I was recently invited to present at the IT Society’s first Lightning Talks of the year.
Originally, I had wanted to give a talk on how to guarantee you would get hired, drawing upon recent experiences leading a hiring round at Waffle Studio. However I was only able to find a single worthy engineer and I guess a single datapoint is wobbly grounds to build a guarantee on top of.
On the other hand, I did say no to the other two hundred applicants, and in my books two hundred points of anecdata is rock solid. Using the knowledge behind each of those rejections, I delivered a talk with a bag-full of of tips to use to ensure you would not get hired.
The slides were a bit awkawd on their own to share afterwards, so here’s a written version for posterity.
Oh, and please, bit flip at your leisure.
TL;DR
When reviewing applications, the first thing the hiring manager will do is whittle down the number of them to something manageable using heuristics, a type of decision making shortcut.
To guarantee you don’t get hired, carefully craft your application towards what those heuristics filter for: someone inexperienced, irrelevant, and forgettable.
Instead, try to stuff as many cliché descriptors into a single grammatically correct sentence as you can. Something like being an ‘enthusiastic and passionate results-driven team player who excels in building clean, robust and scalable solutions’.
This is truly yawn-worthy. Take pride in how the words could be used by literally any candidate willing to exaggerate themselves and how it doesn’t describe you specifically at all. This will help you blend in and be noise amongst noise.
Under no circumstances would I recommend using the personal statement to actually show personality.
Instead fill your CV with fluff and utter nonsense. Hiring managers can smell BS a mile off, so we can utilise that to our advantage.
Be sure to let them know how you ‘spearheaded’ your group project at Uni, executing on the ‘strategic initiative that resulted in a 300% increase in retention’.
This approach is great because if the worst happens and you actually end up in an interview, you can guarantee the interviewer will ask you about what you’ve lied about, and then you’ll panic because you know it’s codswallop, and then you’ll be rejected at that stage instead. It’s foolproof plan to avoid landing a job.
We all know that ‘honesty is the best policy’, so it makes sense to stay clear of it here.
Instead, add a little visual to show you’re 100% proficient in JavaScript.
This is beautiful in two ways. First, it literally makes your CV more beautiful than the rest – dangerous territory if you want to be forgettable mind you. Second, you swiftly dash the hiring manager’s hopes as they see the chart, and then your naïveté.
Used well, these little visuals and skill quantifications will give you a hard-pass from any company that actually knows what they’re doing, and any company that knows what they’re doing is not the company you want to work for. Because you don’t want to work for any company, remember?
Instead, keep a cool distance and don’t show too much interest.
About 1 in 15 applicants sent me a cover letter or message when they applied for our role at Waffle Studio. This made them stand out and gave them extra airtime in my head.
Recall that your aim is to be forgettable. Don’t give the hiring manager any reason to suspect that you could genuinely be interested in the role.
Instead, aim to keep the hiring manager guessing about your skills. Even the most basic portfolio could risk being noticed!
Worse would be a portfolio with something mildly interesting or well executed on it. No, if you want to avoid getting hired, the best approach is to keep your talents hidden from the hiring manager at all costs.
In the current climate, where new hires are expected to be able to deliver results within a few short months, showing that you might actually be able to do just that would be quite the schoolboy error if your aim is to avoid getting hired.
Instead, be a lone wolf, help is for the weak.
The trouble with recruiters is their direct line to the hiring manager. They’ll likely check in once or twice a week, getting the hiring manager’s full and undivided attention to wax lyrical about how right you would be for the role. You’ll effectively be jumping the queue.
The hiring manager will feel obliged to give your application deeper consideration than if you had applied via a job site, because if you’re not the ideal candidate (fingers crossed) they’re going to be asked to describe in as much detail as possible why that is so that the recruiter can try and find someone more appropriate. Honestly, these recruiters are so damn persistent in trying to get people jobs!
Oh, and a good recruiter will give you feedback to adjust your application for each role too. You don’t want that. You want to go it alone. Ignorant, and jobless.
Don’t use a recruiter.
Instead, do nothing and ideally have no interests whatsoever.
Working on interesting projects is a big no-no. This would give you content for a portfolio (bad), it’s going to accelerate skill acquisition (badder), and it would give you things to talk about during an interview (baddest).
Having projects to talk about during the interview would make for a well-greased and interesting conversation with the panel. That’s exactly the sort of conversation that’d put you right in the danger zone of being considered for the role.
Not only do projects serve you poorly if you want to bomb the interview, they also run the risk of catching the attention of other builders out there. It might seem unlikely, but these projects sometimes lead to people seeking you out for their open position rather than the other way around. Be warned!
Joining the committee of a society (and actually putting in the leg work, I hasten to add) is terribly good experience for you and terribly good experience on your CV. It might reveal the you’re driven, good with people, or possibly interested in the field. All things that would increase your employability, and I trust you know by now, that’s not something we want.
I was involved in running the IT Society 10 years ago. Shortly after starting, we had an outing to a local PHP meetup (showing my age). At the meetup I ended up sat next to a guy who built and maintained forum software for a living. We chatted throughout the evening and got to know each other a bit. Not long after that, he got in touch with me via an acquaintance and asked if I’d like to go to his office for a chat. I did just that.
He then offered me a job.
Let this be a cautionary tale! Running a society and going to local professional events is a dangerous game if you want to avoid getting hired.
I’ve talked about being forgettable to avoid getting a job. Another approach is to be the riskiest hire possible.
Suppose you’ve two candidates. For all intents and purposes they have equal qualities except one of them has been working part-time in retail for 3 years, and the other has no work experience whatsoever. The hiring manager is obviously going to favour the person with experience right!?
Without any work experience, you are a very large bright red flag.
This is quite ideal. You’ll leave the hiring manager thinking ‘mmm, will this person be able to cope with the transition to a 9-5’, ‘mmm, I wonder how reliable they are’, ‘mmm, I wonder how they’ve avoided work up until now’.
You’ll be a huge risk, and in a pool of 200 candidates, possibly one of the riskiest!
What a fantastic way to lower your chances of getting to the next hiring stage. As a bonus, it’s less work in the meanwhile, meaning more time to stay at home and play games. It’s a real win-win situation.
Finally, if you’re a software engineer, data scientist, computer scientist, machine learningist or some-other-kind-of-ist, yet another great way to minimise your employability is to stay well clear of events like Hack Pompey and SSEN’s Watt Works hackathon in November.
Go to a hackathon like this and before you know it you’ll end up with an interesting project in your portfolio, levelled up skills, and industry connections. Also, you might have a good time and make some friends. All very regrettable stuff.
I know it’s tempting because it’s free to attend, there’s free food and drink throughout the day, and you can even nab a free t-shirt if you sign up before November 4th. But seriously, if you want to avoid getting a job in industry during or after Uni, don’t go to this event.
Don’t go to hackpompey.co.uk to find out more.
Don’t go to Evenbrite to get your tickets.
Don’t even think about joining Hack Pompey’s Discord to be part of that community.