code on the beach 2019

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hey, what's going on podcast listeners super super excited to bring another episode to you This episode is actually my conference talk at code on the beach in Jacksonville, Florida a few weeks ago Personally, this was probably one of my better sessions the questions were amazing and the people were awesome as well So there's a lot of good content that was generated out of this Session to help navigate your job search. I hope you guys enjoy this Shout out to Pete and his crew at Interactive Resources in Jacksonville. They put on an incredible event. This event was on the beach at a great hotel. So it was a cool experience to be able to learn a bunch of tech, but also be able to work on my tan after hours and maybe have an adult beverage or two.

So it was just an absolute blast. As always, feel free to like, rate, and review this in the App Store. This will really go a long way. My goal is, again, as always for this podcast to be a tool for others so they can help themselves on the job search process. The only way that people will be able to use this is if other people like rate and review it so they can find it on the podcast store. So please do that. If you need to reach out to me, email is the best way to do it, Taylor at Vaco.com. But if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter, I'm doing a ton of blogging, quote unquote on both those platforms.

So my social media handles are at T. D. E. S. S. E. Y. N. and then my LinkedIn is pretty self-explanatory. I hope y'all enjoy and look forward to another episode out the next week or two. Thanks. All righty. We're gonna go ahead and get started. Last call, the closer everyone gets, the better the vibe is throughout the entire session. I've done this a handful of times now, and the closer we all get and kind of just have a hang out and on this conversation, the better this thing goes. But you don't have to move, it's fine. No, I'm not gonna call on you, so you don't need to worry about that as well.

So, I'm gonna go ahead and dive into this. I know a lot of individuals, I've overheard things like, oh yeah, the recruiters suck talk, you're gonna go to that. Believe it or not, I am a recruiter, surprise. I'm not a developer, that's angry recruiters. So, just a background about me, just so you know kind of where I come from and really how I formatted this session, you know, ultimately kind of my background so you know where I'm coming from. So, I actually work for a company called Vaco, who in here has heard of Vaco, raise their hand. Cool, it's two people, great. So we actually are a $500 million revenue, so we're pretty big now.

And we have 40 offices across the country, our closest one to Jacksonville. I guess it's going to be Orlando. We do have a Tampa office as well. I myself, I am based in Nashville, Tennessee. So my story and kind of how I came to Vaco is I moved to Nashville in 2011 to pursue music like everyone else. I was a drummer still and I guess I don't know. And so I came up to Nashville, did some stuff on Music Row, did some studio stuff, did some touring and played down on the honky tonks. I don't know if you've ever been down to Nashville, but 3 a.m.

at the honky tonks gets a little weird. So I did that for a bit, went on a tour in the middle of August, broke down the side of the road in the middle of South Carolina, and I was sitting outside of advanced auto and I said I'm done. So I found a found Vaco through a friend of a friend and as everybody else at Vaco says the rest is history. So I started recruiting in in our national practice, right? So think of the typical recruiter that cold calls you across the country and tries to sell you on an, I already see head shaking up here.

Tries to sell you on an enterprise client that you've already been submitted to 15 times and have signed 13 right to represents. And you're just like, I'm tired of it. Well, that's what I was doing. I was recruiting for companies like Yahoo, Sony, Disney, and didn't really even know what a MySQL DBA was, but I was recruiting a ton of them at the time. And so I did that for two years. got extremely tired of developers hanging up phones on me. And so I was like, I need to make real connections. So I had the opportunity interview for our Charlotte, Raleigh, and Tampa offices. I got the offer for those offices, and I decided to choose Raleigh because of the team out there.

I moved out to Raleigh in the research triangle area for a year, got super invested with those, with that community specifically in development space, and really started to hone in my recruiting efforts and only working with developers. And so my mentor at the time, Scott Gorna Nashville, he said, hey, do you want to come back after a year? And I said, absolutely. My brother also moved up there as well. He's a product owner at Ticketmaster. If you hate Ticketmaster, I will direct all emails to him after this talk. And so I've moved back to Nashville. Since I've been in Nashville for five years, I've helped scale our team from seven to 21.

