Good morning, everyone. Hi. Today's talk is how to land your new Python developer job, a recruiter's perspective. And as you heard, I'm the recruiter but I also want to tell you a little bit more about myself and answer the question that I normally ask

first during an interview. So for once, it's my turn. Tell us about yourself. Well, my name is Giordano Tubo, but you can call me Gio and I am from Italy originally, but I live in the Netherlands. I've been living there for five and a half years and I work there as a tech recruiter. I work at Chernobyl. It's a software company located in the Netherlands in Utrecht and whose main services are written in Python.

So I talk with Python developers who are looking for a new job literally every day of my life. So I'm all this. I'm a recruiter. I'm from Italy, but it's also another thing I am and you're probably noticing I'm nervous and

well, my voice is cracking a little bit. My legs are shaking and I'm sure you all recognize this feeling, right? It's the feeling you have when you're submitting a resume, when you're going to an office for an interview, when you're sitting at the interview and possibly even after. And that's why I'm here. I'm here because I want to share what I know from the other side of the desk with you all

to give you some tips and tricks. Because, well, you are applying for a job. Companies are selecting but the application for the job is yours. So you have the rights to have all the tools to be in control of it. But what does the job search look like and what are we going to cover today?

Well, we're going to cover all the steps of the job search process. We're going to start with job research and we are going to continue with application, first interview, second interview and arrive at the end of the decision moment. So are we going to cover everything about all these steps? No, absolutely not. I could be talking about each one of these steps for the whole day and I'm pretty sure you don't want that.

So I will be giving you some small tips and important parts that could be relevant for you as a Python developer looking for a job in today's market. So let's start with the first one, job research. So this is a step that gets often overlooked by people looking for a job.

So you're thinking, okay, I want to look for a job. I'm going to start applying for a job. No, hold your horses. There's a lot of work that you need to do before and that comes with the job research, market research, but let's look into that. So obviously we are Euro-Python, so chances are that you would be looking for a job where Python is important.

So what does the Python job market look like nowadays? Of course, different countries, different job markets, but what you know is that Python is a very widely spread language in a development community. Actually, data still shows from the market that Python is the main language that developers know.

So there are a lot of developers that can use Python. That's true. And I know the news nowadays. There's an elephant in the room, right? They're not the brightest, but since because of its readability, simplicity, Python is still used by a lot of companies and don't worry, the data still shows that it's still a very high demand market for Python developers. Trust me,

it's hard to find Python developers. And so keep on the positive side of things and look up because there's still a lot of opportunities out there. A lot of companies use Python for different reasons. And this is what I mean. So Python, you know it better than anyone else, is a big beast, right?

Python doesn't mean only one thing. It's had a very big environment of libraries, frameworks, and it can be used in many different things. So here I've listed some of them. I'm not going to be going through all of them, but the point here is they are specialized. You see web development technologies, data science, machine learning, and that's what the market looks like as well.

Companies are specializing more and more and are looking for specialized Python developers. So chances are the way you're going to work as a Python developer, you're going to either work in web development or in data science, for instance.

There's not a lot of chances that you will be doing all of that. And you might be thinking, but I can do all of that, and that's great. That's fine. It's perfectly fine and very admirable to be a jack-of-all-trades, but companies are now more looking for a master of one or two. So of course take a picture here,

but here it's more think about specializing and also when you're looking for a job about specializing on what to look for. But how do we start? So we know what technologies could be out there. We want to specialize on something. Again, here I encourage everyone to always sit down for a second and think, what is actually important for me?

I feel like that's something that people tend to overlook a lot and don't realize that, hey, I need to sit down, grab a piece of paper, grab a pen, and write down, what am I looking for? Because companies do that. When we look for someone, we don't just start immediately looking.

We actually sit down, have a meeting, and say, who are we looking for? So do the same. Use the same process, use the same tool that we use as companies to look for people, and sit down and think, am I looking for a higher salary? Am I looking for a remote job? Am I looking for a friendly environment, company where I can make friends? Am I looking to grow vertically?

So change my job title soon, become a senior or a manager. Do I want to grow horizontally, gain more responsibilities, but maybe never change my job title. So write a wish list of things that you want to get out of your job search. And then start researching and start thinking, okay, I'm in Prague.

