—

listen, this conference is massive. Like, I am terrified, right? Like, I am an extrovert when I speak. I'm an introvert when I'm not speaking. And so please find me over the next 2 days and just be my friend because I'm terrified in big spaces like that. But what just happened just now is the point of my talk. I just don't want you to be alone. Like, I don't want you to go through this conference alone. I don't want you to go through the job search alone. I don't want you to go through life alone. So literally, connect with the person left or right of you. This could be your potential hiring manager down the road. This could be your potential best friend down the road. I'm pretty sure I did some sort of thing like this at Render ATL that I'm actually one of the hosts with, that Brianna actually helps organize too. And so basically, literally, we connected, some people connected, found that they lived near each other in their hometown, then they started to meet up together.

Right.

Make sure you follow up with the people you just connected with because it's incredibly important. All right, I wanted— yes, Chris, go ahead, buddy. To carry on where we were before, we talked a lot about the job seeker side. As a hiring manager or as a recruiter, how do you sift through 300 resumes on a single job ad? Yeah, yeah, I mean, you can't, right? I mean, you just can't. It's awful, and it's like Kelly said, it's right place, right time. Like, I truly think most of the job search is follow-up. and like being so fast to move, right? So like, for example, the main thing when it comes to, this is why I don't like submitting your resume is because depending on how they're sorted in either an ATS or the job posting, it's through timestamps, right?

Yeah.

Now I haven't been internal. There could be some other things. Now I am consulting with a startup that's using AI to kind of help with that sorting of it. But like right now, like there's not— and I think a lot of people are trying to do that, but I— it's a very difficult process. And that's why I tell people, if you can— now, if like, you know, Pat has a post and he's probably going to tell you to submit your resume because it's got to be there, but I think it's the follow-up that needs to occur that's incredibly important, right? I talk to Kelly this all the time because literally Kelly and I just screenshot each other, like, you know, what, what, what we see. And it's like You know, I used to preach, if you've been following me long enough, I used to preach, hey, tell, ask somebody for a 5-minute conversation, 7-minute conversation, 9-minute conversation. Yeah, that, nope, fuck that, right? Like, people ain't got time for that shit right now, right? Like, people are getting laid off. Upper management is like condensed. They're like managing like multiple people. Engineering managers just got the ax the last year, year and a half, right? And so when it comes right now, nobody has time to have a conversation. So the, so the realness that you can get through the DMs is huge. And again, Kelly and I talked about this today because she was getting these DMs and like, I moved into this VP role and now everyone's trying to sell me something. The, the amount of inauthentic DMs that I get on a daily basis is insane, right? I, I'm telling you, the more conversational speak that you can blend in with professional speak, the better, right? Because that means you're approachable. If you message me, you go, hi, Mr. Dessen.

What?

Stop. No.

Right.

And like, people want to be approached and just, and just have authentic relationships right now. And listen, if you have a spelling in your— like, if you get a DM from me, it's like misspellings and like I run on sentences, right? Like, I, I just want to get my point across as fast as possible. Um, and I know there's some nuances here with everything I'm saying. I'm not saying, you know, message people in the DMs and just be absolutely ridiculous, but I'm also saying that the more real you can get in the DMs and the more to the The more on point you can get, the better. But in terms of answering your question specifically, there's not a sure thing unless somebody's doing something that I don't know about.

Kelly? Yeah, I recently hired a mid-level full-stack engineer. I received 2,500 applications in about 3 days.

Yep.

That is a really difficult thing to actually sift through. One recommendation, make sure your resume is searchable because what I ended up having to do is look for keywords within our ATS We don't automatically reject unless you're saying like you're outside of the country and we are only hiring in the US. But if I can search for specific keywords like I'm hiring for React, TypeScript, I'm looking for API experience, whatever it happens to be, I can start to pull those out of your resume. The other thing when it comes to reaching out via DM, as Taylor said, when you ask me for 5 minutes of my time, I don't have 5 minutes. What I do have is time to quickly answer a question via DMs about the role. And I'm much more likely to remember and like put a face to the name when I see your resume if I've answered a question for me or for you.

Bree?

