It seems most people I talk to are unaware of the job pipeline. There is a process jobs go through in the journey of trying to find and hire a qualified candidate.
Let's walk through this process.
Step 1: The Rockstar
Sometimes a job is created exclusively for one specific person. Maybe the company is using a technology that person invented. Maybe someone is starting up a new business and doesn't want to invest the time and money to get it off the ground if it's just going to fail, so they only trust this specific person to be the CTO. Maybe a specific person isn't very useful to have at your company, but it's worth paying them NOT to work for your competition.
Can you apply for this job?
No, you can't "apply". This job is "offered" to you. In most cases, if the person does not accept the role, the job never gets created.
How do you get these jobs?
"Be so good, they can't ignore you" - Steve Martin
Work on your connections, your public facing "personal brand". Be well known in the industry. Give talks at conferences. Produce important content, be that a book, an open source library, a startup or product, etc.
I personally convinced the company I work at to create an entirely new role to solve problems I'd identified, and recommended a friend for the position. They did a preliminary interview with my friend to make sure, if no one else applied, that they'd be happy hiring them. Because they didn't want to create this job role if we didn't have a good candidate lined up. After a hiring process with 60+ candidates applying, my friend made it to the final round and was hired. This role was made for them, and now, a year later, it's worked out really well. They are excelling in the role, and everyone is happy to have them solving those problems I'd originally pointed out.
Step 2: Internal Hires
Whenever possible, you want to hire from within.
Reasons:
- If someone is moving laterally from the same role on a different team, it often means they were bored with their work, or unhappy with the project, team, or management. Moving them to this other team in the same role is basically preventing them from leaving the company to do the same job somewhere else.
- Retaining talent is generally a big win for companies. Onboarding new people and getting them used to your company specific processes, verbiage, etc takes time.
- Hiring new people is a risk, what if they don't work out? What if they're a bad influence on the rest of the team?
- Promoting from within is good to. Let's say a Senior developer leaves the company and we need to back-fill that role. I've got a mid-level dev that is ready to be promoted that could be moved to this new team to take on the role of a senior. Great! I saved money and now only have to replace a mid level developer, rather than hire for a more expensive senior dev. But looking around I find a junior dev that is ready to be promoted to mid, let's move them over to fill in for the mid that was promoted. Now I only have to hire a much cheaper Junior dev. But the team the junior came from is actually fine, and doesn't need a replacement junior. TaDa! Win/Win/Win!
- The mid and junior are both happy, they have been promoted.
- The company retains their existing talent.
- The company skips an external hiring process entirely, which is expensive and takes a lot of time.
Whenever possible, shuffling of internal assets is the best option for everyone involved. It is the most efficient use of employees.
Can you apply for this job?
Nope, internal employees only. Unless you work at the company, you will never even know about this.
How do you get these jobs?
Make your manager aware that you are interested in something new, and why. Either a new team, project, or role. Explain the root cause of why you want something new. They will start asking around and trying to find opportunities for you, it may not happen soon, but when one comes up, they'll be thinking of you. And in the mean time, they'll try to improve the underlying issues that you pointed out as the reason you want this change.
Step 3: Nepotism
Okay, so a new role opened up at the company and no one internal is interested or a good fit. So it's time to hire externally. But just because they're going external, doesn't mean they doing it publicly. First, the company will ask employees for recommendations.
Reasons:
- As someone that works at the company, you know what the company is like, the culture, the expectations, and what this role would roughly look like. So you'll be able to filter out people you know that aren't a good fit, and if you know anyone that is, you can do a good job of recruiting them.
- If you recommend someone who was a bad hire, that reflects poorly on you, so you are likely to only recommend people you really trust to work out. Lowering the risk for the company.
- Companies generally reward employees when someone they recommended gets hired (referral bonus). This can be a couple hundred or thousand dollars depending on how important the role is, or how hard it is to find good candidates for that role.
- If your friend works at the same place as you, you are more likely to work there longer before leaving the company. Employee retention is a big win for any company.
Can you apply for this job?