I want to look for a job in Prague. Can Prague offer me what I wrote down on my wish list when it comes to salary, when it comes to hybrid work policy, or everything that you might have put down? Because remember, you are selecting two. So use the tools I put down here, glassdoor.com.

It's a very good website where you can see what people think about the employer they have had, or they had at the moment. So do your research, you can find salary ranges, you can find experiences, company cultures, and you can realize, okay, is my wish list actually valid, or should I tweak something?

So let's say you now have your wish list. You have what you're looking for, you know what you want to do. So where do I look for a job? I put down some websites here, there are a lot of them. And it's not like you have to look on this website, but these are the ones that are very, very popular.

But the main takeaway here is that there are two kinds of ways to look for a job mainly. So one of them are the so-called job boards websites, so like Indeed or Glassdoor jobs. And then there's the bottom two ones that are together, which is LinkedIn, job fairs, networking events, and conferences like the one you're at now.

So the reason why I want to group LinkedIn and the bottom one, job fairs and networking together, is because that's something I hear very often from developers and job seekers I talk to. They tell me the sentence, oh, I opened a LinkedIn profile and I'm applying for jobs.

That's not what LinkedIn is about. LinkedIn, you can think of LinkedIn as Facebook, and you're probably thinking it's 2023, you're still referring to Facebook. Yes, but LinkedIn has not changed much. So if you think back at 2012, when you had your Facebook account, you were liking things you were seeing, you were joining groups,

you were commenting things you liked and supporting friends. That's the same thing that you should be doing on LinkedIn. So it takes a lot of time, I know, and it might not be everyone's cup of tea. So you don't have to create a LinkedIn account. But if you do that, you need to be active there. You need to be seen. And remember that, again, the data shows that LinkedIn is the number one portal

for people to find a job and also for Python roles. So great. We have found the right position that fits the wish list that we wrote down on our piece of paper and pen. So now it's time to apply. And how do we do that?

Well, there are two tools that you're probably familiar with that you need for your application. So those are your CV or resume and your motivational letter or cover letter. So we're going to look at how to build those. Obviously, again, I could be talking about this for a long time, but I'm going to be giving you some tips that are specifically useful

for looking for a job as a software engineer in Python in this case. Well, let's start with a little bit of a list and disclaimers. So different countries do have different resumes. So I'm trying to be giving you tips that are applicable pretty much everywhere in Europe, but there might be things that are different. So maybe you don't want to put a picture or you want to change the layout.

That could be, but the content can be applicable in many of the countries over here at least. So I think the number one golden rule here that I always want to share with developers looking for a job is that the first person that reads your resume is not a developer.

Trust me, chances are very, very low that a developer is going to read your resume first. It could be someone like me, a tech recruiter, so with some tech knowledge, it can be a generalist recruiter, an HR representative, or you probably also know this. It could even be a software and not a person. So your resume needs to be simple. That's the word you should keep in mind.

It needs to be easy to read. You want to introduce yourself to someone that probably doesn't do what you do and doesn't know what you know. And you want for it to be simple, one rule is also to keep it on one page. And I often hear, oh, but, you know, I have eight years of experience. How am I going to put everything on one page?

Okay, two pages is also fine. Nobody's going to throw away your resume because you sent two pages, but you can put it on one page. Trust me, if Elon Musk, this guy, manages to put his resume on one page, so can we. And let's take a look at how. So this is obviously, well, a fake resume

because I'm not a Python developer, as you know, but you're probably not going to read everything, and that's not the point here. The point is that the average recruiter spends around six seconds on each resume. And not six minutes, six seconds. And I can guarantee if you receive a lot of resumes, that's really the time

you have to go through all of them. So you're going to want to keep it simple and facilitate their work, right? So after the name here, you can see the job title, Python developer that you have or are looking for. And then there's the contact details. What is important here is that there's also a link to

GitHub or your personal website, so I want to stress here for you all the importance of visible code. It's a very important tool for a developer to show visible code in their resume, whether that's your work projects, personal projects, university projects, open source, there's a very good

talk coming up after this one about building your career with open source, so go there. It's really useful for a reviewer to see what you've done and what your skills are. Then there's an about me question, sorry, section right under that where you introduce yourself in just a couple of lines about what you do.

