I received an email recently and I thought I’d share some of what came up…

The person was recommended to me as they were trying to get into the web dev/design industry; they already had some skills and they were working in a related industry.

The person wanted a full time job; freelancing can be a bit daunting (hence this site!). They had no related work projects under their belt but they did had a decent blog which showed they knew what they were talking about.

In no particular order, here are some ideas:

Twitter

They weren’t strong on Twitter. Their website didn’t mention it (come on, make it easy for people). Twitter is a great place to form relationships and get on people’s radar. Who should this person target? Well, potential local employers for one plus other key people in the local web community. Same goes for linkedin.

Work = Marketing

Work begets work. Saying what you can do something and doing it are two separate things. You need work to show people what you can do & for you to blog about. If no-one is paying you, work on personal projects or do free stuff. Better though would be to reach out on Twitter and see if anyone wants any low end help on projects; explaining that it’ll be evening/weekend work will work for many people as long as they are told. Once people know what you do they are able to recommend you – simple as that.

Get involved in the local web community, events etc. Explain to people what you do and you’ll end up getting some bits of work – that’s a start. Explain what permie role you’re looking for and people will end up listening out for you; if they don’t know you, don’t know what you want – then they cannot do that – sounds obvious but it has to be stated.

Reach Out

I wouldn’t look on job boards for openings etc. I’d hand pick the companies you’d like to work at, research them and reach out to them. By reach out I don’t mean an email saying “Hi, I’m looking for a job, here’s my CV” I mean something more like:

“Hi, we’ve spoken on Twitter a few times and I was wondering if we could meet up for a coffee so I could ask your advice. I’m currently working as X,Y,Z but I have skills in A,B,C and am looking to take the next move. I’d love a couple of moments of your time to hear your thoughts, as someone who employs tech folk. about my approach & what I should do.”

Hopefully you can see this is a totally different type of approach that just blasting in a CV (tip: no-one wants to read a CV). Many companies are always on the look out for talent; irrespective of what their vacancies page says. If you show up as a proactive, interesting person then who do you think will be top of the list when it comes to interviews?

So, that’s just some basic tips. There’s nothing rocket science there but many people don’t do it because, in all truth, it’s much easier to hide behind uploading your CV to a job board & crossing your fingers – that’s a process which we can pretend is us finding a job but, in truth, we have to be a lot more proactive than that if we want to stand out in a crowded market.

Joel