How to Streamline Your Job Search

Published on August 07, 2020

I officially started my job with Virtual Peaker a couple of months ago. I’m fortunate to have found such a perfect fit. I know many people are looking to make the next step in their career or land their first job, so I wanted to share my tips and techniques for finding and researching job opportunities.

Finding Job Opportunities

Early on I experimented around with having apps on my phone. I checked them throughout the week with no consistency. This didn’t work. A lot of times, I would find opportunities too late. Also, the phone format didn’t work for me to do something as intensive as job searching.

Another roadblock I ran into was that most job boards default to sorting listings by “Most relevant” or “Recommended". These options didn't work for me, as I kept seeing the same job listings over and over, and some listings slipped through without me seeing them.

From these failures, I came up with a routine that worked pretty well for me.

• First, research different job boards. Pick a few that are most relevant and have jobs being posted frequently, and make note of any others that may be less frequent. I bookmarked these as a bookmark group so I could open them all up in a new window quickly. If you need help getting started (and you’ve got a similar background to me), click here for a complete list of all the job boards I ever checked.
• Then each day I would sit down and open up my core job boards and look at what had been posted since the last day.
• After I looked through those, I’d occasionally look through a few other boards that had new listings less frequently.

Using this system, I didn't miss any job postings and I wasn't having to worry about my search outside of the time I sat down to do this.

Some other things: It’s also worth researching companies that make products you love and look for their job openings page. Also, if you have a network to lean on, see who may be hiring for positions you would be interested in.

Researching Companies

One of the most important parts about applying to and interviewing for a position is doing your research. This can really help to show your passion for the company, but it also helps you know if the company’s culture and trajectory are something you’d be interested in. Here are some of the ways I researched companies. It’s worth noting that I was mostly looking at smaller companies, some of this might not apply to larger corporations.

• LinkedIn company page - this can be a great source for information about product launches, business deals, or company culture
• Company blog - some businesses also publish a blog. This offers similar things to LinkedIn. Once I found a blog post describing exactly what that company looks for in an interview to determine a good fit!
• Personal blogs - you may be able to find the blog of the CEO or someone important at the company. In my experience, I’ve found information about why they founded the company or workplace practices they’re trying within their company. Usually, you can find this with a simple search, or by looking at their Twitter or LinkedIn profile.
• Podcasts - if the CEO was interviewed on a podcast you may be able to find a lot about the company. I used Listen Notes to search for their name across all podcasts and had a lot of success.
• Glassdoor - I would always check for any Glassdoor reviews of the company. Look to see if there are any trends in the reviews and keep that in the back of your mind as you continue. (Note: Glassdoor can also be a great place for interview questions)

Conclusion

That’s all I have to share for now. It’s what I found to work for me, and I wanted to share it in case it works for you. But experiment around and see what’s best for you! Best of luck with your search!

2022 Update

I've just gone through the interview process again. I don't have the time or desire to create a new seperate post, but wanted to document some of the resources I used for interview prep this time around:

• Neetcode - This was a great resource for refreshing myself on different approaches to programming questions you might see in an interview. I completed the easy section of each category before doing deeper dives into ones I felt weaker in. Although not the best approach I'm sure, I would sometimes just listen through to the solutions of particular problems to increase the number of solutions I saw during my short interview prep window.
• Grokking the System Design Interview - A decent place to start for system design interviews. I used this as a starting point, then would watch random youtube videos discussing various system design problems. I would just search "{some app} system design problem". They also have a another course for negotiation, which is worth looking over.