Also on my end, because I do have the honor of sifting through thousands of things on a daily basis via Render since they decided to be international, don't know why. But what I tell people all the time is, for example, I'm sifting through Ambassador Program applications right now. Everything is technically optional for you to fill out. But anyone who filled out every single thing automatically goes to the top of my list. I don't care if it's optional, do it. If it's optional, that means do it, because at the end of the day, when we have thousands of things that we're looking through, whoever has 100% completeness, they are instantly going to go to the top, and I'm going to try to contact them first. Because at the end of the day, if you only did the bare minimum, I'm not looking at it, because that means you're going to do the bare minimum in my office.

And working alongside Breonna, you don't do the bare minimum, you get yelled at. So anyways, yes, go ahead.

What each of you all described is really almost demonstrating something that I've been reading about recently where people are getting jobs more through the back door instead of the front door.

There you go.

So we might just be applying, but really it's the people who do that thing where, hey, I know somebody who knows each other, that extra connection. And so is there actually like a path? I've been reading about it.

Sure.

But as recruiters, like, yes, y'all want that as an extra? Like, um, because like when you're describing 2,500 jobs, I mean, applications.

Yeah, so it's daunting. Yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah, uh, yeah, I mean, literally like referrals. I mean, I, I speak— I right now in this market, it's hard to get business because it's like every engineering leader has like You know, literally I messaged one of my engineering director friends because he posted 2 roles, 2 senior staff-level roles. I said, hey, can I help you fill these roles? He has— I have 15 referrals. 15 for 2 roles for staff level. It's typically harder to find, and he hasn't even looked at the 200 resumes that he had in his job posting. But the referrals are always going to be there. I'm telling you, like when I, when I went through the job search after I left Gund. So when I left Vaco after 11 years, I essentially went through my job search for the very first time as like an adult. And all I did is I just hit up everybody I met at conferences and meetups. And literally I got the job because my biggest competitor— oh, take every call too— my, uh, my biggest competitor in Nashville as a recruiter got me the job at Gund. And he was like, hey bro, I'd love to take you to coffee. And in my mind I'm like, what the fuck is this guy going to help me with? Right? He recruits devs like me. Like, what's he going to help me with? And he literally got me the referral into Gunn to get the job. And then what's crazy about it— and again, you don't know— the reason why I'm so passionate about people connecting with people, the reason why I got the job at Torque— and I found this out at our all-hands in Boston a few weeks ago— is that my very first presentation to junior boot camps 6 years ago, some guy reached out to me. That guy then started to work for my now boss, and he was like— he introduced me through backdoor 3 or 4 years ago. I've been on my boss's radar for 3 to 4 years now because of some junior dev boot camp speaking gig that I took for free 6, 7 years ago. That's how this stuff works. That's why you try to meet and be nice to as many people as possible at this conference. because you don't know where it's going to go.

Yep.

Just kind of back onto what Kelly said, like a lot of these tools that hiring managers are using, they use like AI now. So if you don't put relevant buzzwords, like the skills that are required for the skills, for the job in your resume, then those, the AI kind of ranks the resume. Indeed, I have a neighbor who works at Indeed. She told me they have started doing that.

Yeah.

Kind of rank those resume page on like how relevant they are. Yeah, and I have resume tips too that we're gonna get on the Torque platform. So we're basically taking my 4 years of content from the job search and we're gonna put it on the torque.dev platform. So sign up, it's gonna come probably in the next 30 to 45 days. How to write a resume, how to write a LinkedIn, questions to ask hiring managers, we're all gonna put it on the Torque platform. Yes, ma'am?

There's somebody over here talking about—

Somebody behind you? Yeah, yeah.

It's hot, so—

It's so hot, I have died. We're all just like, God.

Talking about searchable resumes. Yeah. As a recruiter, I will find sometimes that it's not searchable, and some people don't know what that means. So open up your PDF.

Love this.

Love this. Open it up and look at it, and take your your cursor.

Your cursor. There it is. There it is. Yeah. We'll all get through this together.

Take your cursor and try to highlight text. If you cannot highlight It's not text, it's a photograph, and nothing is going to come through.

So is that how people save their document, or? It's how you save it, right.

You need to— wow. Unless you have Acrobat in some capacity and you can do, you know, find text or—

Yeah, yeah, certain PDFs don't encode properly.

