What makes someone stand out amongst developer job applications?

Recorded February 24th 2021 – watch the full episode on YouTube.

‌When you get a bunch of applications for a job, what makes someone stand out to you – what makes you decide to get someone in for an interview?

Jordanna Kwok: I think when I look at resumes, I don't typically look at the company names, I'll be honest with you. I think each manager is different, but I'm looking for a unique set of experiences. Maybe someone has written an app on their own even, and has gotten a lot of traction even though it's maybe not a full-time gig. Those types of things really stand out, because it’s not something that is typical maybe of many iOS developers who are just coming from a big corporate company.

And they might bring something, especially a perspective, that the team might not have. Not just skills – I think what we want to look for is more than technical chops, we want to look to see are you bringing something, a different type of background or whatnot that can really help with the product? Because if you think about the team itself, we're not just engineers, we're also product engineers. We want to have people who have lots of great ideas in terms of what features, how the UI should look, what are some things that in the future might be interesting to incorporate in the app.

So it's a lot of product thinking as well, so if someone has a design background, for example, that's pretty interesting. It doesn't need to be just iOS.

Sponsor Hacking with Swift and reach the world's largest Swift community!