Job Hunting in the UK: Career Aspirations and Soft Skills

Once you have passed the "selection criteria of the recruiter", there would of course be technical evaluation. No IT company would recruit a technical person without having a thorough grilling on the technical part. While that is no different anywhere, there were a few surprises for me in the UK hiring process:

Your career aspirations are really important!

Back in Pakistan, we don't take career aspirations too seriously. In fact, the person being interviewed also thinks that career aspirations have been asked just as a formality, and the interviewer doesn't mean anything from that question.

So, if you are serious about some job opportunity, below are some tips:

Tip #3: Make sure that you read the job specs very very carefully.

In fact, you should be knowing the specs by heart, and if you are really serious about the job you have applied for, you should tailor your answers a little bit around the specs of the job.


Tip #4: Be ready with an answer when asked "where do you see yourself in the next 3-5 years."

Believe me or not, at one place I had cleared all the phases of the hiring process (agency screening, 1st online test, 2nd online test, technical + soft skills phone interview, 1.5 hours technical face-to-face interview, group manager interview, HR manager interview) but I was turned down at the end. Reason: I wanted to be a technical lead in a few years time but the department head didn't foresee a managerial position to become available in a couple of years.

Job Hunting in the UK: Exact Match Required

Tip #2: Exact match is required by the recruiter!
Not just the recruiter but the company where the vacancy exists is also looking for an exact match. But the recruiter is usually more selective than the company itself, perhaps because he/ she cannot judge the "ability" to do more than what's written on the CV. So, for example, if the advertised position lists 7 skills and one of them is programming in a Unix environment, and you don't have that skill, there are good chances that you'll never be called.

To my surprise, I have seen advertisements with the words "Java mulit-threading Programmer needed". Didn't mention multi-threading on your CV? Bad luck. Multi-threading is yet another important keyword.

This kind of specialization is partly due to the large pool of candidates available to recruiters here (unless you are from a very niche market such as programming embedded linux in wifi routers).

Since it doesn't make sense to write every tool that you have ever installed (even those which you never actually used) on your CV, you have to be very selective in defining your own profile, and target only those jobs. You can't, under normal circumstances, have experience of CruiseControl.NET and Maven at the same time, for example.

Job Categories for Programmers

Apart from mobile and web development, following are some of the programming job types which are abundant at the least in London:

1. Investment Banking/ Trading: This is the most highly paid job type. The ads usually require C++ and Unix with strong multi-threading and SQL experience along with STL and Boost. So one good profile could be: C++, Unix, Multi-threading, SQL, STL and Boost. In the same category, there are requirements of Java programmers with C++ background; there the "keywords" could be Java, Spring, Hibernate, C++, Multi-threading and SQL.

2. Set Top Boxes: Related to digital TV, this is not-to-be-ignored area, specially if you are a C++/ Java programmer. Usually comes with similar requirements as those of investment banking except, of course, the domain knowledge is difference, and Hibernate/ SQL knowledge is not important.

Technology Stack

Knowing C# is also beneficial for Java/ C++ programmers but only at the Winforms level. Here is a quick review of the technology stack used at most companies outside the embedded systems and web development markets:

1. C++ is used for algorithmic and performance intensive work. It's also used where hardware interfacing/ network level programming is used. It's important to have work experience on Unix, STL and Boost for most of the jobs.

2. Java is used for server side programming. Comes with the requirements of Spring, Hibernate, TDD and SQL most of the time. Did I mention that "multi-threading" is important?

3. C# is used for the client side GUI. Winforms and WPF (and sometimes WCF) are also important. Further, if you are a C# programmer, you ought to know CruiseControl.NET or other CI stuff.

Job Hunting in the UK: The CV

Before coming here, I knew a few things about job search in the UK: the most popular UK job listing sites for IT are Jobserve, Jobsite, cwjobs and monster.co.uk. Amongst these, the first one (Jobserve) is usually not accessible from outside the UK---it redirects to Jobserve India.

Before starting with my job hunt, I also knew that most of the ads on these sites are placed by recruiters acting on behalf of the company where the vacancy exists. Further to my knowledge was the fact that contract jobs are available in a vast number and are much more rewarding purely on financial terms than permanent jobs. Yet, there were quite a few things which were a complete surprise for me:

Tip #1: Add "keywords" to your CV

Recruiters run queries on your CV! This is something that I have deduced based on how recruiters have contacted me in the last one month. They always demand "MS Word" files for CV's, which clearly indicates that they run some kind of tool on these CV's. Now, all job sites can "import MS Word CV's" and can automatically pick out "education", "projects", "skills" and "job history" from your CV---no matter how you have written your CV. Of course, sometimes this parsing is not 100% correct but its amazingly close to perfection.

Now, recruiters are not programmers or project managers though they have specializations in hiring certain kind of people. I believe that most of them import your CV in their system, see a job spec for which they are hiring and run a query on their system for matching keywords. No keywords, no match and thus, no call.


The conclusion is that for starting your job hunt in the UK, make sure that your CV is "query optimized" and not just looks pretty when printed. For a developer/ manager, some important keywords for the UK (other than core programming skills are): agile, test driven development, unit testing, scrum, xp, etc.

Further tips will follow suit.