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by zubairlk 2368 days ago
Getting a foot in the door is definitely hard. Place I work at isn't hiring at the moment.

Have several suggestions.

1- Have you considered looking at freelance platforms like Upwork?

There is a bit of a game that needs to be played to get the first few projects.

- bid quickly (as soon as job posts come up) - underbid - keep trying.

It'll probably help you hone your skills and have specific projects to talk about during interviews.

I helped my wife step into this. Quite quickly, a few projects led to a nice part-time role with a US startup via Upwork. A while later, tried applying full time locally and the projects and work was easy to talk about during the interview.

2 - Have you considered going to local/slightly distant meetups via https://www.meetup.com/ or eventbrite? Networking in person makes it easier to push the CV through HR. And in some cases, there are HR folk attending the meetup to step in. I once attended DWPs Hackathon in Leeds (which turned out to be a recruitment event basically. so sign up to those perhaps?)

3 - I'd recommend having a LinkedIn profile. Saw some questions about how to put the homeless time gap in there. Don't have any suggestion. But I think having a profile would be better than not.

If you had a LinkedIn profile, I can share that easily. Have lots of recruitment people connected in my profile.

Connect here https://www.linkedin.com/in/zubairlk/

And there are some other people I wanted to share your profile. Perhaps I could try sharing the CV. But definitely easier as LinkedIn is super easy to parse. The format is the same for everyone. One glance is enough.

Add a little udacity/coursera online course icon and that is sufficient to push the profile through the door sometimes.

CVs require more investment to parse.