Right, and so make sure it's a document.

Oh shoot, I didn't know that.

Just somebody and say, hey, help me out.

Yeah, Ctrl+F.

Yeah, because then they're not seeing anything.

Okay, that's good. Yes, ma'am.

I think there might— we maybe like we can all talk after, but yeah, there might be some caveats with that because now like a lot of built-in image text identifiers are showing up, so you can scan it, but maybe it's not showing on the recruiter end. You know what I mean? Like Apple has a built-in image detector that makes it look like it's searchable, but then I don't know if it is.

Man, this is a whole other conversation in and of itself. OCR is not perfect.

Yeah.

So everybody just send the resume to their friends and see if they can search. Yes, sir, in the red. What do you have for advice for people who are wanting to network but feel like they are either nervous or first-time networkers are a little nervous? Yeah, yeah, it's hard. Bri, Bri, Bri, Bri, you got?

If you need to network and you want to network, the number one thing I'm going to tell you to do is scan that QR code and book our meetup tonight.

Aside from that, I'm so serious about it.

I'm so serious because today, guys, what Taylor and I have in common is the power of community. Taylor got me my job. He did, because I have been on his radar for three to four years, and I was on my boss's radar for three to four. Our boss's radar for three to four years as well. The first thing he said to me is, "I have been in love with what you're doing at Greater ATL." What? Like how do you even know who I am? What I do? I'm not public facing. He's been reading all my emails. He's been seeing all my social media posts. Do the work. But the number one thing, if you're trying to network. My favorite thing to tell people is just to just to start, to go up to someone and say, "Hey, I'm Brianna." Like, where are you coming from? It's as simple as that.

Where?

How did you get here? Do you live here? That's my go-to because people are like, "Oh no, I'm from blah blah blah blah blah." They start telling you, and then from there you lean in. You actually just remember to be a nice person and make that follow-up connection after the fact. Take a photo with that person right then and there. Be like, hey, let's take a picture.

Yeah, selfies are a great way to break the ice, man.

Not only are they good for social media because you can tag that person and create a continuation of the relationship, number 2, they're gonna remember who you are because you're gonna be like, okay, great, I'm gonna send this to you so you can remember who I am. And then from there, you're gonna follow up with them. What I personally do, especially if I meet someone I really, really, really want to be intentional with, I put it in my calendar to follow up with them a week later or 2 days later. However, it depends on what conference or event I'm going to. I set a reminder for myself. Everyone has an iPhone or Android or Google phone, um, and you can put a reminder on your phone for 48 hours, 36 hours, however many hours you need. But be intentional with that follow-up. Connect with that person. Remember, at the end of the day, we are all humans. We want— to Taylor's point, we were made to do things together. We were not made to do things separately. You're not going to go anywhere in your job process if you're trying to do it alone. Lean into it. Go to platforms like Torque.dev where you're going to get free resources to apply to jobs, to get networking ideas and tips, to see what events are going on in your area. Even if it's not in your area, there's virtual events that you might not have to be on camera for, but you can still participate in that conversation. But at the end of the day, you have to take the time to do the work and make that engagement with someone. And I challenge everybody, when you leave here today, Try to take 3 selfies with people. 3 different selfies.

It doesn't have to be— you don't need to meet 25, 30 people, 90 people, 100 people. If you have like 5 people you met and you're vibing with and you stay in touch with them, that's 5 more friends than I got, right? So that's great. Chris, yeah, go ahead. So I'll add a plug for your Discord. So I was in your original Discord and now I'm in your Quark Discord. Yeah, that's filled with developers. It's a great place to network. LinkedIn is hard, right? You don't know this person, right? You DM them, you make a post, oh, maybe it gets a like or two. You have Discord, Taylor's Discord, there's tons of developers, tons of people who are ready to talk. That's an awesome place to start. Yeah, absolutely. Jason, Jason, where's Jason?

He got locked out.

Did he really?

He can't go back in anymore because this is over capacity.

Are you serious? Oh my gosh. I was going to tell Jason Jason's got a crazy awesome story. I want to get some more questions here. Yes?

I know at the beginning of this talk you were mentioning contacting the hiring manager directly. Yeah.

