With more than 100 applications submitted, I often find myself feeling anxious, depressed, and unmotivated towards the job hunt. After 6 automated rejection emails in a row, it may feel like that developer job will never come. I’m here to say that it will come and it will be worth it. ❤️
Organize Your Applications & Calendar
And in the meantime, let’s get organized! The key to my application organization is Notion. I use their job applications and calendar templates everyday. I’ve modified their job applications template to be geared more towards developers so you can start getting organized right away. You can duplicate the template here .
This template is handy because you can view the jobs by status, date applied, position, and more. After applying to so many jobs, it’s easy to think “wait I didn’t apply to that” when an interview email arrives. But with this template you can easily search for a company, see when you applied, and read the position details again. You can also find the calendar template I mentioned earlier here to record all those interviews you’re going to get!
This template is essential for managing your interview dates, goals, and just daily life.
Organize Your Interview Prep/Notes
In addition to managing your applications and schedule it’s helpful to have a template for managing your interview prep. A day or two before an interview I always prep a word doc that includes everything I know about the position, a blurb about the company, answers to potential questions, and questions for the employer. If nothing else, always make sure you have thought out an answer to the question, “Why do you want to work for our company?”. I have been asked this question in 90% of my interviews and always have a thought out answer ready to go.
Below is an example of a word doc I would prep for a first round interview with a company.
Phone Interview With ___
Who’s it With: John Doe (John Doe’s Title Here)
Date & Time: Tuesday, November 30 at 2:30
Duration: Roughly 30 minutes
Job Description: Insert a link here to the job description
Position Location: Vienna, VA (remote for right candidate)
Salary: Insert any salary information or your desired salary
About the company:
Quick blurb about the company and anything that stood out to you when researching them.
Potential Questions:
Why do you want to work for _?
Always personalize this to the company you are applying for. The interviewers will almost always ask some variation of this question. Your answer to the "about the company" section above should help you answer this question.
Do you have experience with (company’s tech stack or programs like Photoshop)?
Be honest here. If you don't have experience with a lot of the tech, mention similar languages or tech that you do have experience with. It might even be helpful to mention your process for learning new languages, because how quickly you learn is more important than be mediocre in every language.
Questions For Them:
- What is the biggest challenge facing the development team right now?
- What is the onboarding process like for new developers?
- How would you describe the culture at __?
For potential questions, read through the job description and think about questions they may ask about their stack, how you work with a team, experience with Git and GitHub and more. If you want more interview prep questions, I previously wrote an article that contains over 50 interview prep questions and instructions on how to import them into an Anki deck for memorization.
Hopefully, this post was helpful in some way. I just wanted to say one more time, that you will get a good job and to just keep pushing. The right opportunity will come. Stay strong. ✨