We have 11 recruiters that I manage. I also try to do my day job of recruiting software developers and then also speak at conferences. I spoke at a handful of conferences last year. I was VP, I was elected VP of the .NET user group which is the third largest user group in Nashville of about 55 active members a month. And so I did that for three years and then now I'm super invested in NSS, National Software School. So those of you went to Amy's keynote this morning. She crushed it. She also went to NSS. And so I'm pretty active because we as VACO don't get a lot of junior devs roles And so I've been pretty active and educating and training and and teaching NSS individuals how to write their resume in the interview I actually have a session this Tuesday with them and rewriting resume.

So that's my background I do not code a lot of my friends want to set me up a visual studio. I said absolutely not I will burn everything down So this talk is all Q&A. The last thing I wanted to do was get up and preach to developers for an hour of what they should do on the job search. So for the next literally 55 minutes, it's all Q&A, right? So I'm open to hearing stories. I am open to hearing frustrations. I kind of call this a mini counseling session because I know there's a lot of pent up frustration about recruiters. And so I am here to obviously kind of take that burden off of you.

Nothing's off the table. So if you want to go over rates, how recruiters price things, I actually have some slides as well. I actually hate slides. This is my very first talk with slides. I've spoken all last year at different events. This is my very first time. So I do have some information on slides, but I typically hate slides because I zone out. If you do want to follow me on social media, at T. Dessen, my last name is Adoze. So feel free to follow me on Twitter. I've been pretty active on Twitter. I post job tips once a day every single morning, a little snippet of how you can approach the job search and better yourself within the market as finding a job.

Also, find me all linked in. I do a ton of posts on LinkedIn. A little bit more long form content. So take my Twitter post and kind of expand it out every morning about, again, how to look for a job, how to negotiate, all that. I also have a podcast as well. I basically record my sessions, so this one is being recorded, it's gonna be thrown up on my podcast. I've also interviewed dev managers and developers alike on how they found their jobs and what tools they leverage to land their jobs, and also what hiring managers look for as well. So again, my goal in this session and also on my podcast is to allow people to really leverage my information as a resource for them and ultimately not use me.

I give away all my secrets. So at the end of the day, you don't have to use me on the job search or any other recruiter, which is it's actually paid off dividends at this point. So all that being said, that's enough about me rambling. I hate talking. I'm actually a huge introvert, which is kind of funny. Pete, for those of you who know him, he's actually drugged me around this entire conference to introduce me to people, because I actually hate talking to people. So surprise, I'm kind of weird like that. So all that being said, let's go ahead and start the questions again. Yes.

Okay. Here we go. Yeah. So, sign on bonuses is kind of a, first off I would always ask, right? So if you're working with a recruiter, you're working with HR, ask if there's a sign on bonus. Some companies offer it, some people don't. I would say again, what I'm coming from, right, is up in Nashville. So, and again, I'm only one piece of the puzzle in Nashville. So I'm always very careful to like, you know, not have developers come out of my talk. I'd be like, well, Taylor Nashville said, this is what the market does. Like, nope, nope, don't want to do that. So to let you know what I see in Nashville, is it's not a ton of sign on bonuses, but it does happen.

And I would always ask if that is an option. And if the recruiter does not know, he or she should go find it out for you. I typically know if our clients are offering any sort of reload or sign on bonus. But that absolutely should be a question to ask. I don't know if they answered your question or not. It happens, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but I would always ask it every single time. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the company's kind of have different ways of packaging it. You know, I literally, one of my friends got an offer for a data science role in Nashville two days ago, and he got a sign on bonus from that company, right?

So, but then another company I know of is offering him kind of more of like, you know, stay a year. It's kind of more like a reload type situation, right? even though he is local, like you gotta stay a year, you gotta pay it back. So again, always ask the recruiter or the HR person at the company if that is available to you. Yes, boom. That's a good one. So there's a few areas of this talk that I'm pretty passionate about. One is the resume format, right? So that being said, let me use one of my templates, even though we're gonna go out of order.

Don't look, everybody close their eyes, there's cats, boom. So here's a resume template that I send to all of my developer friends. This is available, so shoot me an email after this talk or shoot me a DM on Twitter. My email is tailor at vaco.com. It's pretty simple. I got IT to take out my last name because nobody could spell it. So here's a resume template that I would highly recommend for you to use again. This is just what I use with all my developer friends. I would say no more than three pages. But again, I'm just one person. There's gonna be different people that say different things.