And then eye tracking studies show that recruiters jump up and don't go until the bottom. So we start with your work experience, which should always be in reverse chronological order, as you probably know. So you should start with your most recent experience and go further. But what's important here is that you should

keep your responsibilities separate from the technologies you used to have those responsibilities. So you should keep the what separate from the how. That's because, as I said before, not everybody knows what you do, how you do it, it's very hard to keep in mind all the libraries and

frameworks that are out there, especially for someone that is not a developer. So I'm going to want to know, okay, were you responsible as I wrote down here for designing and development on new product features? Great. What libraries did you use for that? I'm going to go to the bottom of that little section that says technology use. So keep that separate,

it's very important, it's very useful and it makes our life much easier and therefore also your role of a job seeker. And then, well, we have education history at the bottom, but I will talk a little bit about this now because when I'm consulting about resume building I get a lot of questions and some of them

are really personal, right? But there are some that come quite often so I thought of putting them here together for all of you. So the first one is, what if I don't have a lot of experience or maybe not even experience at all? Well, the good news is that you can still build a great resume even if you don't have a lot of experience and that comes from what I

said before. The importance of working on personal projects, showing interest, doing courses, right? You can put down what you did at university or maybe the side project you did with your friend. That's totally fine. What we are looking for as companies normally is someone that can do, not necessarily someone that did a lot in the past.

So show us what you can do. So what you want to do in the future by showing interest and working on the skills you currently have and that's going to give a lot of bonus points, trust me. And the second one comes very often and I always feel it's such a pity that I guess this question so often because

it's what should I do with a gap in my CV. Well, you shouldn't do anything with it because a CV is a document about your professional life, right? And professional life happens during personal life and none of them are perfect. That's totally fine. So you could have a gap on your resume because

you went traveling around the world. It could be for a very happy reason or it can be because you just had to, right? Because as we said, life happens. So just put it down and often I hear back, yeah, but geo companies do discriminate based on a gap on your resume. And normally I answer, would you really want to work for a company that would discriminate you based on that?

I'll leave the answer to you, of course. And the third one is work experience first or studies first. So what you said before is that the studies were at the bottom because if you have experience, I normally suggest putting that first. If you instead don't have a lot

of experience, put your education first. And then we move ahead with the structure of your cover letter. And you're thinking now probably, do people even read cover letters? Yes, I personally read cover letters. My colleagues that helped me with hiring also read cover letters. Probably there are companies that don't, but

that's not your problem, right? You should assume that people are going to read it. And the cover letter is a document for you to again help the recruiter or the person reading your resume thinking, okay, who am I? Why should you choose me and why am I choosing you? So here I have a little bit of a

structure starting with, well, it's four paragraphs. Who are you? What skills do you have for this role? Why this company? And a final call to action. Who are you? Well, quite straightforward. Introduce yourself. What skills do you have for this role? Take the job description and create a figurative arrow in your

mind thinking this sentence structure. You are looking for this. I can do this because I've done it there. It's that simple. Create a link between the job description and your skills to help recruiter understanding why you. And then it's why them. And that's when the research about the company that you did before

applying on Glassdoor and other websites comes in handy. So show your wish list and again create a list between your wish list, what you are looking for, to what you think they can offer based on your research. And this way you show that you know what you're looking for and you know what they can do to give that to you. And then a final call to action. Quite simple.

I hope I can discuss it during an interview with you. Seems easy. I don't read that very often and psychologically it's a very good trick that works. But let's say you have a great resume, you have a great cover letter and you move to interviews. Well, the first thing you should ask yourself is what kind of interview? And not only asking

yourself, but you can ask the recruiter too. Well, typically for a developer job there are two kinds of interviews. The culture interview, also known as HR interviews in some companies. That's normally with a recruiter and maybe a member of the team. And then the technical interview or a tech assignment. They can be swapped in order, but I will start with the culture or

HR interview. What's the goal of this talk? Well, the goal for us as a company, as a recruiter, is to understand do your values match with the company values and your way of thinking, your way of working. But don't forget it's a two way street. It's what I said at the beginning, right? You're selecting two and you want to do the same thing. So

enter an interview like that with the same mindset. Thinking, do I want to work here? Do their values match mine? And ask questions because that's what they're going to do too. And what kind of questions are they going to ask? Well, they're going to use a technique, interviewing technique called behavioral

questioning. Behavioral questioning is a technique that wants to put you in this part of telling how you behaved in the past. So not what you would do, but what you did. So you can think of can you give me an example of a mistake you make? Or can you give me an example of a colleague you

collaborated with? And not how you would collaborate with someone. And how do we answer that? We answer behavioral questioning with a STAR methodology. STAR stands for situation, task, action, and result. We love stories as humans. When we're toddlers, right?

