The 10 Surprising Things My CTO And I Learned While Offering Free Coaching Sessions
Caroline Chavier (The Allyance CEO) & Sami Touil (CTO at Agorize)
The Starting Point
📌 One day, my CTO and I got the same idea : we wanted to open our calendars to help others. As a recruiter, I often help members (of the meetup I created) prepare for job interviews, write resumes or share career advice. I was doing it spontaneously and talked about to Sami Touil (Agorize’s Chief Technical Officer : CTO) who answered : “I thought about it as well! I have been considering it for quite a while. I want to help Tech leaders and CTOs.”
The Idea
So, we created the Tech Coaching Program! #TCP > The principle is simple.
Sami is an excellent engineer who became CTO : he can help tech managers and fellow CTOs face their challenges by offering an external and objective point of view. On my side, as an experienced tech recruiter, I can help candidates apply, interview and land a job!
The original tweet
Here is the expertise we offer(ed) :
🌈 During the TCP sessions, the people with whom we got the chance to interact were very diverse : junior, experienced, French, British, black, queer…etc. It was both surprising and pleasant to interact with diverse and international people.
Here is a sample of where the people who interacted with us came from 🌍
💕 It was extremely insightful to adapt as much as possible to the mentees who booked a slot with us. During this process, Sami and I learnt a lot and shared actionable pieces of advice to our mentees based on their needs.
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Here are 🔟 ideas we wanted to share :
1. Candidates wonder if a 1-page-resume is THE right format
❓ This question showed up systematically during the coaching sessions dedicated to resume review. It’s hard to give an universal answer to this specific question as there are cultural differences depending on the countries where you apply.
My answer to candidates is pragmatic about this topic : “the length of the resume does not matter as long as relevant information about your skills are featured”.
📄 We all believe that the famous 1-page-resume is the magic recipe to get the recruiter’s attention. It might be true considering a recruiter spends an average of 6 seconds to review a resume. Jan Tegze expresses it better than I do ⤵️
But, we should all relax! Start by writing a complete resume displaying all your experiences in order to be able to personalize / adapt it to a specific job later. For instance, I have a full resume + different versions of it to fit to different roles.
How Long do Recruiters Look at a Resume? by Jan Tegze
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2. Candidates don’t know if side projects should be featured in their resume
💻 You are part of an NGO? You teach people how to code? You developed an app on your personal time to learn a new coding language? Of course, it deserves to be featured in your resume!
It’s always smart to highlight what you do (and not just at work)! I got the chance to talk to a woman who learnt how to code via a special training. Once, she got her diploma, she became a teacher. It says a lot about her passion and commitment!
💎 Another Front-End developer created an e-commerce platform on her own to sell the jewelry she created, she was wondering if it was fine to put it on her resume… Of course! It is valuable in the sense that she hosted her website, designed the UX/UI of her website from scratch and used a new programming language to do so!
This topic is dear to my heart because introvert people can shine and show their true colors via the projects they worked on. No social interaction is necessary ;)
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3. Candidates interview without having prepared themselves
Have you ever seen an athlete not training before a race? No one should interview with a company without having taken some time to list a few key topics…
🎯 Let’s imagine an interesting situation: You have 10 shooting targets, at various distances, in front of you, and 10 arrows. You can only shoot one arrow per target. If you successfully reach several targets, you will only get to select one. The easiest one will grant you $1, the second one $10 and so on with the last one granting you 10 billions dollars. Simple question: which targets will you shoot first ? Seems pretty obvious to say that you would first get practice on the easiest ones before trying to reach for the golden ticket, right ?
🏹 When faced with the exact same problem : when looking for a job, a surprisingly high number of applicants make the mistake of first applying to the job of their dreams. Unprepared, risking their one arrow, while they could have been practising on easier targets, they often fail due to the higher difficulty of the interviews and end up demotivated, as their real target is now gone.
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4. Candidates don’t know where to apply apart from Linkedin
As a recruiter, I (Caroline) encourage my peers to find candidates somewhere else than Linkedin ( thank you Morgane Conrad for the amazing and open-source Sourcing map!) because all the recruiters are pinging candidates there! Funnily, through the coaching sessions, I noticed that candidates extensively applied to job offers on LinkedIn.
🔎 Why is it a problem? It’s restrictive. 80% of the jobs are never posted online. To optimize your chances to land a job, you need to be proactive and to explore the hidden job market.
🎁 Indeed, the mentees Sami and I talked to were all connected to gold sources of potential job offers: Slack groups, Meetup groups, former colleagues or teachers, past trainees who successfully landed a job and could refer them…etc. The list of possibilities is endless but when you are looking for a job, sometimes for weeks, you tend to forget all opportunities waiting for you to reach out to them!
Unlock the Hidden Job Market to Boost Your Career Growth by Larry Cornett
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5. Coding programs will not make you an engineer in 3 months
🧗🏼♀️ There is a mismatch between the candidates and companies : companies need skills straight away and might not always have the time to train new employees. Candidates who went through these coding trainings are left alone in the merciless jungle of the IT job market. They are compared with experienced engineers and need a lot of self motivation to reach the same target.
