Thoughts on web development and technologies by Peter Gasston
How to apply for a web development job
The company I work for has a lot of SMB websites to produce over the next three or four months so we’re looking for a client-side developer to come in and help us out for a short term. I placed an ad on a few websites with details of what we’re looking for, and waited for the applications to come in.
When they did, I was shocked. The majority of them were terrible. From the introductory email to the CV to the examples provided, only one or two were good enough for consideration.
To pass on advice to prospective job seekers (and hopefully make my job a little easier in future), here are five tips for applying for a job in web development:
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Read the advertisement
This may sound ridiculous, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t seem to have done this. I asked for someone who could come into our offices in central London when needed; I got replies from Brazil, India, Russia, Indonesia. I know we live in a globalised world and work in an industry which lends itself to distance working, but I specifically requested someone who could come to our offices. If that wasn’t necessary, I wouldn’t have said so in the ad.
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Take care over your covering letter/email
I understand that English is not first language to everyone, and I’ll pay no attention to grammatical errors if that’s the case. But at the very least I’d expect to see it spell checked, with punctuation and capitalisation. I received emails all in lower case written in txt speak; ‘i wld like this job can u plz reply asap’; if you don’t care about your application, why should I?
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Make your CV clear and informative
I want to be able to see, at a glance, your most recent experience and your key skills. I don’t really care where you went to school or what you studied, I want to know if you’re good for the role I’m offering. There are literally thousands of websites giving information on how to write a good CV; take a little time and read one of them.
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Provide links to examples
I want to know how good your code is, and for that I need to see it. Not images of websites you’ve worked on, but live pages I can view the source of for myself. Also, we work on the world wide web, where the hyperlink is king; if you don’t put hyperlinks in your CV or the covering email, I’m far less likely to take the time to visit your examples. Live links, and lots of them, please.
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Know what you are talking about
The most important rule of all: don’t try and bullshit me. If your covering email says you have been working as a professional web designer for five years, I expect to see evidence of that. I looked at some of the examples I was sent today and I thought I had travelled 10 years back in time; table-based layouts with inline styles and javascript, Times New Roman for all the text, badly-sized images, ugly tiled backgrounds… it was nasty. And there is no excuse for it; there’s an embarrassment of fantastic articles on web development available, and sending me an amateurish ‘portfolio’ just proves to me you don’t pay attention. If you don’t have a lot of commercial experience, you should have a knock-out portfolio site to make up for it.
And if the position I’m advertising is for an HTML and CSS developer, why would I want to see your Flash portfolio? Why send me a CV with ten years of server-side programming jobs? I want relevant experience, relevant examples.
By all means, if you have knowledge of a subject but not much commercial experience, embellish your CV a little; we’ve all done it. But don’t flat-out bullshit me by claiming you know something, when all the evidence points to the contrary. If I don’t catch it at the CV stage, I’ll definitely catch it at the interview stage, and that’s more embarrassing for you.
Phew! That’s a load off my chest.
Dave Woods [January 15th, 2008, 10:46 am; Permalink]
Hi Peter, completely agree with all your points although I personally don’t always include URL’s to sites that I’ve worked on for external clients and who’s site I don’t currently have control of.
The reason? If the client has control of the website then there’s no guarantee that on any given day, the code that a potential employee will view will be the code that I created.
I specialize in HTML and CSS and always deliver valid, semantic code using web standards but if a potential employee can go to a link, all they’ll do is view the source code and see that there’s hundreds of errors due to dodgy ASP.net implementation despite the code I delivered them being completely valid.
Because of this, I tend to provide links to the 4 or 5 website that I have control of and then provide details of my skills and information about another 10 or so sites/intranets I’ve worked on which I can then explain further at interview.
Maybe I’m being a little paranoid with this approach but I’m a little conscious about providing links to website which may not truly reflect my work.
Agree with all your other points though and have experienced these kinds of problems even with agencies who when I was first starting out sent me for a PHP interview!!
Peter [January 15th, 2008, 11:12 am; Permalink]
Hi Dave. The way I tend to get around this problem is to create a ‘snapshot’ of the code I’ve written; save a page as flat HTML & CSS, then host it on my own website. This is not possible in every case, but I’ve used it a couple of times to save work I was proud of but which was liable to change.
Dave Woods [January 15th, 2008, 11:44 am; Permalink]
Yeah that’s a good idea and is something I’ve done for my last few freelance jobs so I always have a few samples that I can show to demonstrate that I can do what I say I can do on my CV.
I don’t know what you think on this but I’m of the opinion that as long as someone can actually demonstrate that they understand things like semantics, CSS layouts, accessibility, cross browser compatibility, then they’re probably worthy of an interview?
I get quite a few people/companies dropping me emails through my website offering their services for outsourcing work and seeing as it’s something I may do in future, I simply ask them to send me one website that demonstrates their ability.
Not surprisingly, I haven’t actually received a single website that was valid, semantic and didn’t use tables so I completely understand your frustrations :)
Peter [January 15th, 2008, 12:25 pm; Permalink]
Exactly. For the role we’re offering, we don’t need (or want) a superstar developer, we just need someone who understands the principles of modern client-side development.