From job seeker to building bridges for other job seekers: The story of #TechIsHiring Part 1
Tags: hiring, jobsearch, entrepreneurship
Published: 2022-10-31 22:36:12

## Introduction

![Nerando commenting that I turned my entire job search into a product. Me letting Nerando know he's smart!](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/l1i3wa5u9ar3nwzz10b4.jpg)


As of this writing, TechIsHiring is a year and a half old. It currently has 11,000+ followers on Twitter, a little over 1,000 followers on LinkedIn and has a newsletter with 750+ subscribers. This is probably the most impactful thing I’ve ever done and most certainly the most impactful thing I currently maintain. As Nerando said in the image above, I managed to turn my job search into a product.

And it was a happy accident!

TechIsHiring was born from a question I randomly asked #TechTwitter one day almost two years ago and after some minor encouragement, I decided that I’d try to put this thing together. A lot of the ideas that make up TechIsHiring currently weren’t even mine honestly. The newsletter came from [Veni Kunche](https://www.twitter.com/veniKunche), the account itself and the bot was something I dragged my feet on until [John Croston](https://twitter.com/jfc3) pushed me to do so. The branding that exists today only came to be because [Brian Douglas](https://www.twitter.com/bdougieyo) insisted that I fix the account page. All I did was come up with the name, and ironically #TechTwitter rejected it in a poll. A collection of happy accidents and good luck makes TechIsHiring what it is today.

Want to hear how these came to be? Okay, let’s start at what started all this. My pandemic job search.

## Job Searching is Tough

In February 2020, I had left a previous role and took some time off before going back out on the grind. After my break, I had initially planned to travel to New York and spend some time with the Dev Community there (I didn’t know about TechTwitter at the time). I had family in New York I could stay with to make it affordable for myself and had saved up enough money to not die of hunger during my stay.

Little did I know that a global pandemic was getting ramped up.

By March of 2020, my plans were officially dashed as Jamaica entered lockdown. No flights were coming in and out the island and an island-wide curfew was in effect which would last the next 2 years. By this time, the US was well into its own lockdown process and I didn’t feel comfortable flying there anyhow. It was during this time I learned of [@BekahHW](https://www.twitter.com/bekahhw) and [@VirtualCoffeeIO](https://www.twitter.com/virtualcoffeeio) (before it got its official name). I spent a lot of time hanging out with a lot of the members there and attending events. A lot of the conversations were about job searching and trying to find a job as a beginner. This really pushed me to really start my job search again and after polishing up my resume and a quick review, off I went.

Summer 2020 felt like THE WORST time to job search as a foreign worker presenting themselves with only a year of experience (which is a whole other story(link to resume article)). I spent the better part of the year getting rejected from every company imaginable. Even companies that I had a connection with that worked there had absolutely no interest in me. It was a tough time and the only thing I could really think of doing was reworking my resume cause maybe I could spruce it up to make it better.

It was during this time that I noticed people making tweets about their job search. And so I tried to do the same as well and my tweet did well. I had a lot of people retweeting and liking my tweet and I had a few people reach out that were interested because of it. While I was unable to leverage the opportunities that I got, it did show me I could really leverage Twitter as a mechanism to find great opportunities. 

My own job search had its highs and lows but I kept as best as I could.

## Is there a space for job searching tweets?

Fast-forward to around April 2021. My job search hadn’t really improved but I kept at it, leveraging the new resource of people making job searching tweets to try and help my own search. It was then when I asked this question which changed my life:


![A tweet I made to that would eventually start the hashtag: Is there a hashtag for technology professionals looking for work? If there isn't, someone should definitely create one (has no problem being that somebody). #cybermentoringmonday #techtwitter #blacktechtwitter](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/nypcvi2dgrfu59c4lr0v.jpg)

To be 100% honest with you, I might not have followed up on this if it weren’t for someone reaching out and urging me to push forward with the idea. That person was @SpencerGTyson who decided that this was a great idea and that I should seriously pursue this. The poll to decide the original name was his idea:

![A tweet I made about polling for the name of the hashtag. #TechIsHiring came second to #TechHireHere](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/rzeqwt9x6wv5jkzzwsdg.jpg)

As you probably noticed, TechIsHiring actually didn’t win that poll. So wha’ ha’ happen was, when I checked out #TechHireHere, I noticed there was a company using it. It was irregular but it was enough to deter me from the name. Also honestly, I liked #TechIsHiring more. And so after a bit of grumbling, I decided that I’d stake a claim to my new piece of digital land:


![The very first #TechIsHiring tweet: Just wanted to promote a hashtag for tech hiring on Twitter! #TechIsHiring If you are making a looking for work tweet or job posting, please consider using this hashtag to help people find it easier. I claim this hashtag in the name of Mar-uhh... Tech! And there's an image of Marvin the Martian looking at a Mars flag](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/2pkdbcwczfpwr5e7q5k4.jpg)

And that’s how TechIsHiring was born. Now the real challenge was to begin. How the hell was I going to get people to use this thing? 

In the next article, I'll talk about actually attempting the grow the hashtag!

* If you found this article interesting, please feel free to heart this article!
* If you’re interested in learning more about Front-End Engineering, follow me here on [Dev.to](www.dev.to/chad_r_stewart) and [Twitter](www.twitter.com/chad_r_stewart).
* If you’re looking for jobs, I’d highly recommend checking out @TechIsHiring on [Twitter](www.twitter.com/techishiring), [LinkedIn](www.linkedin.com/company/techishiring) or TechIsHiring's new website https://www.TechIsHiring.com/ for posted jobs and other resources!