It’s always extremely moving to me to hear the background of candidates who got the strength to switch careers :
👩🏽🔬 a biologist turned into a data scientist 👩🏽🔬,
🕴🏾 an archeologist turned into a front-end developer 👨🏾💻,
👩⚕️ a doctor turned into a developer 👩💻…
The list is long and these examples are real! These mentees are inspiring because they are the living proof that we are not constrained to only one job for the entire duration of our work life. However, let’s not idealize these stories because they are often paved with obstacles.
😇 I witnessed a few things :
Paid programs saying they will make you a software engineer within 3 months are lying > No, you will not be a developer after 3 months. Yes, you will learn the basics of computer programming
Paid programs are not helping their students find an internship nor a job later
Companies are not that open about hiring candidates who went through a career-change. The only one I heard of was the Criteo Returnship Program in France while the US-based companies were more active on the topic.
Switching careers is brave, daring and visionary. Companies should start building programs to hire these unique yet uber motivated candidates!
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6. Candidates should understand the differences among roles and companies
📍 Before applying to job offers, there are some actions to set up. Sami and I are convinced that one of the most important things is to understand the characteristics of the job you target or the differences about the jobs.
Why? The same job title might not mean the same in different companies. Sami and I recommended to candidates to interview professionals who do the job they targeted.
For instance, a student booked a session to better understand the difference between Data Scientist and a Machine Learning Researcher. His goal was to build a strategy before applying to his first job. I gave him a few common points and differences but also put him in touch with people from the field. Indeed, no one knows your strengths, areas of improvement and professional desires more than yourself!
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7. Applying implies building a strategy
💡 We just pointed it out : once your goal is obvious, it gets easier to define the path… Unfortunately, most of the mentees I talked to were struggling with their imposter syndrome. My advice to counterbalance it was simple : “once you know what you want, know your value, you should define a strategy.”
One thing I noticed : candidates are not systematically updating their Github / Linkedin / Personal website / Twitter profile in a harmonious way. Yet, it should be the first thing they do.
Make sure your feature the right keywords : Full-Stack, Front-End, Machine Learning…etc.
If you don’t know how to introduce yourself, ask a friend or a colleague to do so
Look at the Linkedin profile of the people working in your dream companies…
🎯 Here are some inspiration to define your strategy on your Linkedin profile... 🎯 … your career path.
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8. Interviewing regularly is healthy
🤯 As candidates, interviewing is a job of its own. Obviously it shares common skills with the actual job you are interviewing for, but it is not really the same. You can be very good at your job, and not able to sell your skills in the best way. On the contrary, you can be pretty average at your job but know every trick about interviewing and convince any interviewer that you are the best among all candidates, even if this is not true. The correlation between being good at something and being good at convincing someone that you are, is not that high.
🏋🏻♀️ During their career, many professionals sharpen their skills at their jobs. But at the same time they pretty rarely take time to get better at interviewing. This is actually pretty bad for everyone : applicants that are very capable can fail at getting the job they deserve, and companies can miss opportunities to get contributors that would perform well.
During my career, I (Sami) forced myself to have at least 3 interviews per year even if I did not really intend to leave my company. It is healthy to keep a foot in the job-interview-world, forcing yourself out of your comfort zone, knowing your own shortcomings and to feel ready when trying to reach for your next position. It is also easier to do it with no pressure, knowing that failing will not have bad consequences.
💠 In the same way that improving your skills on a daily basis, you have to practice for interviews, in real situations, on a regular basis. Self discipline will get you anywhere!
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9. When candidates interview, they are interviewing the companies (not the reverse)
🗣 You can say it loud! If you work or want to join the tech industry, candidates choose their company… companies are not the one having full power anymore. Indeed, you are a valuable asset! You have skills that are scarce and needed by companies. Tech positions are flourishing and numerous.
🌷 🌸 🌼 🌻 After having built your interviewing strategy, interviewed, you will be the ONE selecting your next company, here is a complete guide written by Tomas Pueyo to select your next company.
How to Pick Your Next Tech Employer by Tomas Pueyo
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10. Here are some feedback we got from the people we coached :
💙 Sami and I would like to thank all the mentees who trusted us!
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Conclusion
👋 Sami and I learnt a lot thanks to this experience. Sami is opening new slots of his agenda. If you haven’t booked a TCP session yet with him, here is your chance > https://calendly.com/sami-touil/coaching30
As for me, you can reach out to book a session here : caroline@theallyance.one
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✒️ Sami Touil is the Chief Technical Officer at Agorize. Technology enthusiast passioned by Web development at scale, he learned his trades at SAP before working on retargetting technology at Criteo. He is now an ambassador of Open Innovation, leading the development of a platform used to launch hundreds of innovation challenges and gathering millions of innovators. He also recently launched The Tech Coaching program with Carole Chavier: an initiative to help IT professionnals get the best out of their career.
✒️ Caroline Chavier is the Allyance CEO. Highly involved in promoting diversity in engineering teams, Caroline is the co-founder of the Paris Women in Machine Learning & Data Science meet-up. In 2019, she was be an Inclusion & Diversity co-chairwoman at the RecSys Conference in Copenhagen. Caroline has always been passionate about encouraging women to network, speak at conferences and present their work to peers. She is also a passionate tech recruiter, always ready to tweet!