How to Stand Out in a Tough Job Market (w/ Aaron Cohen and Rachel Cohen)

April 24, 2023·27 min·2 clips

Aaron Cohen explains why sending a personal email instead of a cover letter can get your resume noticed by a human.

This episode features host Joel interviewing two guests from Bloom Tech: recent graduate and back-end developer Aaron Cohen and Director of Operations and Coaching Rachel Cohen. They share practical strategies for navigating a competitive tech job market, drawing from Aaron's recent successful job search and Rachel's institutional perspective. The conversation focuses on the structured support system Bloom Tech provides to its learners and job seekers. Aaron secured his back-end developer role at Ellucian after an approximately two-month search following his graduation in late November. He emphasizes a strategy of dividing opportunities into three "buckets": Bloom Tech's hiring partner network, internal job boards, and self-sourced roles. Rachel explains that Bloom Tech's hiring partnerships range from small businesses to large enterprises like Amazon, which co-developed the back-end curriculum. A key tactic both advocate for is sending personalized outreach emails to a human contact at a company, even beyond a standard application. Aaron highlights that his Bloom Tech projects, which involved extending features in a scaffolded codebase, were specifically praised in his interview for demonstrating his ability to navigate complex, existing systems. Rachel details the career coaching support, which includes one-on-one prep sessions for interviews, weekly job search peer groups, and continued access to technical office hours for graduates. She notes that while the market requires more applications, they advise a "15-15" method—15 quality applications and follow-ups per week—without sacrificing personalized effort. An interesting insight is the recommendation to join local tech Slack or Discord communities to discover hiring companies and bypass traditional recruiting channels. Aaron suggests job seekers look beyond headline-grabbing tech firms to stable industries like higher education, medicine, or construction tech that need developers. He observes that a back-end portfolio is less about flashy websites and more about demonstrating the ability to understand and extend legacy systems, which his curriculum projects showcased. Rachel reveals that Bloom Tech's learners often finish with more applied projects than students in some traditional master's programs. The alumni network remains actively engaged through dedicated Slack channels, where members share job leads and hiring stories, sometimes leading to direct referrals. Both guests stress that job searching in isolation leads to burnout and advocate for finding peer accountability, whether through a formal program or informal connections. The tone is educational and conversational, blending a coach's strategic advice with a recent graduate's firsthand experience. The style is supportive and practical, offering specific tactics rather than abstract theory. This episode is ideal for anyone actively searching for a tech job, especially career changers or bootcamp graduates seeking a structured approach to networking and applications. Listeners looking for a broad economic analysis of the job market or critiques of tech education models might find the focus on a single institution's ecosystem too narrow.

As heard by us

Practical job-search advice built around back-end projects and coached placement support.

This episode lands closer to a practical job-search session than broad career advice. Aaron Cohen’s point is simple and useful: people hiring for back-end work want proof that someone can walk into an existing codebase, get oriented, and ship something real.

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Need help translating your work into proof employers can read?

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