[mooze]

Having been on both ends of the hiring process (in tech):

1. You don't have to be 100% qualified. Just show me that the skills you have are transferrable.

2. Tailor your CV & cover letter to the vacancy and company. List at least one work/life/volunteering experience (preferably a project with end results) that is linked to each of the requirements.

3. Keep it short and to the point. A quick glance and relevant keywords should jump out and pique my interest.

4. If you go "but..." to any of the 3 points above, you're probably wasting everyone's time.

[porker]

I'm going to "but... " point 2, having been there last week.

There were 10 requirements. It was a niche job that I was skilled at. For 1 I had life experience with end results (do ppl have life/volunteering experience that applies to job requirements? I'm nearly 40 and don't). For the other 9 I could link them to exact work matches - except all are under NDAs with different clients, so had to be described vaguely.

The company I was interviewing with weren't impressed, which was ironic as I'd had to sign a NDA prior to the interview.

They also wanted to inspect code I'd written - can they see a project? Well no, because it's written for a commercial client. What can I show them on GitHub? Nothing helpful as I develop in private repositories and what is public is experimental code doodles.

How do you handle strict NDAs and private projects?

[mooze]

If it's under NDA then don't talk specifics, but during the interview you can talk about difficulties you overcame or lessons you learned during the process. The key is to show that you are equipped to solve their problems.

If they're pushing for you to break NDA, then you probably don't want to work there anyway.