I graduated from the University of Windsor a with a degree in Computer Science this spring, and after getting back from a month-long trip to Europe in May I started doing the natural thing which is looking for a job. What I had expected to be a process that would take a couple weeks ended up taking me three months instead, and I want to take a moment to talk a bit about why that is.
First of all, since I did the co-op program at my university I had two co-op placements that both went well that I could use as relevant experience when applying to jobs. This I feel is the strongest aspect of my resume going into my job hunt, and is the reason I felt so confident about being able to land a position.
Second, I had some strong limits on the types of jobs I was applying to. I really strongly want to stay in Windsor, Ontario, and so I was limited to jobs here. For programming related jobs specifically, this is a tough market in the best of times and the city is suffering harder than most under the impacts of the current economic situation between the United States and Canada. This meant that I could apply to the few jobs that existed here and otherwise applied exclusively to remote jobs.
The issue with remote jobs is twofold. The first is that most remote positions aren’t hiring junior developers, and are instead looking for people with much more experience. Second, you are now competing with the talent pool of the entire world, in some cases anyway, which makes these positions much more competitive and harder to have your resume looked at, let alone land the position.
It isn’t surprising then that of the 246 jobs I applied to over the last three months, 42 of them were in person and the other 204 were remote, and the only position I heard positively from, which I ended up getting, was a local one. The remote jobs are much greater in number, but your chances of success are much lower without a really highly optimized resume and the skills to back it up. This number of jobs applied to is rather low compared to the number of remote jobs that existed; I mostly applied only to jobs where I felt I at least had some related experience I could leverage.
Speaking of my resume, I didn’t resort to any tricks like adding in invisible LLM-hacking text, but I did spend effort on it consistently to improve it over the course of my job search. Most days I spent an hour or so in the morning actively looking for jobs and applying, tweaking my cover letter and resume as I applied to jobs to make them more specific or to improve them generally. By the end of my hunt I really felt like my resume was much stronger, more specific, and that the bullet points very clearly spelled out the sorts of things I was good at and backed them up with as much evidence as you can fit in a sentence.
Overall, while I did manage to find a job eventually, I’m not sure I would call my job hunt a success, though I am grateful for what I ended up with given the current state of things. Preferably I would have at least been able to manage the opportunity to interview with multiple companies, but I feel as though I mostly lucked out with my search given I landed the one job I heard back from.