"I know I have a lot of value that I can add to company, however I feel like I'm being rejected a lot because of my lack of experience as a developer. My question is how do I convey that I am a good fit for a role if I'm not even given the chance for an interview? Any thoughts or advice is greatly appreciated."
This is a great question and is definitely the right place to ask it! I think to really understand the dynamic here, it's good to have an exercise in empathy, especially from the hiring company's perspective. So there's 3 types of companies:
- Companies that effectively only check for YOE and if you don't hit a number, you're out no matter what
- Companies that are heavily reliant on YOE but will make some exceptions
- Companies that use YOE but are actively accepting of folks with 0 YOE and will take the time to look for "gems" and giving very new folks a chance
A lot of companies are in bucket #1 and there's nothing we can do about those. Just take the rejection from them and move on (we'll get 'em next time, hehe).
So what's the experience like for #2 and #3? The problem is that there are a ton of junior engineers flooding into the market as accessibility has skyrocketed. Anybody can put together something functional nowadays; the tutorial landscape is so, so advanced now.
Now imagine you're a #2 or #3 company. If you post a junior engineer position, you are getting 100+ applications, easy. But in the end, you can only give 10 of them interview opportunities as you don't have infinite interviewing resources. How do you choose?
I've seen a lot of junior engineers understandably complaining that companies should give them a chance, because everyone deserves a chance, and this junior engineer will make up for it with their determination to learn and high-energy. But the problem here is that the 100+ junior developers they're competing with for the same job are saying the exact same thing. A lot of companies (those #2 and #3 bucket companies) are giving people chances, they just happen to not be giving you chances because well, there aren't a lot of chances and you're essentially playing a lottery unless you stand out (covered later). Even after you narrow the pool down to candidates with a solid resume and a decent LinkedIn, you probably still have 50+ candidates and just 5-10 slots to give.
So how do you stand out? Well, if you have no work experience and you've already made a stellar LinkedIn, a stellar resume, and you're applying to a lot of places, there's really only 1 thing left from the process of deduction - Build actual, serious software projects.
The increased accessibility of tech has made the market far more competitive, especially for folks on the low-medium effort side of the spectrum, but it has also made the upper bound more exciting for folks who really dig deep. It is way easier now, 100x easier than ever before, to deploy an app or website that gets 10k or even 100k+ users, all on your own time, outside of work, all for free. And if you want to learn how to do that, join the #side-projects channel 😄
Anyways, this is how I broke into Android engineering. Most places rejected me automatically for an Android engineering position when I had 0 YOE (they were in bucket #1), but there were a few that gave me a chance. One of them ended up being Course Hero, which was my 2nd job and hired me as their Android lead to build their Android app from scratch! The job posting required 3 YOE and I learned after joining the company that it filters on YOE pretty hard, but my resume caught recruiting's eye because by the time I left PayPal (my first job), I had deployed several Android apps for fun with 10k+ users.
If you have a lot of design experience, I would try to build a personal software project that actually looks sleek and modern, something akin to what a real tech company like Airbnb would deploy. And then use LinkedIn to share it; maybe even do a #100daysofcode challenge around it. When I build Android apps, I always "borrow" UI components from top apps. I'll take days to write the fine-tuned code to mimic them, and it's totally worth it because these apps look professional (and great on my resume) and have a good user experience as well.
Anyways, apologies to everyone for the long spiel, but this is a big problem that @Rahul Pandey and I really want to help with (we deeply empathize with all the junior devs who are struggling to find their first job, that truly sucks), and this is an answer I deeply believe in.
The point of a software engineer is to build. So if you have the time, just build stuff. Like actual products, not mechanical tech demo projects purely meant just to get some basic familiarity with a tech stack.