Hello, I am Ukrainian. Due to the war I with my family found a shelter in UK (near London) last year, have a good background in Pascal, and study Swift from March 2022. I have 2 my own applications in AppStore, worked with UIKit, SwiftUI, Cocoa Touch, Realm, Github, CoreData, RestAPI, JSON, MVC, MVVM, Firebase, StoreKit, CloudKit, WebKit, MapKit, XCTest. I regularry check job websites but there are no vacancies for junior level there, and when I find something interestiong and send my CV, I even do not get any answers. Is the industry collupsing so nobody need Juniors even for the smallest salary? Take care of yourself and relatives, Ihor servicegambro (at) gmail(dot)com

Before hiring a developer, companies pay attention to many factors. It might help if you read articles on how to hire a developer to meet his requirements.

Oh it is hard everywhere. At the moment the market is oversaturated with developers. For ex: I live in Spain. I compete with at least 300 other developers for the junior jobs( I know this as I usually see 5-600 people who applied for the job). I have been looking for a job for a year now. I had 1 technical interview. The technical problem was for a mid-senior( I asked around). As I see it, there are not enough jobs at the moment and mid-developers apply for junior jobs, thus we as juniors have no chance. If you are a good developer I suggest you start looking for jobs as a freelancer. There are sites like Fiverr and others where you can take up freelance jobs. I wish you good luck.

As someone that has been carrying out interviews recenrtly (not iOS) something to consider, make sure you are shouting about your skills. If you have a GitHub account make sure the URL is on your CV (and of course you have projects visible to the ublic, if you dont have one, create one and create some projects show casing what you can do.

Something I have found frustrating when interviewing people is not having something to properly look at, or almost as bad, having cookie cutter projects.

Having apps that you can point too that are on the App Store is great but does not necessarily showcase what you can do, the underlying code could be a mess, but having code available on GitHub will demonstrate your skills and quality of code.

I am a professional Python developer, I did the above myself and this was specifically mentioned in my own interview, in my case I had never worked as a professional developer but had done a lot of personal projects, this gave the interviewers the confidence in what I could do.

I ran a small development agency in the UK for many years and interviewed many developers during this time .. hopefully this may help people understand the process from the inside and provide a few tips ...

• You will be one of many developers applying for the position so your CV needs to stand out. keep it punchy and to the point
• You should tailor your CV to every job, not mass mail it to everyone. if the job is for a Swift developer, ensure this is at the top of the list not bullet point 15! Ensure you include what the business is looking for.
• Try keep your CV to 2 pages - you want to tease the reader to invite you in for interview not give them your life story
• A hint of colour on you CV helps it to stand out and shows a bit of creative flair - do not overdo this otherwise they'll assume you want a design job!
• Check it, check it, check it - a sloppy CV would suggest sloppy code
• As others have suggested have your source code available on Github or similar
• Check your (public) social profiles - the employer may research you too and may not want someone who has posted photos of them taking drugs with their mates every weekend.

A larger business may have more time to invest in Junior developers and can "mould" you into the developer they want. We were only a small business so the priority was to get junior devs working on smaller projects asap so a lot more hands on learning.

if all else fails call and offer to work for free for a month. We were not going to interview one guy until he called for a chat and asked if he could come and work free for a month or two so he could put it on his CV - We recieved 80+ CV's and shortlisted 6 to interview but his single call (which nobody else did) put him straight to the front of the queue and we offered him the job 4 weeks later!

Hope theres a few pointers here that help

Good Luck

Roy