Ireland has become an immigration magnet within the EU and beyond, but it can still be a non-trivial affair to find your first job here. To be sure you’ll be able to get suitable work in Dublin or elsewhere in Ireland, you’ll want to do the following:

Research, Research, Research:

1. Know your work status- Visit www.entemp.ie to get more information about work permits in Ireland. Citizens of most EU countries are permitted to work in Ireland without a permit; those coming from other nations generally require employer sponsorship for a work permit. For experienced workers in software and other high demand fields,
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The good: This CV has a clean and simple format with enough details to create a clear picture of the person’s background, but not enough to make the recruitment specialists’ eyes glaze over. Click here to view.

The bad: This CV is much too generic and short. For QA positions, knowledge of specific technologies or industries can make or break, so being vague will keep you from being considered for some roles. Here’s an example.  

The Ugly: Coming soon. It takes a surprisingly long time to invent bad CV’s.

Writing a QA or software tester CV is a lot like writing any other CV, but there are some particular things you want to include to ensure that your details get the attention of the right person.

Things to do:

1. Stick to the general rules of preparing a good CV- nice layout, careful proofreading, good length. Check out these tips on CV writing in Ireland if you’re not sure how to format your CV.
2. Clearly articulate what the product you were testing was, what technologies it used, and what industry or sector it fits in. For some positions previous experience in the industry or with the key technologies is the deciding factor.
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So, as development on Jobyssey rolls along we’ve stared seeing more pieces of functionality completed and ready for testing.  As a start up, our developer hands over the code and it’s up to us to check that everything is functioning properly.  We found a real dearth of ideas about how to implement an extremely simple, basic QA procedure.  Plenty of ideas as to why QA was important, why you should hire QA people, how you should track bugs and so on, but not much that spoke to the “QA on a shoestring” contingent (Yo).

Here’s the procedure we followed:

I’m working on the Jobyssey help section at the moment. In addition to the normal trouble-shooting stuff we’re adding advice sections, and we’ll have a section of interview questions for specific roles too (so, if you’ve never interviewed a project manager or head of QA before you can generate some ideas about specific questions for their roles).

After jotting down the questions we usually ask for these positions I went out and trolled the Internet to see if there was anything I’d missed. Pretty quickly I started turning up “gotcha quizzes” (see an example here for graphic designers). Basically, these are lists of specific facts to interrogate potential employees with- Is Avant Garde serif or sans? What’s the difference in PHP between include and require?

This is not a great approach for a plethora of reasons:

Jobyssey is joining the long, long list of software companies that have put off a beta or ship date and rescheduling our beta test launch for May 15, 2008.  As we’ve been working through the development process we’re finding features that we feel we really need to have, and we’d rather push the release back by a month than put those features off to a later release.  The database is in good shape, but we’re going to be using the next month to tune up these features:

• A complete applicant tracking process that records which jobs you’ve applied for and where you are in the application process;
• Improved searching logic to show you “almost match” jobs as well as perfect fits
• Improved CV parsing logic to automatically find as much info on your CV as possible (and save you typing in your search criteria)

Stay tuned for updates- we’re a bit snowed under at the moment hammering out exactly how the new features are going to work, but we’ll be posting about our progress as we get closer to completion.

We’re in the process of finalizing design decisions for our key pages- the pages most people will be using once the site is up and running. Serendipitously, I came across this article on Web Design From Scratch that summed up the (heretofore inarticulable by me) design principles of web 2.0. The characteristics singled out were:

1. Simplicity
2. Central layout
3. Fewer columns
4. Separate top section
5. Solid areas of screen real-estate
6. Simple nav
7. Bold logos
8. Bigger text
9. Bold text introductions
10. Strong colours
11. Rich surfaces
12. Gradients
13. Reflections
14. Cute icons
15. Star flashes

So as you may or may not know, Jobyssey is a start-up web company designed for IT employers and IT talent. The general idea is to create a comprehensive search site whereby IT professionals can find opportunities suitable to their skill sets, and employers can find experienced IT professionals in Ireland. Sound like a good idea? We thought so.

It is a fact that Human Resources officials spend most of their time trying to identify potential hires for their respective companies in order to meet the business requirements. Realistically, most of their time should be spent with developing initiatives to improve the work life of the professionals currently employed by the company. The primary reason for the time spent on identifying new hires is that highly skilled, experienced people are hard to find. HR staff have plenty of resources available to them in order to identify potential staff ie. job boards, agencies, print ads etc. The trouble is most of the time these methods are ineffective and costly.

So the challenge now is to try and relay the advantages of Jobyssey to very busy hiring managers and Hr staff. After several frustrating phone calls, and a fair amount of hair being torn out, we have decided that cold calls is not the way to go. We are now creating a flash demo “presentation” of the site to distribute to potential employers so they can review t in their own time. What do you think of this idea? Do you have any innovative business development ideas of your own? Any suggestions greatly appreciated…..

Ok, so your making progress. It took you a while to get your CV just right but your starting to get bites and you have just been called for an interview in a software house. PHP development is your thing, you are really excited about it and would love to secure this position. What to do now?

First off, in the immortal words on the cover of the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy - Don’t Panic. It is important to prepare for an interview, but it is also important to remeber that an interview is primarily to gauge your fit into an organisation. Your PHP skills have already been verified by your CV and sample of your code. So just be yourself, and that realistically should not be too difficult.

Alright, preparation time;

This is an axiom that everyone constantly repeats, but that is really a pain to put into practice. “Great” you think, “it was enough of a pain to come up with one CV, I have no idea what else to say to make 5 different versions of it.” It is worth doing though- even if you’re sure you are right for the job, make it blindingly obvious so your CV makes it through the gauntlet and onto the right desk.

Some ways to get started after the jump: