After 2 years of doing my own thing, I recently got the itch to work on something bigger than myself again and earn some money in the process. After talking to a few interesting companies, I was reminded that hiring engineers is really hard, really time consuming and has a large degree of risk attached to it.

When I think about which company makes the most sense for me to join, I picture myself as a jigsaw piece, with a unique blend of skills, experience and personality traits that you could conceivably draw as a pretty complex jigsaw piece. Each company is also a jigsaw, with a bunch of pieces missing. Just as your shape is unlike anyone elses, so each company's gaps are uniquely shaped as well.

As I plan to do full stack engineering for a company that has a strong AI focus, the jigsaw for a company that might be an optimal fit for me could look like this. Each blue piece is a position the company has already filled, with the blank ones being empty positions they are hiring for:

Imagining myself as the green piece and other candidates for the role as the orange and red, this is a company jigsaw where I would have high alignment, because the shape of my puzzle piece fits with the gap in the company jigsaw without missing areas or overlapping too much.

This is a good company to consider joining, with both company and candidate benefitting from the strong alignment. Our orange and red candidates don't fit so well, or overlap too much, so their ability to create value for the company (and therefore themselves) is lower.

When people research you, what do they see?

Thinking from the hiring company's point of view, it's quite a lot of effort to do the research on a candidate. I honestly don't know if the automated candidate screening tooling is good enough to trust yet, but there are 2 things I do know:

1. Almost all the information they will gather about you will be from the internet
2. You don't get to see a copy of what they find out about you