docs.rodeo

MDN Web Docs mirror

Finding a job

{{PreviousMenuNext("Learn_web_development/Getting_started/Soft_skills/Workflows_and_processes", "Learn_web_development/Core", "Learn_web_development/Getting_started/Soft_skills")}} 

Technical job interviews can be very demanding, and some have quite specific requirements. Finding the right jobs to apply for in the first place can be challenging! This article provides some tips and resources to help with the process from finding potential jobs and applying, to succeeding in interviews. The process outlined below might not work for everyone exactly as-is — you might find that a slightly different approach or order works for you — but most will find it useful.

[!NOTE] You might not even want to think about what job you want right now; you may just want to concentrate on learning some code. That’s fine; you can always return to this article later on, when the time is right.

Prerequisites: N/A
Learning outcomes:
  • Deciding what kind of job you want.
  • Searching for jobs
  • Developing qualities for that employers look for.
  • Selling yourself to would-be employers.
  • Applying for jobs.
  • Preparing yourself for job interviews.

Decide what kind of job you want

It almost sounds too obvious to write down, but you should think carefully about the kind of job you want before you go out into the job market and start searching. If you don’t, you’ll probably end up using a scattergun approach that isn’t very effective — going for a wide variety of jobs and not making yourself look like the ideal candidate for any of them.

If you are reading this site, you are probably interested in some kind of web development job. That’s fine, but think about it more specifically, and write some ideas down about what you want in the following categories:

If you are not sure of the answers to these questions, that’s OK. Ask your peers, friends, teachers, or mentor what they are interested in, to get some inspiration, and look around the industry to see what’s available. Realistically, many of you will probably start by seeing an interesting job ad or company, then working out how it fits in to the above categories and how to “sell yourself” to that company.

Sell yourself

To get a job, you have to learn how to sell yourself, which means making yourself look like a great candidate for the jobs you want. This involves a few different steps, which are described in the sections below.

Develop qualities for that employers look for

As a general point, you should be aware of the attributes that hiring managers look for in a candidate and prepare accordingly. Obviously, you’ll need technical skills and other abilities that help you to directly do the task at hand. However, companies also look for “soft skills” that indirectly help you do the job, and also make their employees lives easier and happier while they are at work. We already touched on some of these in our Collaboration and teamwork article.

To summarize, hiring managers will look for:

Think about whether these statements describe you, or not. This could be a useful way to identify some of your weaknesses, meaning that you can take steps to improve them. For example, if you are not good at communication or problem solving, look up some guides or classes to help you improve those skills. Even something informal such as talking to your friends about your work and describing your projects will help you become better at communicating.

Create a CV/résumé

You should create a CV/résumé, which communicates your worth to an employer. There are lots of guides on how to write one on the web, but in brief, they should generally contain the following:

Here are some general tips for CV/résumé writing:

[!NOTE] You should think of your CV/résumé as a general document, and then customize it for individual jobs you go for, in terms of the most suitable work experience and skills for each job.

Get some experience

When you start searching for jobs, you will find yourself in a vicious circle — you need experience to get a job, but you also need to get a job to get experience. Don’t despair — there are other ways to get experience. Here are some ideas:

Create a portfolio

Once you’ve got some relevant experience worth talking about, the next step is to put together a portfolio that you can include on your CV/résumé, and show to employers. The whole idea here is don’t tell me what you can do — show me what you can do.

This should include:

Keep your portfolio as highlights of your best work. You want it to be easy to access and look through. Include a few significant items in each section, rather than hundreds of items, otherwise the hiring manager will get bored and move on. A nice clean design will help with the experience, but a complex design might reduce legibility.

In terms of how to actually publish your portfolio:

Create a LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is one of the most popular sites in the world for people to find jobs, and for employers to find employees. It is a great place to host an online account of your work experience and skills, which is similar to your CV/résumé, but also different.

LinkedIn has many useful advantages that allow your profile to work well alongside your CV/résumé. You can:

For these reasons, you should create a profile. Make it look good and sound professional. Create a good LinkedIn profile provides some useful tips.

Applying for a job

Let’s now look at the process of applying for a job.

Job searches

There are different ways to approach job searches, and a combination often works best:

The “Decide what kind of job you want” criteria that you created earlier should be useful for narrowing down your lists of what companies you want to work for and what kind of jobs you want to apply for.

