from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best ways to recruit on HN?

by bvod on 6/11/17, 10:28 PM with 1 comments

What are the best ways to get software engineering positions through HN? Do recruiters frequently reach out to people with cool projects that reach the front page?

  • by kjksf on 6/11/17, 11:34 PM

    Recruiters do reach out to people but HN front page is a bad way to get attention.

    First, you have no control over that. Second, it only lasts for a day.

    The right way to do it is to build long-term credibility by:

    - having a personal website (https://blog.kowalczyk.info/) with basic information about you , your up-to-date resume (e.g. https://blog.kowalczyk.info/static/resume.html) and a way to contact you (e.g. https://blog.kowalczyk.info/contactme.html)

    - blogging on deeply technical topics. Avoid rants and anything that is not about technology. The "deeper" the topic, the better. (note that my older posts can be ranty; newer are not).

    - do interesting, open-source projects. Have them on GitHub. On your website, create a "portfolio" section that summarizes the projects (https://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/ but it's far from the best portfolio design)

    - for inbound recruiter requests have linkedin profile. The quality will be lower than those who contact you via website, but it's easy to ignore bad recruitment pitches

    I do get contacted by recruiters. It resulted in one job and I do believe that portfolio of projects helps me when interviewing.

    This is a very long-term strategy. My website is 10+ years of accumulated work.

    In the short term, on 1st of every month HN has "Who's hiring thread". Apply for jobs listed there or in other high-quality places like https://stackoverflow.com/jobs