Probably not. Sometimes, for legal reasons, these jobs will be posted publicly, but usually quietly to the company's careers page and taken down relatively quickly. Even if you snuck an application in, they are most likely going to go with the recommended candidate over you, unless you are dramatically better, and not hiring you would make other people look bad.
How do you get these jobs?
Networking. You have to have a strong network. You have to know people in the same industry as you, or doing the same job role at different companies. That is the easiest way to be informed of jobs before they are public. Being in the right group chat can increase your salary dramatically over the course of your career. Or when layoffs happen, they can be the difference between getting hired somewhere else instantly, or spending a year looking and applying, or changing careers entirely.
I run a few Meetup groups. From this, and attending many other tech meetups, I know most of the people in the tech community in Indianapolis. So anytime a job opens up where I work, I have at least 2 or 3 good, qualified, candidates to recommend. As a result, I've helped a lot of people I know get hired. Also as a meetup organizer, I have companies coming TO ME to ask if I know any good candidates. And I always do. In person meetups took a huge hit during covid and have really only just started coming back in ~2024-2025. More and more jobs are remote now. But finding these communities is still key to getting alerted to opportunities when they come up. You can try going to meetups and announcing that you are looking for work, and maybe someone who is hiring will talk to you.
Step 4: Recruiters
Okay, so no one internally is a good fit, or knows anyone that is. Time for a recruiter. Some companies have recruiters on staff, others will pay external recruiters.
A good recruiter is a master networker, they know hundreds of people that could be the right fit, and are constantly messaging and connecting with people. They're job is to know what the company is looking for, and what the people in their network are looking for and to match them up.
Recruiters also have access to qualified candidates that are already working at other companies and wouldn't be looking for a job. Candidates that otherwise would never have applied.
Can you apply for this job?
Nope, you have to be privately recruited.
How do you get these jobs?
Use your network to find out who the best recruiters are right now. Unfortunately, the best recruiters, don't stay recruiters for long. Usually only lasting a year or two. When you get really good at connecting people to higher paying jobs, it doesn't take long to figure out you can connect yourself to those jobs too.
But you don't need the best recruiter, as long as you can very clearly communicate exactly what you want, and what you don't want, then that's all they really need to know.
Step 5: The careers page
We finally made it to the point where the job requirements (job req) are posted publicly. But still quietly, on the company's website. Usually careers.company.com or company.com/careers.
Reasons
- This limits the applicants just to those that are already interested in working for the company.
- This means they are more likely to stay at the company longer if hired. And may already be familiar with the industry the company operates in.
- This also reduces the overall amount of applicants, important for competitive roles that may get dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of candidates. That's a lot to filter through.
Can you apply for this job?
Yes! But you have to be proactive and looking around at specific companies, and routinely coming back to see what's new.
How do you get these jobs?
Have a really polished resume that is optimized to quickly communicate your skills and experience, so as they skim across 15 resumes a minute, yours doesn't get filtered out.
Practice your phone, and video call, interview skills.
Step 6: Desperation sets in
If a company isn't getting enough good candidates, they may try targeted job boards. Here in Indianapolis, we have a local tech community job board, which only those in our community know about. So you're more likely to find passionate, enthusiastic candidates through it. For programmers, Stack Overflow used to have the best job board, but then they killed it in order to take money from Indeed, to embed their shitty search. I mean, do what you gotta do to stay afloat as a company, StackOverflow, but sucks that the best tool for the industry died off. Now-a-days, I see people using LinkedIn's targeted marketing of job roles as a replacement.
So yeah, basically more targeted posting of the job to the community, since not everyone checks your company's specific careers page every day.
Can you apply for this job?
Sure
How do you get these jobs?
Same as above. Good resume, good interview, good luck.
Step 7: The sewage
At this point, the job posting has been turned down by:
- All internal employees
- No one is willing to recommend anyone
- All the experience people contacted by recruiters
- No one good is applying to the website
- No one good is applying to the targeted job boards
Why is everyone passing on this job? Is it the bad pay? Bad benefits? The toxic company culture? The horrible tech stack (looking at you React)? A combination of these things?