I wanna kick the guidance counselor in the shin. Hence why my podcast is named guidance counselor 2.0. I wanna kick the guidance counselor in the shin whoever said resume should be one page and that's it. I think that's absolutely ridiculous. I think if you are younger in your career there's no need to like fluff up your resume for five pages. However, if you've been in the industry and been as a developer for three plus years, a solid two pages would be great, anything more than five years, probably three pages. But if you follow this format, one, this format, I would say 99% of the time gets hiring managers attention that I work with and they get interviews.

I've noticed if I don't format resumes like this, It's not as quick as people, it's not, the hiring managers don't move as fast. I don't know what it is, but I've had great success with this. But if you get really specific on using as a summary of what the company does or what the application does, get very specific in bullet points and then recap with the technical skill sets at the very end, your resume will be very clear, concise, and you won't have to take up three to four pages. Whoa, this, yes. Do you want to come to Nashville? Okay. That's okay. So I think recruiters today are the new cover letters in my mind.

Working with the recruiters going to allow them to sell you with all of your accomplishments instead of writing it out on a piece of paper. And then the recruiters, if they take the time to know you, they should be able to hit the high points. And when they submit you to a position, they should be able to sell you enough. And so, but it brings in a human element instead of a paper element. So that's my first suggestion. And second suggestion, LinkedIn profiles are really important. I'll get to that on the next slide. That's one of my other things I'm really, really passionate about. So I'll show that in a second and how to format that, okay?

Yes? If the resume is more than the rebate, I'm never going to look at the date thing plus the rebate. Thank you for affirming me. I mean, when we're hiring for a senior developer position right now, I get like 20, 30, 40 resumes for a position. I've got five, nine times. If I need to see drop strokes run on the first two pages, your most relevant work experience with your skill that. And I'm just speaking for myself personally, but I just don't have time to read more of these for candid. And I have one candid that's around had a 17-page resume. He's been 30 years experienced because that's really incredible.

Don't grab a strap or a remedy, but be precise. And for me personally. And also keep your link in updated. And take the don crap off your social media accounts as public basic. Because if I like you, I'm going to Google you. He's actually leading my talk from here on out. So that was great. That was awesome. Just how much? Sorry. Just as a climate though. Yep. And also because I've seen a lot of resumes that are, it's like I was CTO of this and this and this and this. I Didn't ignore titles was everybody yes in the almost senior developer in their company Everybody's got every title so for me to resume it just and my mom gets you on the phone and do a little resume with you It's just not verbal I am phone interview, but but I also but I also say this too real quick.

Sorry for him. Do you I? I would absolutely make your resume a living, breathing document. In that, it needs to change. So let's say you're a full stack.net engineer, right? And you've done some view and react on the front end and you want to move more into the UI side of things. You need to bring out more of your UI projects on your resume and take off the little bit of back end stuff. But don't lie. But don't lie, yes. Don't lie. See where you two paragraphs. It just feels like... It's not good. Yes, they should attend my talk. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It turns to AI again, right?

You want content? It's just like you said, you don't want fluff, but you want enough to tell a story, right? I've learned in recruiting and other recruiters in here can vouch for me. It's about storytelling, right? So a lot of cancer like, what if I leave this job? What if I leave that job? If you can act adequately communicate why you left and there's a story there, then that's fine, right? But you need to be able to tell that story through your resume. Yes? I mean, it doesn't matter. I mean, for us, we do word documents because I slap on that. So we take off the contact information because we have had hiring managers go around us and try to snake our can it's away.

And that's essentially how we make money. So word document is great working through a recruiter because then we slap a logo on it. Like literally, this is what it looks like when I submit you to a job. My name is shoes on the other hand though. I sent the word document and I see what the hiring manager got. Yes. They tried to reformat it, and they're formatting currently. They didn't read the reformatting. Yep. It happens. So I would say if you're working with a recruiter and say, hey, if you need a Word document, send it back to me one more time before you submit the jobs.

So. We technically don't think of ourselves as UI developers, but in resumes, and especially when you're speaking in interviews, having time to speak is important. So take screenshots of what you've been working on, even if you didn't do all the UI, even if you, hey, it's just an app. Anytime you get to say, oh no, this login is a form, I did all the back end work that, so, you know, we did this, we had this, we had this, we had this code, it kept to anything like that, where you can explain what you actually worked on with a screenshot of what we did, or actual, like, you know, UI, part that we did, or, you know, screenshoting postman, seeing all of your huge scripts or anything, stuff like that where you include your resume, and gives you time to talk about what you did.

