Securing Your First Job in Software 1: Register New Contact Info

This post is part of a short series on actionable steps in acquiring your first developer job, which I utilized in 2018 to become a Software Development Engineer with a major cybersecurity company.

Greetings fellow green horn job seekers! When it comes to tech jobs the market demand has never been higher, but the willingness on the part of companies to train newbies can - frustratingly - feel inversely proportional to that demand. Once you have those marketable skills, you will have modern "job security." I previously wrote a post with general steps for getting your foot in the door with IT, or any new career. This series will build on those steps with additional tasks you can focus on that are within your control, and together this can increase your likelihood of being recognized by hiring managers. The first step: streamline your contact information.

Email

If you somehow made it here without owning a single email address... I applaud you, I honestly have no idea how you survive in this world. For everyone else, it's quite possible that you have multiple addresses, and are equally likely to be firmly against creating yet another one. But allow me to offer an argument in favor of doing so:

Having a separate email address (such as with Gmail) strictly for communicating with potential job prospects can offer the freedom of handing out your address at any public networking opportunity, without sacrificing the day-to-day strain of filtering through extra spam and recruiters you could care less about - especially once you're comfortably in a position you love. The point isn't to add yet another account to sign into and check, but to take advantage of settings in providers like Gmail to forward ALL your mail to another address that you actively use. Then all you have to do is filter your incoming mail by the recipient "to" address, creating a rule to have all emails sent to your new professional address moved to a "Networking" folder (Gmail: Settings > Filters and Blocked Addresses). You can even send email AS that other address within your existing account (Gmail: Settings > Accounts and Import > Send mail as), which will provide the same capabilities on mobile apps as well (just select the "from" address before sending).

Phone

Like with email, you want the ability to give out your phone number to the world when networking for job positions without the repercussions of dealing with extra spam that could last months or even years afterwards. A great option for this is renting a temporary phone number, which Skype offers for a mere $6.50/month. Skype even includes a feature to forward all calls made to that number to another phone (presumably your actual mobile number) within one second of the call. The catch is that they still count and charge you (minimally) for minutes that are forwarded, so you either need Skype credit in your account or just get an unlimited subscription within the U.S. for $2.99/month. Still, $9.49/month for peace of mind ain't bad.

You can include this number on your resume, on job search sites, even on LinkedIn - basically everywhere you can while you're searching, and then stop the subscription when you find something. Just don't forget to give your new company your real phone number at some point or that could make things a tiny bit difficult.

LinkedIn

Though it's not my first choice for a fun social networking experience, LinkedIn is almost a necessity these days when you want to network publicly without giving out your personal accounts like Facebook and Instagram that may have, shall we say, "incriminating material" for potential employers and colleagues. In addition to email and phone, LinkedIn messages can be another valid method of contacting recruiters. I've spoken with professional LinkedIn Branding Artists (at least, I think that's their job title), and it turns out there are hundreds or even thousands of hours of learning material available in the form of sites and books and courses that will teach you how to improve your profile. I can only begin to scratch the surface, but here are just five things you can focus on to drive traffic to your account:

1. Customize your public profile URL (see the setting in the top right) and stick it to the top of your resume
2. Go ahead and put that shiny new email address and phone number front and center in your introduction
3. In your headline, include titles for the job you WANT and major skills that you want to be recognized for by recruiters who are searching for great candidates, aiming for around 20 keywords: i.e. "Software Developer Engineer Programmer Computer Scientist Java JEE Spring Python JavaScript AngularJS HTML MySQL Agile"
4. Your introduction (BEFORE expanding to see more) should include the summary highlights of your career. Then in the next paragraph, start "I began my career..." to tell the story of your professional life, and emphasize the work you want to help with: i.e. "I am excited to help develop software in the cybersecurity industry with my advanced education and agile programming experience"
5. As I mentioned in the previous post, your profile should be a catch-all for organizing all of your work experience and information in one place, so you should actually start there when updating and refer to it when picking out the best and most relevant information for your resume. However some job coaching companies actually discourage including some personal information such as graduation dates because apparently identity stealing is a thing.

Check my LinkedIn profile for more details!

Godspeed, applicants.

Read on: 2: Update Your Resume

Other posts in this series:
Securing Your First Job in Software 2: Update Your Resume
Securing Your First Job in Software 3: Practice Your Pitch
Securing Your First Job in Software 4: On Recruiters
Securing Your First Job in Software 5: Optimize Your Online Search
Securing Your First Job in Software 6: The Technical Interview
Securing Your First Job in Software 7: Ask Your Value Questions