Proving your developer experience without having been hired

To land a first job as a web developer, there's only one option:

Find a company willing to hire juniors with no experience. Because no job, no experience, no experience, no job.

In any case, that's pretty much what I read every day on LinkedIn, but is this a general truth, or a truth only for a certain number of developers who speak out on social media?

If we put ourselves in a recruiter's shoes, hiring a new team member can be critical for the company, and the cost of the recruitment process for a developer can quickly reach several tens of thousands of euros.

According to this article from Welcome to the Jungle, a bad hire could cost a company between 30,000 and 150,000€.

It therefore seems "logical" that, putting ourselves in the company's position, the goal is indeed to minimize risks as much as possible, and thus to do everything to hire someone while having sufficient confidence in their skills!

So what's the solution to show that you have a sufficient level to be hired, even if you don't have an engineering degree and three years of experience?

A big personal project

On the blog, I shared with you my "9 creative project ideas for junior web developers" telling you that creating multiple small projects was an excellent way to improve your web development skills.

And that's true!

But while small projects allow you to practice and show a range of your skills, they don't necessarily allow you to be envisioned the way a multi-month contract within a company does.

A personal project that you work on regularly, gradually developing, and for which you'll have to make technical choices both in terms of tools and architecture, over the course of a few weeks or months, will allow a recruiter to picture you within their company!

The dozens of questions that may linger in the mind of the person in front of you about your skills, even if you don't have real industry experience, can dissipate within a few minutes.

Give your interviewer the opportunity to sign up on your site before the interview, and they'll already know that you're capable of developing a functional authentication workflow (sign-up, login, password recovery, etc.), that you're capable of organizing yourself to prioritize the development of multiple features on the same platform, that you're capable of handling the deployment of a project, and so on and so forth...

Unlike a project done as a team during your studies, you'll be able to explain all the ins and outs of the project by yourself, you'll be the sole one responsible for its successes and failures, but above all there will be no doubt that you actually worked on the project, and didn't just take credit for other developers' work!

One more line on your resume

This project is also, and above all, one more line on your resume, and not just any line, since this line can appear in your "Professional Experience" section, because yes, this project is real professional experience in which you'll have invested your time, your skills, and sometimes even a bit of money for hosting.

Ideally, this project should be neither too small nor too ambitious. Don't aim for 10,000 users, a dozen sign-ups will already let you verify that your platform works, and you'll even be able to talk with your new community to find out what they'd like to see in future developments of the platform.

Choose a topic you're truly passionate about, not a whim that will bore you after 3 weeks, and try to add a bit of content or new features at least every week; it will be additional proof that you can be reliable and stick with a project over the long term for a future employer.

Does it really work?

Personally, that's how I managed to land my first interviews and my first job, but afterward, that's also what I based my hiring decisions on when recruiting people.

The developers who showed us a real personal project through which we could easily judge their abilities didn't even go through a technical test, and the interview became almost a formality.

Recently, and this is surely the best proof of how effective this method is, one of the blog's readers found a position within a few weeks thanks to this method!

In fact, she was even hired to work on her project in order to integrate it into the company's services, what a journey!

Ready? Then go for it!