And unfortunately, recently I had the experience of applying to a position and there was no information as to who the hiring manager was.

Correct.

Yeah, it happens.

So I was wondering kind of a case basis of like, what would you potentially do in that situation of trying to make contact? You're saying of making that connection when there is not that information to directly connect to something?

Yeah, so one of the things that— so I was talking with an engineering leader recently on his job search, and he said he was having major problems just like getting people to respond back to him. And so what he— and I'm going to tie this into your question here in a second. But basically, he was like, I was sending vague messages like, hey, I'm an engineering leader, just got laid off, didn't know if you were looking to hire. Right. That was kind of his message. But then what happens is he would take the job that was posted. He would then search the company on LinkedIn. He would then start DMing engineering leaders or whatever group it is and basically go, hey, I saw the job posting. I don't know if you're hiring for this, but here are 3 reasons why I'm a really good fit based off the role posted. Let me know if you want to talk. And he said his response rate shot up. So, yep, go ahead. That's a huge thing. So I'm an agency owner. Here, stand up, stand up, because you're in the front and it's big. So I'm an agency owner, and that's actually one of the things that we do is we ask people, like, hey, reach out directly. We're a fully distributed team. We're remote. Written communication, obviously, can communicate, are human. Like, can we have a conversation?

I don't care about spelling.

It's like the computer will fix it. I'm horrible at spelling. Right, right, right.

Yeah.

I want people that want to be there. So are you you know the what did you say the wide net versus yeah the depth not width.

Yeah.

So I don't want somebody that's just casting out a wide net. I want somebody that wants to be with my company. And so they're gonna find I'm out there. And I don't we don't put emails that they we want them. to respond to in our job postings, but we do put a question in the process for submitting that tells us why you're a good fit. And if somebody doesn't answer that, they're on the bottom of the list. Because we get 800, 900 responses in maybe 2 weeks to a job. I don't have time to go through that. Yeah, it's going to take time, right? And I think that's the biggest mindfuck That you like, you may go, you may, you may do enough research, only send 5 DMs in a day, but that's okay because those are gonna be 5 meaningful DMs.

Yes.

Oh, personally. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, go ahead. I've got a question.

Sure.

On interview prep. Yep. So I've been trying to— I've been at the same company 9 years since college, looking to upgrade. Yep, feel that. I've been doing like 100 I feel like that's a lot. Mock behavioral last night.

Okay.

And how do you know? Because I feel like some of the big tech or scale-ups are less personal and that your coding interviews are binary— hire, no hire— and then your system design and behaviorals are for leveling. So like, you want to connect with the people that are interviewing But it feels like it's a little less personal because they're trying to keep consistency. Yeah, I mean, listen, let's just call it what it is. There's a different interview vibe going through Amazon than there is like a Series A startup who just got their funding, right? It's a very different vibe. It sounds like you're doing all the things you need to be doing. And it depends where you want to go, right? If you want to go FAANG, if you want to do all that, that's out of my realm, to be totally honest with you. I've never recruited on— I have a lot of friends at FAANG. That's a very interesting interview process. I know there's a lot of algorithms and data structures and all these other buzz terms. I have no idea what they're talking about. It sounds like you're doing the things that— that's where you want to go, right? Again, I will say if you can combine that with the researching the person, right, building that rapport in the interview, I think you're going to be pretty dangerous in the best way possible. So, I mean, it sounds like you're doing what you need to be doing for sure.

Thank you.

Any other questions? This is good stuff.

Yes? How do you feel about COVID letters?

Jesus Christ, I get this question all the fucking time. Let me ask you this. I'm going to turn the question back on hiring managers. Who in here wants cover letters? There you go. Next question. No, I mean, here's the deal. Based off my experience as a recruiter, typically agency recruiters are the COVID letter. Right? So we call the manager like, hey, Mr. Manager, you should interview So-and-so because they're great, right? Listen to us, right? Now, if you apply to a job and there's a cover letter option, does anybody feel like they have a good cover letter? I don't think every cover letter is, hey, I'm great at what I do. Right. But like, Pat, why, why do you think you have a good cover letter? I kind of have a template in it so I can kind of tweak little things. But what's the general gist of it? This is who I am.

Okay.

