The Ultimate Guide to Landing Your First Software Engineering Job at a Tech Startup: Jobs Database

Organize your job search with a Jobs Database.

Jun 01, 2024

Have you ever been to an interview without any idea of what you wrote in your resume?

Unfortunately, I have. In the past, I applied to so many companies, and I wrote my resume a huge amount of times. I wanted it to fit with the job application, so I did my best every time to highlight the experiences and skills the company required.

It is natural to finish having several versions of your resume.

The company might not need you to know Vue if they use React. It is worth mentioning it of course, but you don’t want to put too much emphasis on it. Maybe it is better to explain in more detail your experience with microservices.

The result could be you sending tens of resumes to companies and losing track of most of them.

How do you remember which version of your resume did you send to a specific company? What questions are they asking you in the interview? Which projects did you mention?

There is also the issue of you not remembering what the company does.

If you read my previous post about interview preparation, you already know how important it is to show up to the interview with meaningful questions and know as much as you can about the company.

You need to be organized.

Create A Jobs Database

In your job search, you will apply to a lot of companies.

So, you need a place to store the information of every application. That is the place where you can look before the interview. It is your starting point for the interview preparation.

I call it the Jobs Database.

Database Page Structure

I like to keep the structure of every page of my database very simple.

Each page contains only the information of a single job application. If I apply to multiple companies for different roles, I create a different page. Each page should contain the following fields:

Company name
Company description
Job application info
Date of application
Resume sent
Additional info (cover letter or similar)

Company Name

I always specify the company name even if it is already in the job application.

I want my applications to be searchable like any other digital data I gather. This prevents the issue of me going through every page of the database just to see if I applied to a specific company in the past or, even worse, in the current job search.

Every time I find an application online, I can search in my database to see if I already applied.

Company Description

The company description should be a short description of the company.

You can just take what they wrote in the job application itself. What’s important is that it contains the following information:

The industry
Year of foundation
Number of people
Funding round

Job Application Info

A short description of the role with its link.

Don’t trust the link. Companies might remove the job application from websites when they receive enough applications, so it is better to keep important information like:

Job description
Job requirements
Salary range

Date of application

Write down the day you applied.

This is important to keep track of the response time of the company. Don’t consider it a good measure of their general response time. Usually, companies take more time for the first response than they need for the following ones.

When the interview process is started, they usually get more responsive.

Resume Sent

Save a copy of the resume you sent to the company.

This way, you will have a connection between the job application and the resume you sent. If you updated your resume after the application, you still have the exact version the company has. You know what they know about you.

I can’t stress enough about how important this is.

Additional Information

This could include the cover letter, but also other data.

Some companies require you to fill out a form or provide other kinds of information. It is important for you to also keep track of this. You need to be prepared, during the interview, to also answer questions about that.

If it’s important to them, it’s important to you.

Structure Your Database

Give your database any structure you want, as long as it is searchable.

All the information you need for an interview should be easy to find when you need it. You might need to answer the first email asking to schedule the first interview, in that case, you need to be able to understand how much time you need to get ready. Every information you need must be easy to find.

I suggest using a tool to organize your notes.

I use LogSeq and my job search was structured as part of my Second Brain. I have a dedicated page in LogSeq named Jobs. Every job application I apply to is linked to that page.