The first developer job is often the hardest to land of an entire career. Job ads that say "junior" remain a minority, they attract a lot of applications, and companies that hire beginners often prefer profiles recommended by an employee or who did an internship with them. When you have neither that internship nor that network, you have to make up for it with a more targeted search and a stronger application. This article describes a method: choosing the right employers, multiplying points of contact, presenting a resume that holds up to comparison and lasting the distance.
Why the first job is the hardest to get
From the company’s point of view, hiring a beginner developer is an investment. During their first months, they produce less than an experienced developer and take up the time of a more senior colleague for code reviews, mentoring and learning the product. A team under delivery pressure therefore hesitates to open a junior role, and when it does, it tries to reduce the risk.
That risk is reduced in three ways, which you should keep in mind throughout your search:
- Referral: an employee who knows you, a former internship supervisor, a teacher in contact with the team. This is the path a network naturally opens, and the one you lack.
- Proof of work: a project the team can open, readable code, a deployment that works. This is your main lever.
- Precise fit: a candidate whose stack, location and availability exactly match the need. This criterion depends on your targeting.
Without a network, you therefore play on the last two levers, and you can gradually build the first one.
Targeting employers who hire juniors
Sending the same resume to every developer job ad published in your city is the most widespread and least effective strategy. It is better to identify employers who genuinely have the capacity to train people, then approach them in a personalised way.
Employers structurally open to beginners
- IT services and consulting companies (ESN), which regularly hire recent graduates and train them before placing them on assignments. The first job is more accessible there; the trade-off is less choice over the project.
- Large companies and public administrations that have graduate recruitment programmes, onboarding paths and sometimes whole cohorts of new developers.
- Mid-sized software vendors, whose teams are large enough to support a beginner and whose products are stable enough to entrust them with a scope.
- Growing scale-ups, when they structure their teams and open several roles at once.
Very young startups, on the other hand, rarely hire juniors: they need profiles who are autonomous from day one.
Reading a job ad to judge how open it is
An ad asking for "3 to 5 years of experience" is not always closed to a beginner, especially if you did a work-study programme. Look instead for the following signals: a mention of a mentor or an onboarding path, a team of several developers, a stack you know well, a description focused on learning. Conversely, "you will be the company’s first developer" is a clear signal that the role is not for you at this stage.
Job boards, meetups and direct applications
An effective search combines three channels, each with its own rhythm.
Job boards
LinkedIn, Welcome to the Jungle 🔗, company careers pages and France Travail listings cover most of the market. Set up precise alerts (title, stack, city, level) and respond quickly: the first applications are often read with more attention. On company pages, read the articles and team presentations: they give you concrete material to personalise your message.
Meetups and technical events
Local meetups around a language, a framework or a practice (JavaScript, Python, DevOps, accessibility) are the easiest place to build a network from scratch. You will find them on Meetup 🔗 or through language communities. The principle is simple: come regularly, ask questions, talk to the speakers. After several meetups, you will know developers who work at companies in your city, and some of them will tell you about an opening before it is published. Offering a short talk on a subject you know well speeds up the process.
Direct applications to engineering teams
In small organisations, the CTO or tech lead reads the messages they receive themselves. A short, precise message can get a reply where an application on a job board goes unanswered:
Hello, I am a junior TypeScript and Node.js developer who graduated in June. I read your article on migrating your API to NestJS; I led a similar project on a booking API (GitHub link). Would you have fifteen minutes to tell me whether your team is hiring junior profiles this year?
This kind of message works because it shows you know the team, it brings proof and it asks for little. Send a few each week, not dozens: the quality of the personalisation matters more than volume.
A resume that holds up to comparison
Facing candidates who did an internship at the company or have a referral, your resume must do more than list a degree. It must show that you have already worked as a developer.
A few principles:
- A summary that pins down your profile precisely: title, main stack, graduation date, and what you have already shipped. "Junior full-stack developer (TypeScript, React, Node.js), two internships in a product team" can be screened immediately.
- Experience described by its deliverables: internships, work-study, final-year project, freelance assignments. For each, the stack, the size of the team and what you actually coded, with an order of magnitude.
- Projects open to the reader: one or two public repositories, clean, with a README that explains the project and how to run it.
- A tight skills section that you can defend line by line. Our article on presenting your tech stack explains how to build it.
- One page, no more.
The junior developer resume template applies these principles to an engineering school graduate with two internships and a final-year project.
Form matters too. Many employers run applications through tracking software that extracts the text from the PDF: a column-based template or one full of icons can lose your stack or your dates along the way. The TechCV editor produces a plain layout whose text remains readable by this software, which keeps you from being rejected before a human even reads your resume. You can create your resume from this template and adapt it to each ad.
Lasting the distance
A first developer job search can last several months. The length itself is not a failure; what is a failure is repeating, for months, a method that does not work.
Track your applications
Keep a simple spreadsheet: company, role, date, channel, contact, stage reached, feedback received. After a few weeks, it will show you where you get stuck. Few replies to applications: the problem lies in the resume or the targeting. Interviews but no offer: the problem lies in interview preparation, and our article on preparing for a technical interview will help you pinpoint it.
Keep coding
Search time is also time to progress. Keep working on a personal project, contribute to an open source library, deepen a technology requested by the ads you are targeting. In an interview, being able to say "since graduating, I added tests and continuous deployment to my project" shows a motivation recruiters notice.
Ask for feedback
After a rejection at the end of a process, politely ask for feedback. Not every recruiter answers, but those who do give you valuable information. Feedback such as "good technical skills, but difficulty explaining your choices" tells you exactly what to work on.
Widen your search gradually
If the search drags on, widen one criterion at a time: another city or remote work, a type of employer you had ruled out, a stack close to yours. A first experience in an IT services company or in the internal team of a non-tech company is still real developer experience, and makes the next search much easier.
Frequently asked questions
Should I accept a job in a stack I don’t know?
If the employer trains you and the role is well supervised, yes: a first job is mainly about learning to work in a team and on a real product. The fundamentals transfer from one stack to another. Just check that the technology is not being phased out at the company.
Does a work-study programme count as professional experience?
Yes. Present it as a full experience, with its dates, its team and what you shipped. Many ads that ask for one or two years of experience accept it, provided it is described precisely.
How many applications should I send per week?
There is no universally right number. A handful of highly targeted applications, each with a personalised message, often gives better results than a long series of identical submissions. Above all, watch your response rate and adjust your method accordingly.
Is freelancing a good way in?
It is rarely the easiest route for a first job: without experience to show, finding clients is hard, and you progress more slowly on your own than within a team. A one-off assignment can still enrich a beginner’s resume if it produced a deliverable in production.