Front-End Focus - 🔥 How to: Land a front-end job
Landing a front-end job is hard. We’ve had an open position at my company for about 3 weeks now, and it’s gotten almost 100 applicants. That’s a lot of competition, no matter how good of a developer you are and how passionate / motivated you might feel. I think the market is especially tough for junior and mid-level front-end developers right now. Throughout the last few years we’ve seen a rise in bootcamp graduates, and learning front-end has become more accessible. I’d argue it’s also one of the “easier” coding fields to get started with that doesn’t require a degree. Mostly because it’s quite straight forward to create an index.html file, add some HTML, CSS and JS and you’re already going. The barrier to entry is much lower compared to something like data science, applied algorithms or systems design. Unfortunately that also means that the market has become more saturated with entry level front-end devs. Combine that with the fact that many companies have been doing tech layoffs in the last few years following the post-covid boom, now is definitely not the easiest time to land that crucial first front-end job allowing you to gather real world experience. And the companies that are hiring are also often prioritising more senior profiles or people with 5+ years of experience. That can be a hard pill to swallow, but it’s unfortunately how things are right now. With all that said, there are of course still front-end jobs out there - even for juniors and people early in their career. They’re just harder to get because the competition is so tough. That naturally begs the question: If you’re an aspiring front-end dev looking for your first or second job, what can you do to stand out of the crowd? How can you make sure you’re the person getting through the initial screenings, to the interview stage and finally to the job offer? There’s obviously no silver bullet I can give you to make all of that happen. But what I can do, is tell you what I look for when judging candidates - in the hopes that shifting your focus a bit will make you 10x more likely to beat out the competition in this difficult and stressful job market. So here’s some do’s and don’ts based on my experience as both a job seeker and more recently as hiring manager: Do:
Dont:
To sum up, I think the best thing you can do is try to see the situation from the perspective of the company / hiring manager. They receive potentially 100’s of applications, so they’re looking for any reason to discard yours from the pile. That might sound harsh, but that’s very much my experience. So make sure you do whatever you can to stand out and stay in the race for as long as possible. Don’t give them an easy chance to reject you for a lack of portfolio, a ChatGPT-written application or a CV with a poor image showing no experience. Hopefully some of these tips and tricks can help you stand out of the crowd and land that crucial first or second job - because I really feel for any junior dev looking to break into the field in this current market. At the same time, remember that it only requires 1 company to take a chance on you. So even if you might feel frustrated and willing to give up, I strongly recommend you hang in there and do whatever you can to keep up hope. Because if you do, I’m positive you’ll end up in a good place where you can build your experience and skills to enjoy a great and fulfilling career. That's all for now - thanks for reading! See you in 2 weeks 👋 If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, why not share it with your friends! Either by forwarding this email, or by posting about it on LinkedIn, X or Facebook. You can also simply copy/paste the link mads.fyi/fef on other platforms. It really helps to keep me motivated and let the newsletter grow 🙌 — Mads Brodt |
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