And we want to go to bed hearing a story or when we're now going on Netflix just to relax. Well, that's what we want to do here too. We want to become storytellers. We want to tell a situation. For instance, our product owner came to me and asked me to deliver a feature. The task, the whole team was on holiday. I thought, that's a tight

line, but I should do it anyway. And that's what I did. That's the action. I started working on it and I worked really, really hard. And the result is that unfortunately I did not meet the deadline. I should have shared my concern with the product owner first and then I would have managed

expectation better. So this is a perfect example on how you can answer a behavioral question with the STAR method. And trust me, if you think of any other behavioral question or you're going to Google some, stop for a second, think of the STAR method. You can answer any question with that. And then we have the tech assessment.

So I'm calling it tech assessment because there are different ways to measure your tech knowledge for companies. One is we could be an assignment, like a take home assignment. It can be a technical interview where you will be asking software engineering questioning. It can be a live coding, also called pair programming. And as a tech recruiter, I sit through a lot

of evaluations of candidates and job applicants at the end of the process, right? And there are things I hear very often coming from interviewers and they're not specific about the assignment or the tech interview specifically but just in general, some tips I want to give you all. The first one

that I hear often is the solution was over engineered. And I get it. You get a task and you think, I can do much more than this. I want to show that. That's not enough. They're not going to know how good I am. And I get it. Again, you probably know and have a lot of skills but that's not the point. So bottom line

is if they're asking you to build a bike, don't try to build a Ferrari. It's really not what they want. And try to do what you're asked for. There's going to be chances to show what it is that you can do. The second one is I don't know is an answer. So it's kind of the end of the spectrum.

Often I hear my interviewer saying, yeah, we asked the question but you know, they really tried to bluff and fake the answer. And again, I get it, right? It's the nerves. You want to be like, oh no, I've answered everything so well until now and now I fall short on this question. That's fine. Nobody's expecting you to know everything they ask you, really.

And again, if they do, then maybe the problem is not you. And then the third one is elaborate on what you do. I also hear during live coding evaluations thinking, yeah, you know, the end result was good but I don't know how they really got there. I don't know their thinking process. And that's what we are looking for.

And I know that you're not going to be sitting in an office talking out loud for every line of code that you write. At least your colleagues wouldn't be happy with that. So just be at home, lock yourself in your room and talk out loud before a technical interview. Start coding. I know

it sounds silly and you're probably going to feel silly as well but it's really useful because that's what we're looking for. We want to know how you get to solutions. So sit down, talk out loud, put the music on. Trust me, it's the best practice. And then the final one is ask questions. I know this one feels a bit more

imbalanced and technical round like they are testing your tech skills and that's true. But you're asking about, you can ask about technology too. You want to know that as well, right? You want to know what kind of environment you're ending up and when it comes to technology too so ask questions, ask doubts, be critical. That counts for every step of the process.

And now the final one, the decision moment. There are two scenarios here. One, of course, the more happy one, the last one, the second one, of course, it's not what you would hope for. But well, let's start with the job offer one. You receive a job offer, right? First of all, close your laptop, celebrate because

whether you're going to get it or not, you got at the end of this process that it's very very hard. And then that's the time then to open your laptop again, maybe the day after or later in the afternoon and think, okay, what was my wish list? Where was that piece of paper I wrote down in the beginning? And put it next to your job offer. Does the job offer reflect

your wish list? Is that what you're really looking for? And if not, which could be and it often is, then remember that the conversation is not over until you sign. Again, this is something that people really tend to forget, but and I'm not only talking about salary negotiations, right? It can be everything. It can be

your working hours. Just talk about it. Bring it up. Ask for a call. Send an email. Do that. And then the second one is no job offer, which is obviously also not a great it's not a great result that you would hope for yet because looking

for a job is a skill. That's your training, right? You're getting all these tools and you want to practice and so ask for feedback because that's important for your future interviews. So ask for a call with a recruiter. What did I do wrong? What did I do well? What were you looking for that I didn't satisfy? And you can learn from that so you don't waste your time because that's really the last thing you

