Job hunts can be painfully repetitive, with long wait times.

Most Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are terrible. Candidates are forced to fill in dozens of fields that are already on the resume. After all this, they still run the risk of the resume getting sucked into a blackhole inbox/app that no one reads.

In fact, a contact in one popular hosting company I applied to, admitted that no one in the company checked the ATS and gladly offered to forward my resume to the appropriate person.

Here’s what I thought - “Filling up forms is non-sense”.

And if even someone does read the resume, it is going to be a HR/recruiter who is going to be screening them. I wrote a resume that I like to portray myself as - casual. That is a sure-shot way of getting filtered by people who weigh candidates by just what can be read on paper. So filling up the form and sitting alongside a pile of other resumes isn’t going to work for me.

Emails work. And they work best when the mails are sent to the people who can move things - which means no HRs or recruiters.

During one of the job hunts, I came up with a trick and was curious to put it to work:

Target the companies I like and spend good time to apply to each of them.

• Find a company's opensource projects on GitHub.
• Send a few pull-requests.
• Find someone at the company incharge of the team (Twitter or LinkedIn). I search the Engineering heads.
• Mail them.

Hello <name>,

Akash here. I sent some PRs to your <xyz> project on GitHub:

* <short description> - <link>
* <short description> - <link>

I looked at the careers page on your site and found out you are hiring for <xyz position>.

Here are a few links about me:

* https://github.com/HashNuke
* https://hashnuke.com/resume.html

--
Akash

Did it work?

Short story: Yes

I realized if the company I was applying to doesn’t reply to such effort, I most likely won’t fit there.

Good luck on your job hunt.