Like, anytime you get to control what you're talking, and they're not asking questions. Is that a good reason for who I've found? So keeping the focus on you would screenshot and stuff like that. I'm not feeling it. Yeah, and I think the natural human, the natural, at least for me, I block out sometimes in conversations, right? Like just, I don't remember what I talked about. I think that's a great point, right? If you bring, even if it's a phone call, have those samples in front of you. So you remember what to talk about, I think is huge. I'll probably start using that. Thank you very much.

I appreciate that. What else? Yes. No, take it off. That's what LinkedIn's there for. Honestly, it's kind of creepy. I'm going to be telling you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would, I would, I would highly agree with that. This is good stuff. Yeah. In the back. I love it. Yes. Love that too. No more than three. I always tell every person that I work with. Don't let me be the only resource for you because I will always disappoint you. I think if one developer puts too much faith in that recruiter, now I've had some developers, they're like, I'm only working with you and I'm like, okay, just know that Vaco doesn't work with everybody in Nashville.

So two usually covers a lot of grounds. If you're really desperate or just love free lunches, three. Because us recruiters will always buy food for you. Yes? I think it's on salary. Negotiate on salary, yeah, so this is a good one. So if you follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter, you will know that partnering with a recruiter has many different benefits. The one big one is to know what salaries are in the market, especially for your skill set, right? So if you're getting called for a bunch of 100K gigs and your price is 75, like it may be time to renegotiate. I think really ask a recruiter who has been in the market for a bit.

So I call it the two and two rule. So this is one of those things where like if you get anything out of this talk, this is one of them. This is loose because I got a bunch of heck for my team when I put this on social media. I would advise and recommend you work with a recruiter that's been with the same company for more than two years and the local market for more than two years. is because most recruiters have to bounce every about two years to get any sort of compensation raise if they're not just if they're not killing it on the how we place people.

And so if you find a recruiter who's been at the same company for multiple years, they're probably pretty legit. And if they've been in that local market for multiple years, they know the market and what the pricing is in the market. So like for me, I've been a national for five years, I'm still learning things, right? Like there's one girl I work she's been in the market for 10 years, she knows more than me. And so I would absolutely kind of connect with the recruiter first that you trust, that you've met with, and that can be your resource for salaries. Because I'll shoot people straight like, hey, you're too overpriced.

Or hey, you're actually not getting paid enough. And being able to have that open dialogue with the recruiter is invaluable from a job I mean, talking on the that, I mean, hiring people, third graders, it's what you just said. It's really awesome to me when I can do it the same person. I mean, the count man has been able to do it the hiring person because it's really frustrating. And I, there's a couple of companies here in town. I get like a monthly call, hey, I'm now the guy in charge of, for Bob Smith recruiting, I'm going to go handle your count now. And it's a, it's a month like her and it's really hard to develop her relationship.

when you invest in, when you're a person, it's not gonna be there three months and they don't know your business and they don't know what you're looking for. So I change the grab date for the companies that have longevity and their, with their recruiters and their account managers. And I've ended up hiring everybody. I think we've hired through like a, well, we really want company here to go and just go, they're a guy staying in place and they know the market. Absolutely. 100%. And so I'm gonna say this too. This is another key takeaway that I would advise you to take away from this talk.

Stop submitting your resume to postings all around town. Re-engineer your job search, start with the recruiter. Vet recruiters first, and then let the recruiters work for you. I'm sure every recruiter in here is gonna be like praise the Lord, because we lose out so many times representing candidates because they blast their resume all over town. And once the resume is in their HR portal, for the most part, we lose the right to represent you, thus causing you to not maybe have the one up using the recruiter in the job market. So if you get anything out of it, the two and two roll and dad gummets stops them in your resume all around town because if you send a bunch of DMs out on LinkedIn and Twitter to recruiters and vet the recruiters first, your job search is going to go by so much faster and so much easier.

Yeah. How do you reach out to you about something that you posted somewhere three, four years ago, your job time on job expectations completely changed. They're still reaching out to you about because you submitted three of them once. Yeah. Yeah. There's no silver bullet to stop that, unfortunately. Yeah. You know, because you coded, because you did it like a PHP side project 10 years ago, you probably get called for senior PHP. Yeah, exactly. So I would keep your, so I've been pretty passionate. One of my podcast episode, I interview a senior react engineer that I'm good friends with at event, bright up in Nashville. And we talk about how leveraging social media in your job search.

