Job Search and Resume Tips 2025 Edition
At community events in Copenhagen or through work I meet a lot of different people, which I am very grateful for. Most of them get to do exciting things every day at work or are currently looking for an exciting thing to do next. I wanted to write down what I usually advise people to do or how YOU can assist someone who's currently looking for a job.
I had to think a lot about networking, CV building, job interviews, techies as a workers community, dynamics of large organisations as work places, leadership and how little I know about all of this after all. Luckily I found some other people who wrote some smart things about layoffs, building your CV, portfolio and networking!
Are You Looking for a Job?
There's a number of reasons and I don't think we should feel bad about any of them. Any of the following are perfectly sensible reasons to look for new opportunities:
- Your expectations of company values or compensation are changing
- Your general life circumstances are changing, wanting to move to the country side, needing flexible hours and remote work for more time to travel
- You're just not as excited executing whatever your function is and there's no room to change
- The company decided to lay you off
Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
I found a post by Mert Bulan that describes well why people often feel bad when they're laid off. It's not just a rejection, but it's the end of an often precious relationship they thought they took great care of.
When I looked back on my time at the company and all the things I had accomplished, I was surprised to be impacted by the layoffs. It wasn't because I thought I was better than others—it was because I believed I was doing more than what was expected of me.
From Once You're Laid Off, You'll Never Be the Same Again
Most people like to be needed, appreciated and feel like they fit in, which is why rejection hurts. It takes some reminders for many of us to not tie our self-worth and happiness to our jobs, especially in environments where people are genuine and don't mask too much of their personality with a work persona.
You Can't Fire Me! I Quit!
It's okay to work a lot too, to spend your free time on learning, but you need to ask yourself the question regularly if you're expecting reciprocation, some form of payback. You need to evaluate once in a while if you dedicate the right amount of yourself to work. If you pour more into a relationship than you get back, it's going to suck when it ends.
Very dutiful employees often have a tendency to want to protect their work place from the fallout that their resignation might have. My tip to you is:
Do not inform any work place before your notice period when you quit.
It's none of their business and they might be in a difficult position where they might have unreasonable demands towards you. Take the responsibilty off of them and let them deal with it, when the time comes.
I've seen plenty of people leave or get left and sometimes the organisation struggled to make up for the losses, but never in my work life has a company collapsed over the missing pieces. The company is going to be okay without you.
Presenting Yourself Well
Communication methodology can help us understand a little bit about what our different channels of communication are good for and what to expect of them.
Some media like blog- and social posts and LinkedIn profiles can reach a wide audience, but don't have a direct effect on the receiver or find the right target group. Also broad communcation is often one-sided. It's you talking to a lot of people (that often do not care enough to comment).
For example: I'm seeing updates on LinkedIn from somebody I studied with and I will never invest in their company and honestly their product sounds like fraud. I'm just not the target group for their broadcast communication. 🤷
When you narrow your communication to 1:1 conversations, remember to set reasonable expectations when you can get back to someone, hiring isn't a life or death matter when it comes to urgency, but about the impression you make.
A Resume / CV
A resume is a tool for you to keep a record of your work-life achievements and for recruiters and potential future managers to quickly get an overview of your experience and what they can expect from you, if you become their co-worker.
It can feel a bit similar to creating a Products or Services page on a website. It's what you have for sale, so to say. Here's an example from Mihnea on how to keep things short, relevant and engaging:
Note: Do not list all technologies you've ever touched, but the ones that you have the most experience with or notably spearheaded in your team or organisation.
Full context, super worth a read: freelancing: How I got clients, part 1
My recommendation is to keep exactly ONE resume unless you're applying for jobs in different industries. If I would ditch tech and go all in on photography, I'd probably re-do my CV, but for everything in tech, I would keep one and the same.
You can still write a very motivated one page cover letter explaining to a company why you think they would be a great fit for you.
- As much of a curse as it is, update your LinkedIn
- Have your CV ready to send from your phone as an attachment
- If you want to pretend like you're really cool, keep your CV as a link and use jsonresume like me 🤓.
- Make sure you have contact details on your documents
- Don't lie
Note that nobody but us nerds uses a json file or knows what that is, so expect having to duplicate all of that data you carefully prepared into some corporate system if you apply for large companies.
Lastly, there's a great wiki entry on reddit: EngineeringResumes 🙌
Present Your Work
If you have your own website, no matter how simple and you can showcase your skills there and keep some contact info, that's great! Do you have any live projects that you manage, link them! Mobile dev but you contributed some epic feature to an app at a company? App store links, creenshots and videos are your friend!
Our GitHub profiles have also become somewhat of a portfolio as well for many of us, desired or not, so I would recommend creating a profile readme.
Set a profile picture on LinkedIn, GitHub, other socials. If someone is curious about you, they might search the web for you, even if you don't include a picture on your CV or elsewhere.
Job Search Tricks
If I were to get laid off tomorrow I would create a spreadsheet with all my attempts at finding a new job. Since I love data visulisation (and I never do enough of it) this is an excellent point in time to employ a sankey diagram!
Tracking statistics and data points is motivating to me and it makes your story a lot of fun to share and show afterwards.
That being said, you should not only look at other companies or formally meet potential employers when you're looking for a new job. Your company never plans to stop hiring or to continue to evaluate if you are still the right fit for them.
Interviews
Interviews are worth a whole post on their own, but I'll keep it short.
- If you're not sure if you should go to a job interview, go!
- If you're nervous about job interviews, go to practise!
- Don't be nervous, you are the person you've become throughout like 30 years, not the part of the person that the interviewer can see for 30 minutes. If they don't understand that, you don't want to work there.
Helping Applicants
If your friends are looking for jobs, tell them about companies that might be a good fit (this requires you to keep your eyes open for companies), write them reviews on LinkedIn or bring them to networking events. It sounds obvious but I have multiple times known my boss before I knew they would be my boss throughout my career.
Also offer assistance in reviewing their CVs and portfolios escpecially if you have hiring experience! These are all things that only cost you a tiny bit of time and no money at all.
If you were someones manager or close co-worker, offer yourself up as a reference, pick up the phone and say the nice things you can say without being dishonest.
Being kind is free.