Before applying

Before you start applying for a job, there are some useful steps you can take to prepare:

Applying for the job

When you apply for the job, make sure you follow the process exactly as they want you to. Each job advert will have instructions on how to apply. If the job ad was more of a conversation with a network contact, ask them exactly how to apply.

Above all:

Not all job applications require the same things; you’ll probably have to:

Constant process

A key point is that your job search should be a constant process where you do a little bit each day, and constantly keep working towards your goal. Don’t just fire off a whole load of applications and then sit around waiting for a response.

You should follow up with any promising leads you meet, for example on community networks or LinkedIn. Also, keep an inventory of the people you meet and the companies you apply to, along with contact details and descriptions of each. Periodically follow up with companies you’d like to work for to see what jobs they have available. If you get rejected for one job, they might have something else more suitable for you, either now or in the future.

If you haven’t had a response from a company after applying for one of their jobs, wait a little while and then followup with their recruiter to see if they have any feedback for you, or any other jobs coming up. Even if a company you want to work for doesn’t have any suitable full-time jobs advertised at the moment, contact them any way and see if they are looking for someone with your skillset. It might lead to some useful experience, such as a freelance contract.

Keep looking for more jobs via your chosen job sites or community networks, and chat to people about what is available. New opportunities will come up all the time.

If you are struggling to find anything permanent that you really want, there might be some intermediate steps to take:

Preparing yourself for job interviews

If the recruiter and hiring manager like your application, they will invite you to some interviews and other sessions. This section provides some advice on preparing for those.

There are some general things you should do to prepare for any interview:

There is also some preparation to do specific to each company you apply to:

Initial screening

Once the company have looked at your application and decided you sound like a “potential”, they will probably start off by inviting you to an initial phone interview, just with the recruiter or hiring manager. This is usually a short interview to assess “culture fit” (are you going to get on with well with them?), make sure they don’t pick up any immediate red flags that suggest you won’t be a good employee, and tell you about what to expect from the rest of the interview process.

At this stage, you should be friendly and talkative, but don’t talk too much, act naturally, and see where the interviewer steers the conversation. Make sure to let them know what days and times will be suitable for you to attend further interviews. Try to be as flexible as you can, and be prepared to move your schedule around to accommodate them.

Don’t be complacent however — you don’t know for definite what questions they will throw at you at this early stage, and you should treat it just as seriously as all the other stages.

The main interview

Usually, the bulk of the interview process is one or more main interviews. These can vary greatly between different companies in function and frequency.

Experience-based questions

Interviews will inevitably feature experience-based questions. These ask you to provide anecdotes demonstrating that you have experience relevant to the job, and will be along these lines:

You should build up a set of anecdotes that you can use when answering such questions. This will get easier over time as you get more experience.

Coding interviews

Some interviews will be coding interviews, designed to test your ability at solving coding problems. These might be something like:

Often employers are looking at how you approach the problem rather than the end result — how you commented your code, how you dealt with error handling, and what you might have done if you’d had more time.

You should research common coding interview question types, practice solving them, and practice explaining what they are doing. You’ll find many resources online for practicing coding interview questions.

Homework questions

Some companies will set homework for an interview candidate to do, as an alternative or additional way of testing your coding ability. This tends to be in the form of a mini-project of some kind, which will ask you to code some functionality relevant to the job you are applying for. For example, you might be asked to create a standalone demo that uses the company’s JavaScript library to pull data from their APIs and populate a page of information.

While this is a reasonable way to test candidates if done right, many people dislike the practice of setting homework questions:

If you are asked to do a homework challenge, make sure the scope and timing of the work are clearly defined, to mitigate the risk of going in the wrong direction and wasting your time.

Accepting the offer

If you make it through the interview process and get offered the job, then well done! It is tempting to immediately accept the offer, but there are a few things to bear in mind before you do:

Try, try, and try again

If you have applied for lots of jobs and not gotten anything yet, try not to become disheartened. Keep trying, keep passionate about the web, and keep talking to new people and learning new things.

If you got to the interview stage but got rejected, ask the recruiter for some feedback on why you weren’t chosen, and use it to improve future applications.

Be patient. Even the best candidates will get rejections from multiple job applications before they land the job they want. You will get there.

See also

{{PreviousMenuNext("Learn_web_development/Getting_started/Soft_skills/Workflows_and_processes", "Learn_web_development/Core", "Learn_web_development/Getting_started/Soft_skills")}} 

In this article

View on MDN