How many people in here actually have a Twitter that they use consistently? Raise your hand. What? I got goosebumps just now. All right, so listen, here's another thing. I would absolutely get on Twitter and start like networking over Twitter. is like, I've become really bullish on Twitter over the last like 90 days and it's paid dividends and you can keep up with market trends like as recruiters, right? I follow a bunch of developers so I can say, hey, did you hear about, I don't know, Azure's latest feature on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and developers love that shit.

Don't you? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right? And then so the other side of things too is from a candidate perspective, like network with other developers in your city over Twitter, right? Twitter, like IDM people all the time. A lot of people don't respond back, that's fine. But leveraging Twitter is huge and also LinkedIn. How many people get on LinkedIn at least once a day? Raise their hands. That's a little better. Not great. Again, LinkedIn is huge. Right now, LinkedIn's reach. And I take a lot of my content from Gary Vaynerchuk. I don't know if anybody knows who Gary Vaynerchuk is. So if you hear some similarities, I want to give him props for this.

But or LinkedIn's organic reach right now is ridiculous. I post one thing a day. One long form blog post a day that averages 2000 to 5000 views per day per day. So if and I'm posting once a day, that means I'm reaching around, I don't know anywhere from 10 to 25,000 people a week. Organically, no ad spend whatsoever. So, and again, if you're a developer, man post an issue you have, I don't know, you're trying to say in buzz words, you're trying to push something out on Git, I don't know, and like you're having an issue, right? Like post about that issue on LinkedIn, I'm telling you, you're going to start a lot of real and open and honest conversations over LinkedIn that's going to really fuel your network and allow you to become more marketable in that local market.

What else this is good stuff? Yes, I have a lot Trying to put it nicely so I I think use two firms and that's it right so if you're a hiring manager I would use two recruiting firms at most three kind of the same way from a job search process from a canet perspective and For me I would If you're going to use recruiters, rely on them to vet and speed up the interview process. I've lost so many candidates to people because managers are like, oh, this person's great, but this is the first person you sent. Yeah, I know, that's why I'm good at my job.

So hire him, right? Instead of like seeing, I need this water back. Because so many hiring managers are like, no, this person's great, but we're just gonna wait. Like literally I texted a senior engineer that I know how to climb and Nashville the other day and I go, hey, like he's in the hiring manager, just a lead. I said, hey, I have three devs right now, texted me in a week and a half later. He goes, are they still available? I go, nope. A week, week, week and a half. If it was up to me, hiring manager in here, I would do everything in contract to hire.

The reason why I would do a contract to hire is you do one phone call, get them started, use a six month as a probation period, and then if they stink, the recruiters fire them and then you wash your hands clean. To me, it's an absolute no-brainer. I'm obviously resonating with the hiring manager up here in the front. Be clear with your recruiter what you're looking for. Yes, 100%. He was looking for someone. What's he looking for? We've sent him all these candidates, and he keeps saying no for different reasons each time. Correct. And every time they gave what he asked for, but it's not what he would do.

Yeah, I mean, and that's another thing from a sales perspective, right, is I think always being, was it students of the game type situation, right? So from a recruiting side, Like we always need to be learning, you know, sales people, I would absolutely try to be as technical as the recruiters. And if that's not the case, then like, you know, there needs to be some training. Because what happens is, is a lot of recruiters aren't technical enough to have conversations with managers. Right? So it's like, hey, I need a .NET developer. OK? Like, we're talking about like web forms. We're talking about like, where are we talking about?

Right? And so like, that's put the onus needs to be on the recruiting perspective from that. But also, yes, managers need to know what they want immediately or communicate that. And if they don't know, that's even more of a reason to hire somebody as a contract, to hire a resource, because you can vet them as they work and see if they fit. So, yep. All right, so once again, I'm working with the software. OK. I'm going to be the manager of that for people. Yeah. Hey, these are the people who want to know we want a QA lead with automation, but they may. So they're like, what?

But they really want a really sweet automation engineer, but they can't like, it takes so long for them to actually move a legal document into the system so that it's unbiased and all this stuff. So what they do is they release and actually get a QA person and then they have a phone call about these recruiters and say, what I really need is a lead automation person. So like, you wouldn't expect what shows up on this job district to do what they actually want, it's not. So they're all this weird stuff that happens around like, you can't do anything between learning off of what they want because there's this whole kind of behind the scenes but they go, hey, what we really want is this.