This is what I'd like to do.

Okay.

This is where I see where you could use someone like me.

Okay.

I hit those 3 points in 3, 4 paragraphs. So my thing is, yeah, my thing is if I got you in an elevator for like 90 seconds, like, and I say, what are your big, like, 4 biggest career, what are your big, like, 4 biggest career, like, achievements that you've gotten? And you tell those to me, those go on your cover letter. I would have one ready to go. Kelly, thoughts?

The only time I really care about COVID letters is if you are career changing. Or there's been a gap in your resume and you want to fill that because it's a really good opportunity where your resume is not going to show that story. My sister is moving from being an analytical chemist to data analytics. That's a pretty big career move, and so her cover letter is so incredibly important to say like, no, I'm actually prepared for this role even if my job description doesn't look like it.

Love that. Yep, cool. Yes, I had a follow-up related to your thing there.

Sure.

How do you view— I was kind of I'm torn on the COVID letter thing because I almost viewed it like, um, like you were saying, if you, if you don't fill out all the optional things, yeah, then it shows less effort. Like, I know the manager is too busy to read all of them, but do you still do it just to show— I mean, if there's an option to put— enter in a cover letter, I would do it. Yeah. And then if you don't, then you just YOLO and see what happens.

So yeah, even if there's an option and you fill it out, there's a good chance a hiring manager is not even going to look at it. But it's there if they want to look at it.

Correct. So then if Brianna's hiring, then if Brianna— see what I'm saying? See how nuanced this whole conversation is? Everyone's like, yeah, but you just said this, but then you just said that. I'm like, yeah, welcome to hiring, right? Yeah, go ahead. I think kind of the difference between like the hiring manager side, hey, I don't have 5 minutes, right? Right. You know, hey, if there's a cover letter and it's optional but I don't read it, Do I have 5 minutes? Yeah, maybe. But I'm trying to put my eggs in the right basket. Right, right. I mean, I would say right now from what it seems like, no one has time to talk. Everybody's async. So the COVID letter could be the thing that is like the, do you have 5 minutes to talk? The COVID letter kind of covers that. Yes, ma'am?

On the COVID letter, I do a you, me, we as a way to Okay. But then also, if I ask somebody to help me, I actually write out the introduction email or the introduction. Okay. Like, hey, I want you to meet my friend Chantelle. She used to work with me at dot dot com.

That's great. I mean, if you—I mean—that's great. I love that.

I love that.

I love that. Yeah, go ahead. So definitely, if it's optional, fill it out. Otherwise, what I would say is instead of sending the COVID letter, send a separate personal email that would have been what your cover letter is. So now you're in the hiring system and you're in my inbox. Then the other thing that we say is please look at your file names and what company you're referencing if you're using a cover letter. I can't tell you how many times it's named another company Small stuff right there. Small stuff, small stuff, right? Yeah, it's like, it's like Grandma's Christmas list. It's like, ah, shit. Yeah, it's nuts. Yeah, yeah, Bree.

I still stand by that. One thing I have done previously in my past life when I was applying to jobs frequently, I— if I could find the hiring manager, I would name my file, hey Sierra, look at this.

God, I love that. That's so brilliant.

I got the job.

I did get the job. That's awesome.

Literally the number one thing she said, you are hilarious, and I've actually looked at your cover letter, and that was I was explaining my career gap, not my career gap, my career switch, because I was a counselor before I was a marketer. I can read you all.

She can. Can confirm.

But that being said, if it's optional, it means?

Do it.

There you go. If it's optional, it means? Consider it.