want to do, right? Time is important. It's important for who's selecting from the company side, but for you as well. You probably put hours into this process so make it worth. And then the third one, again overlooked many times, is keep the conversation going with the company. If you like the company and you think I would have really, really loved working

there. I have a lot of examples of people that have kept contact with me and we hire them after six or seven months because the hiring needs changed and maybe we were looking for a more junior person or they worked a lot and they improved their skills. So do that and you never know what's going to happen, right? So we looked at each step of the process and

there are different, of course, tools and tips for that. So I want to thank you for your attention first of all, but also live on a note that is, you know, job searching can be frustrating, can be repetitive, can feel like you're never going to get there, but it rings a bell, right? It's like coding and you all have learned

how to code and I feel like you forget how hard that is. So trust me, you can learn this too. Thanks and let's connect on LinkedIn. We will have four minutes for

Q&A. Please use microphones to ask your questions. Hi, great talk. I'm going to ask you about, do you have local websites, like a list of local websites like Glassdoor, but for the local markets like

for the Netherlands or Czech Republic because I'm sure that there are always sites like that, that are way better than Glassdoor. You mean like more specialized job boards like for the country or? Yeah, I mean, but like not like a job boards, but like reviews of the company.

They're probably for different countries indeed, but Glassdoor is international, so it's used almost I would say everywhere in Europe. I would go on that one. To be honest, I know some for the Netherlands. I don't know any about Czech Republic, but I could look it up and we can link on LinkedIn. Maybe I can get some up. Of course, thank you.

Really good talk. Thanks. I was wondering if you had any specific advice about like salary negotiations or stuff like this in the final stage. Very good question. So salaries obviously change a lot depending on the countries you're in, but what I normally suggest is to walk into the first stage already knowing

what you want to get out. Don't wait until the end or wait until they bring it up. Have a clear idea in mind so that you, you know, as I said, it takes a lot of time for you as well to go through a job application process, so don't waste your time and go into it thinking, okay, I already know what I know, what I want, sorry, and that's going to save you a lot of time.

And then with negotiations, well, you can get as far as you can get at the end, but I think as long as you bring it up at the beginning, then you should be good to go. Thanks. Hi, thanks. Great talk. So you have a lot of experience and you want to switch careers to programming, so you had a different career before,

but you don't have a lot of professional experience in programming. What would you recommend putting in the CFE or COFA letter to help you in this process? Yeah, in that case, I would consider your experience as what I gave as a tip of not having a lot of experience, so putting your interest for programming as the

highlight and not going extensively about all the other experiences. So mention that, mention your job title, but don't list all your responsibilities, for instance, as a marketing manager because it's not really relevant. Just say that you've done that so they know, but then put more highlight into the courses you're following or your personal projects or

open source work you're doing and things like that. Thank you. Hi there. So my situation is I work full-time but I also have my own business, but I run part-time. Sometimes the business is kind of relevant to my full-time work as well. So if you've got any advice for me,

do I include it on my CV or do I leave it out? Sometimes I'm unsure how to deal with that situation. To live out or not your small business activity. I would say put it in, it's very nice and entrepreneurial spirit is something that companies look for a lot. So whether it's very relevant or not,

it doesn't matter, it still shows what you do and what your interest is. So I would say definitely put it in. Great, thank you. Of course, thank you. Okay, one more question I see. Yes, I have two questions. I see that you mentioned web development on your presentation.

What do you mean by web development? Web applications or just websites? It can be both. It can be both. There's a distinction there as well, of course, as you know. I would say it's a bit less defined so it might be that you can focus on both in that case and obviously there are different

circumstances, right? It can be that you're also going to do web development and machine learning. It's not that strict of a line but it's more of a trend into the industry that the jobs are going to be more specialized. Yeah, and my second question is I see people mention that even, especially on Medium, that even without that much solid

background experience they get into the FANG companies. But other people also tell their stories and claiming that you need some experience to get into these companies. What's your opinion about that? So to get into big companies, you said? Yes, by Facebook, Google, Netflix,

Amazon. It is possible. Those big companies also have great traineeship programs, so there are different ways to get into a company even if you don't have a lot of experience. Showing interest is important but they even have programs to build your talents in-house. I would say in that case, look for traineeships because big companies offer

them quite a lot. Thank you. Thank you Gio, thank you all. Unfortunately we don't have more time for Q&A so reach out to Gio after the talk. Thank you.