And then they have to rewrite it for you to actually get what they want, versus what the link was up. Which, so I'm gonna go to this one slide that we're gonna go back to LinkedIn. I haven't forgotten about the LinkedIn yet, okay? So this right here, you guys, you don't have to write this down, but these, I did a little mini series on my LinkedIn and Twitter on what 10 questions you should ask to stump the recruiter. So if I were an engineer at all, I would highly recommend you write this down or shoot me an email afterwards or take a picture and fill that's fine too.

So when we qualify a job order within our team, we have all this information. And I've had an engineer in Nashville. He worked with two recruiters. He sent the recruiters these questions, radio silence. Recruiters couldn't answer them. This is legitimately sharing my secrets. And as a developer, if you get a job order, you need to just go ahead and have this prompted on your email as a signature and just send it to the recruiter. Because I will tell you 90% of recruiters probably won't be able to answer all these. Now, if they can't answer them on the spot and they go, I'm gonna go find them, fine.

But these are all the questions. I've been pretty bullish about this. And like I said, I put this on LinkedIn and it spread like wildfire and Nashville. And so I would highly recommend that you use these questions. I have more trouble getting the first six answers than last four. The first six answered? Yeah. Last four, I said the goal is? Oh, good. Yeah, so the big thing is asking the recruiters like their relationships with the company, right? So if it's contract to hire, you're not super stoked about contract to hire, you know, ask the recruiter, hey, how many people have gone perm out there with that team?

He or she should be able to tell you, right? I mean, we have one team at a huge client national. My team has pretty much placed their entire dev team, all contract to hire. So when I look at that, I close the new developer with that team over the weekend, and it's like, hey, listen, he wasn't super thrilled about contract to hire. And we talked through that, and I said, listen, we, like, the lead hiring is a guy placed there as a contractor, now he's gone full time. So if the recruiter can't explain that to you or had that conversation with you, I would move on to another recruiter.

That being said, let's go over LinkedIn real quick. So, and by the way, the 80s inspired stuff, Pete and I share a passion for 80s. So that's not planned because we're at Code on the Beach and it's 80s themed. I actually love 80s. I grew up in the wrong decade. So this is actually a friend of mine. He's in Raleigh. I'm sure he'd be fine if I gave him, we gave his name to y'all, but I took it off. He actually paid somebody to write his LinkedIn. I got pissed off at him because he didn't use me to write it for him, I would have done it for free, but that's fine, still not mad.

So essentially, I say this is the absolute best way to write a LinkedIn. I would say it's probably even a little too much, but what I really, really like about this as a non-technical guy, I can read this stuff up here. And then this is like super nerdy, right? So for the hiring managers, like they know what all this means, right? And same thing here, right? Again, contract assignment was a hands-on manager full stack developer, you know, set application or set direction for their ATS. So again, right? It's broad and then it gets specific, just like your resume should be written. I don't think a lot of people are like, should I just cut copy and paste my resume to my LinkedIn?

No, I think it needs to be two different things. I think this needs to be a little bit more personalized. Or you could say even a little shorter too, right? I'm fine with the LinkedIn just being two or three sentences. Speaking super high level about what you're doing like you're talking to your mom or dad. And then two sentences, one sentence outline, like, hey, I work for a company that is like Uber, but for pets. And then the second sentence going, I'm a full stack.net engineer focused on the front end with Vue.js. And then the third sentence is my full entire tech stack that I use is.net Vue, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I think that's a perfect way to write a LinkedIn as well. So anybody can pull up that information and search on it easily. So also search features well recruiters. We recruit on all these buzzword stuff. Azure Service Fabric, Web API, if I need a developer that has heavy API, I'm plugging in API to the search string that we use on LinkedIn to find your profile. So that's why going back to what you were saying about old stuff, you've got to keep your social, digital, media, resumes tight with specific verbiage that you want searched on. Well, I'm very sorry. Yeah, I got nothing. I got nothing.

