What do you need to get a software engineer job?

Be able to get the job done.

The most important you must be able to do the job your potential employer wants you to do. For a software engineer, it means you should have expected knowledge and experience in programming/computer science.

Each particular job position has its own requirements. It can be quite a long list of them. But usually, only they really need only 1-3 items of that big list. If you read the job description and the company site you should be able to understand what those really important requirements are.

For example a degree requirement almost always is not important.

So you have to understand what an employer wants instead of what they say in a job description.

When you understand what the employer needs you found the skills and experience you need to do the job.

Write a working resume.

Next, you need to present your self in your resume because the first contact with an employer is always your resume.

In average your resume will have the attention of a recruiter for about 10 seconds before it discarded as dull. You can see how writing a resume is a critical skill. There is an opinion the resume does not work anymore. My opinion people just do it wrong.

The problem people like to be like everyone else in the same area. Standard education history, a standard degree, standard certificates, standard phrases in the resume. They try to look as good as the others. But real effect they show they the same as others. What you really need is stand out of the mass, which requires an opposite approach.

So a good resume is a resume which make a recruiter to contact you. Even better if it makes a particular kind of recruiters to contact you.

The bad resume goes to garbage in about 10 seconds of reading. Even a good resume can go to the same place nine times from ten. Recruiters read a lot of resumes.

Found a job.

There are two approaches to finding a job. Either you find it, or you make it find you.

To find a job you search for it in google and specialized sites like monster.com, indeed.com and so on. I advise to search on google and work hard on your queries. Depending from which words you use you can search for a job a minute or a year!

Then you contact the companies you have found and send your resume or make an application. They should describe your next step in the job description. If not look at the site or send the resume to email from the job position description.

It takes a lot of time to contact each company. And you may need to make many contacts before you get any answer.

While you are waiting for the answers it may be great to have a chance a company find you by them self.

To archive that you place you resume in some place where recruiters are going to see it. It is like a fishing 😉

Long term solution to create a linkedin account and connect to some recruiters. It is not difficult at all but takes some time. So start to do it as soon as possible.

Short term solution is to place your resume on sites like http://monster.com and update them once a day, otherwise they go the very bottom of the list.

Got through the technical interview.

When a recruiter contacts you they call you right away or ask you to scheduler a phone call by email.

If the phone call goes well they start an interview process with the company. It can include phone/Skype interviews, online tests and on-site interview.

So it can be a long multi stage process.

You can be a great software developer but fail on technical interview. So you have to prepare for it. I can recommend book “Cracking the coding interview.”