Ideal Job Profiles
Things that are normal and very common in a job search:
To not know exactly what you want to do at your next job
To be open to a couple different types of roles
To find yourself easily swayed by people and opportunities that come your way
The downside of these commonalities is that it often leads people to sell themselves, via resume and how they interview, in a singular way across multiple types of roles……which doesn’t always serve you best as a candidate.
Let’s think about an simple example (it can get much more complex than this):
You are an engineer with 4 years experience at a mid size company and are ready to explore what’s next for you. Your title at this company has been ‘Junior Full Stack Engineer’ and then ‘Full Stack Engineer’. Title aside, you actually find the most joy in doing Backend work, so, you decide to look for a Backend Engineer role moving forward, but, for the right company, you’d probably be open to Full Stack again.
Based on the example above you now have 2 different types of roles that you are open to. But, ‘Full Stack Engineer’ and ‘Backend Engineer’ are still pretty broad. A simple keyword search of those jobs will get you thousands of hits. Because of this, it’s helpful to build out an Ideal Job Profile (IJP) for each of these roles to help you navigate which roles would/won’t be a fit for you.
Ummmm, how?
First, some things you should consider when building an IJP:
What level are you looking for? Does that change based on size of company?
What size of team would you want to join?
What is the makeup of the team you want to join? (I hear this most from people saying they don’t want to be the first ‘X’ on the team)
Do you want to be able to be mentored on the team? Mentor others?
What type of projects do you want to work on?
What languages/tools/technologies do you want to work with?
How are you ideally ‘graded’ in an ideal job?
How do you prefer work to happen on a team?
Do you have a preference for location of team members? (Async work v synchronous work)
There are many more I could add, but this hopefully jobs your brain.
An IJP can be anything from a few bullet points to page(s) that help guide what you are looking for. If you have something on paper, I find it’s a lot easier to say yes/no to applications, conversations and companies in general.
Sales teams create Ideal Customer Profiles and many teams create Ideal Candidate Profiles, why wouldn’t you create an Ideal Job Profile?!
My goal is helping y’all be more proactive in your search and understanding what you want, is the first step.
Next time…….how to build a resume and pitch yourself for each profile.