I got, yep. And I can tell by what you're asking, which application was from because of what they're looking for. Yep. Your student had to change my skills that he were easier. Yeah, that's why my talk is recruiters set. Yeah, so. So that's how I would recommend writing LinkedIn. Don't have bathroom selfies. Bathroom selfies are rampant on LinkedIn. Take those off. please get a professional headshot done, and that helps a ton as well. What else? Yes? What's your recommendation for, I've actually never heard of it, like rate my professor. I think rate my manager. Yeah, rate my manager. Yeah, I mean, managers, same thing, right?

I mean, I would always keep your LinkedIn evolving, right? Because as a, you're eventually going to be on the job search if you are a hiring manager. whether it's now or whether it's five years from now. So I would always keep that tight with new projects or new things that you've learned or implementing. From a manager perspective, I just keep it up to date as well. I mean, I would probably try to get some, if you really wanna stand out, get some recommendations or referrals or recommendations. LinkedIn recommendations where people can write. So like, if, so if I go to an engineer And they have like 15 recommendations.

Like immediately as a recruiter, I'm like, all right, this guy must be pretty decent. If 15 people sat down and took time to write, right? If I go to a manager who's been a Nashville for 20 years and they don't have anybody write them a recommendation, it's not a bad thing. But somebody who has 10 recommendations is going to stick out more. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I would do it if I was a manager. doing here uses or has a profile on dice, raise your hands. Dang, gum. Well you all came to the right talk then. So dice, yes I am a cat lover.

I have one cat. I also have a corgi. I'm obsessed with corgis as well. So dice is really important. If I were, I'm not sponsored by dice, but if I would use, I wish I was. Dice if you're listening. If I would recommend one job board to utilize, would be dice. You have to be in technology, we don't have to, but it is a technology specific job board platform thingy. And what I would do as well is I would absolutely make your information up today as much as possible. These are all the search filters that recruiters can recruit on. Like this is literally a screenshot of what I am looking at as a recruiter.

And So having your information super updated helps a ton. And I would highly recommend it again, like you can link all of your social media to it as well, like provide links. So a recruiter could just go to your LinkedIn by clicking that LinkedIn icon. The Cat Lover Developer at Vanderbilt has a much better social media profile than blank at the Weather Channel Atlanta. You see the two difference, right? Social media, like Gary Vaynerchuk says, is the state of the internet. Like your social needs to be extremely tight. Take all the crap off from 15 years ago, or you got weird at some college parties, right?

Cause that does come out. I can't, I don't feel comfortable sharing what I have found out about some candidates scrolling their social media, because it is a little weird. So again, if you don't feel comfortable with your mom seeing it, I would probably take it off and make sure you keep everything pretty tight. So again, dice, other people ask about career builder monster, still recommend them, still good resources, but when I type in a developer to career builder, I get construction developers and like, linen develop, I don't know what a linen developer is just came to my mind. But the thing is, is that if I type in a developer on dice, software developers are gonna come up, or database developers are gonna come up, not construction developers.

Monster, it's still good. Indeed, really good too. So we're starting using D-ed a lot more. I would highly recommend having an indeed profile as well. And again, if it were me, I would recommend you update all your media, social media, or internet sites like Dyson Indeed, and then start DMing recruiters to meet with them. If you do that, one, the recruiters are going to be impressed. Two, you're going to completely flip the job search on its head and you're going to be so much more efficient. Assign from social media. I mean, public barriers market to market, but Jacksonville to be a big place is a really small town.

So everybody knows everybody. All you guys will work in here in Jacksonville. I work with somebody I know. So it's aside from social media, just don't burn bridges. Yeah, I would highly recommend to not burn bridges. Yes. And then we're looking different. I haven't messed with it. I don't know. Yeah, I mean it's just another one. I've heard good things, but I don't use it so I can't. Good. How much do you get? Good. Oh, I'm gonna go check it out I guess. Thank you for that suggestion. Yeah. I'd say I'll almost say mine's gonna look if it's gonna be good. Stack overflow for years.

Yeah, so stack overflow. I know stack, yes. I don't use stack overflow. I know some recruiters do. They are, right? So again, how do you make money? you sell your contacts to recruiting firms. You can make a lot of money doing that, right? So I haven't used Stack Overflow. I think we've tinkered with it. But again, that's just another. Again, I would keep everything you use day to day super tight, right? Your GitHub managers want more code samples now, right? So if you're a junior engineer, I would highly recommend you upload all code samples that you want to work on in your first job, right?