All right, real quick, I want to hit 2 more bullet points before we wrap up. I want to get a selfie with you all too, because this has been great. I hope you guys enjoyed this. 2 things with hiring managers. First off, very few hiring managers know actually what the fuck they're doing. Right? Everyone's doing the best they can, right? Literally, Pat's back there going, we're making it up as we go. Like, so, so that being said, have grace, be kind, thank yous. One of the things that's gotten me further in my career than anything else is just being grateful. Thank you. Hey, I, I know it didn't work out. It's all good. Let's definitely stay in touch. I appreciate your time. That goes a long way. Next thing is too, every engineering manager, leader, hiring manager right now is over overworked and overwhelmed, right? This market right now has done just, uh, has done a lot for the mental side of things, from the mental health side of things. What I mean, like, I mean, everybody's overworked, everybody's managing more teams than they should be managing. And so like things get— things really get slipped through the cracks right now. And so that's why follow-up is so important. That's why giving grace is so important. Like, I can't tell you the amount of people who I've given feedback to and have popped off at me because I've given them feedback what the hiring manager said. It's like, well, no shit you didn't get fucking hired because you're popping back off at me, right? So again, be nice, be grateful. It goes a really, really long way. Real quick, I do want to give Jason to tell his story real quick. Jason, I want to— Hold on, this is for Patrick. Before we wrap up, I want to put you on the spot. I'm going to tell this story, then I have one more story to end it on, and we'll get out of here. Talk about how we got connected, our story, and how you got to Torque. Just the power of networking and referrals. Yeah, I honestly don't even remember how we connected. It was Twitter. So I, just as my background, film industry, switched to tech, was in Hunter Dev's boot camp with Leon Noel. Love him. Shout out to Hunter Dev. One of the first things he says is get on LinkedIn, get on Twitter, get networking. before you get the job. Make the connections before you need them. Um, I saw Taylor's content through the algorithms connected and, uh, just started engaging, just started talking to him, starting to figure out who he is. And, uh, you were looking for somebody to help you with some stuff. Social, like social stuff. So I said, you know what, like, I would love to do it. I feel like we had good synergy with the way we were having conversations. Um, I had been interviewing, I had multiple interviews over the last year that were— sucked. Like, that's heartbreaking. I think we've all been in those positions multiple times at this point, most likely. Um, he approached me with an opportunity here, and at the end of the day, I think I've always been leaning more toward the people-facing side of the industry, so it just made sense. Yeah, like, we're community builders. I have a community that I built organically, and I now have an opportunity to help him build one on a Yeah, again, yeah, Jason, thank you for that. Jason was on my calendar, on my radar for like over a year, year and a half, and now he's working for me, right? It's a long game. It's a long game. I want to end with this story real quick and the power of LinkedIn. And just, I want to encourage you guys to just go all in on LinkedIn because I still think LinkedIn is a very underrated platform. LinkedIn is the only platform right now where you can go and DM any manager at your dream company you've ever wanted to work for. for and have a conversation potentially today. I mean, that's literally how powerful LinkedIn is. And so, like, my dad, uh, ran the Outback Steakhouse in my hometown for 25 years, right? Um, I, I still think Outback Steakhouse is the GOAT of, like, you know, chain restaurants. Don't me on that. But, um, basically, like, he, he called me up after he left the restaurant for 25 years and he goes, how do I find a job? And I was like, oh man, because he was like, he goes, because the last time I was on the job search, Taylor, the internet Didn't exist. And I was like, damn, you're old, Dad. And so I was like, all right. So I talked to my wife that night. I was like, how do I tell my dad how to find a job? She goes, try to dumb it down with what the recruiters do, where he can do. I said, okay. And so this is the advice I give everybody who's on a job search. I told my dad this. I said, have one intentional conversation a day— coffee, lunch, breakfast, meetup, Zoom call, FaceTime, even maybe just a long text or DM conversation. Just where you really feel like you like have a friend. Like if you ran into that person at a Starbucks, do you think you'd say hi? That is an intentional conversation. I literally just made that up. I've been looking for that now forever for this talk. That's it. If you had a conversation with somebody and you ran into them the next day at Starbucks, would they remember you? That means you had an intentional conversation. And so I told my dad to do that. My dad did that every day, one conversation a day for 3 months. You know, a lot of, hey, I'm so excited about this opportunity. Of course it didn't go anywhere. And then finally, he was like, Taylor, you won't believe this. I found a job. I said, how did you do it? He goes, I messaged somebody on LinkedIn I used to work with in the restaurant industry 7 years ago. They were looking to start a new restaurant. And my dad's been there for 7 years now. Listen, if my dad found a job on LinkedIn in the restaurant industry, none of us have an excuse. None of us has an excuse. So again, thank you all for coming out. I appreciate it. I want to get a selfie real quick with you all.

All right.

Everybody, uh, everybody smile.

There you go.