Whatever it is, this job is probably pretty shitty. So it has made its way to the end of the pipeline, a sewer pipe, public job boards. I'm talking Indeed, Monster, Jobs . com, non-targeted public LinkedIn job posts, etc.
Can you apply for this job?
I wouldn't recommend it.
How do you get these jobs?
You don't want them.
So that's the pipeline. The order isn't completely precise. Some companies will try the careers page first before paying for a recruiter. For example. The pipeline is basically the same across all companies, because it just makes the most business sense. Now that you understand it, you can work your way up to the earlier steps to get access to better jobs.
Everything above this point has been very general, and is applicable to basically anyone job. But the rest of this is going to get specific to programmers.
It's important that more people know about this pipeline. Otherwise you end up with all the shitty React jobs making it to the sewage stage and people only seeing those and thinking "everyone uses shitty React, guess I have to learn it", or "everyone else is hiring for shitty React, maybe our company should use it, even though it is easily the worst possible choice we could make".
Which leads us to...
React is a litmus test for bad jobs
Notice that you never see Vue or Rust jobs getting outsourced to India or the Philippines, because those are very desirable jobs. But shitty React jobs? Yeah, those flood the job boards, and eventually get outsourced because no one with any experience wants to use the worst technology choice.
All the good non-react jobs get taken by qualified developers. Where I work, every team can pick what they want to use, and everyone picks Vue and is very thankful they get to. So I hire up Vue devs from my network (I run the Vue.js meetup group in Indianapolis). You'll never see our Vue jobs on a public board, because they all get filled internally or via recommendation.
As a UI Architect, I've talked to many other experienced developers, in our community, or even at conferences I've attended or spoken at. I've found an interesting pattern among these groups. They use certain technologies, like React, as a kind of litmus test. The idea follows this logic:
Because all other alternatives to React are better than it, picking it shows poor decision making skills. They went with the most well known choice, without comparing it to anything else. This is a thoughtless approach. So if they are this bad at picking a technology, what other bad business, or management decisions will they make. They probably will not be a good place to work at in general.
If no experienced people are willing to work in React, that means that only inexperienced developers are building these projects. So any React project over 6 months old is basically guaranteed to be a spaghetti code train wreck. Which reinforces the decision of experienced developers to pass on these jobs.
That's why you never see good jobs on public marketplaces, and why you see so many React jobs.
Advice for those entering the industry
If you are new to development, and someone told you "Learn React, there are a lot of jobs for it"... well, you weren't lied to, but you were somewhat misinformed.
Yes, these jobs really do exist, but they're all going to be bad for your career. Your likelihood of getting to work with a really good senior developer is near 0%. Good devs don't take these jobs to begin with, or they leave them quickly. Without good mentorship in your early career, it will take you dramatically longer to get good at this stuff (and this stuff is hard enough as it is).
When you are ready to move on and work somewhere else, you might get stuck, trapped, in the largely underpaid React world. We're not at the stage yet were we just throw out any resume that mentions React, like we do with Flash or CoffeeScript, but those days are coming, and having it on your resume today does de-value it. Unless you are applying to a job that uses it. But again, you don't want those jobs. React is known for having hundreds of React-specific problems you need to solve that no other framework makes you deal with, due to React's bad design.
You will spend years getting good at, and learning how to solve, problems that are created by the framework (React). This is 100% wasted time and effort. You will never use that knowledge, those patterns, or skills again, after you switch to ANYTHING else. This is why I devalue React developers compared to other candidates applying for a role.
If I see someone with 5 years React experience, I have to ask "how many years do I need to subtract from that for it to be equivalent to my other candidates". Maybe, 3 years? That sounds about right, for all the time they've wasted learning shit that won't be of use here, or anywhere else for that matter. Compare that to someone with 3 years Vue or Svelte, experience, they are going to be better hires for whatever role I'm offering if it relates to frontend software development at all. Almost all of their time was spent learning how to develop software, not how to use their tools.
Further, because the virus that is React is so pervasive, and React developers are devalued, you WILL be paid less on average. It is harder to find someone with decent Vue experience, than it is to find someone with deep React experience. So Vue devs are higher valued, and paid more on average.
Heed this warning, new devs.
Good luck out there...
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