So if you really want to target React jobs, I would volunteer internship and take any work that you have in production to throw it on your GitHub if you're a junior engineer, because a lot of hiring managers look for that as a junior dev. So as a recruiter, if you have a lot of visibility, we don't have any candidates, managers, outside the broad platform. What kind of things do you see on my places that recruit people and keep them really happy and have great retention? but there's some common factor you can say in that that other companies don't let's get an email later. Yeah, if you're not paying above market, you're gonna have an issue keeping people.

I'm just, that's like, I think we talked about that. That's the biggest issue, right? So Nashville, Nashville wants all of these West Coast engineers, but they still wanna pay like under market value, right? That's the biggest issue. The companies that are doing it well, like the event Brights in Nashville. We have Amazon coming to Nashville now, 5,000 jobs. It's ridiculous. We have, I know Ernst & Young is paying pretty well, right? So paying as a whole is the first step. Payback, I went on a rant on LinkedIn that obviously got some attention about managers paying their people what they're worth. I would highly recommend to have open and honest conversations again, doing your research and then going to managers like, hey listen, I've talked to two recruiters.

Here's where I'm at. I have conversations with my brother all the time about where he is at versus, because he gets LA price per-ecket in Nashville. So he's above average for his mid-level career. So again, money's the big thing for managers. I would say the next thing too is technology's big, but then also just a flexible work from home policy. I think most, believe it or not, most developers want to work in the office that I'm seeing, but having the option to just be like, yeah, just take it whenever you need it is huge. Or, naturally, I mean, Jacksonville, we're not in San Francisco. I mean, we've played for a grand year for an 800 square foot apartment.

100%. Is that factory in favor? Are they just looking at, wow, junior debt, and getting them bucked out in San Francisco? I might not get in a bucket and Jack's bill for it. You talking about like reloading people out here? No, I'm just talking about the salary comparison. I mean, these guys and West Coast, I mean, the numbers are obviously different, but the council living is radically different too. It's just a lot cheaper to live here. Salary and newspaper. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense, but when somebody is, you know, targeting a job or hiring managers, see these, or if a candidate's seen a job that they can get realistically in San Francisco at $60,000 more, Let's face it, people don't normally do research for cost of living, right?

Like I was talking, I was talking to my wife over here the other day about like what salaries would look like in Raleigh versus Nashville versus in other parts of the country and I went on CNN money, right? That's one thing I use a lot just quick down and dirty. I don't know how accurate it is, but it seemed pretty accurate I lived in Raleigh for a year, people just don't do the research. So they just see dollar signs like, well I can go over here. It's like, yeah, I get that. But you're literally going to be living in like a 600 square foot apartment.

Pass, right? So what else? This is good stuff. We got 50 more minutes. You guys are free to leave now if you want. But I also know that it goes over pretty well from a question. I mean the questions have been great. So I don't know if there's any other burning questions. If you want me to pull up any more slides. Yeah, for sure. So markups. That's always a fun one. I've had a lot of developers try to stunt me on this one in the Past. So it depends on the client. We have one client that's a set markup. So the markup is 45%. So whatever i pay you, i have to only mark it up 45%.

And then in other companies, it just varies. it varies. I don't have a set number. What I try to do is I try to make sure you get a raise, you're happy, and it makes sense business-wise for me. Right? So if you really want 60 an hour and I give you 65, does it matter what the bill rate is? Now I will tell you that's what we got to build a relationship with the recruiter, right? Because a lot of recruiters try to jack the price point down and get that margin bigger. I will tell you that there's probably, there's usually room to negotiate, and if a recruiter's not one negotiate, right, red flag.

I usually tell my people like this is legitimately the best, and I try to overpay because the market is so competitive. Recruiters, for the most part, do not want to underpay too much because then you're just going to bounce for a few more bucks. So we want to keep it honest. But at the end of the day, like, have open conversations, right, like one of my dudes that I placed out of one contract gig at 68 an hour, I can only pay them 62 an hour for this one. But I've placed them three times now. So we know how I do business. Again, it's valuing that recruiter relationship that just legitimately will take your entire career to the next level because you'll know all these intricate stuff.

That's my question about markups. 45% on some open-ended on others. What else? Good deal. Well, you guys are free to go. Thank you again for coming out. There's great questions. I know the second session everybody wants to like go to the beach travel lunch. I'll stay to answer questions. Find me, like I said, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, podcast, shoot me an email, Taylor at Baco.com. And again, thanks y'all, appreciate it.