profile

Henry Ngo

Recruiting Partner for Full Stack Engineers interested in Health Tech. I write a weekly newsletter for engineers on the job search, EMs building teams, and founders hiring them. With 10+ years hiring 350+ engineers for startups, I deliver insider knowledge written as stand-ups, sprints, and retrospectives so you can take action immediately. Subscribe and I'll send 3 Claude Prompts to update your resume, LinkedIn profile, and benchmark total compensation for your experience level.

Featured Post

Welcome to asmbld.

Nearly eleven years ago, my daughter was born. And like most new parents, I started doing the math on my life very quickly. I had a stable job. Good pay. Outdoor work. Flexible hours. But I was missing time with her. And that started to wear me down. So I did what most people do and began to search for a new position. I applied on the job boards, sent my resume to a recruiting agency, and asked around within my network. To my surprise, someone put a good word in for me to a friend that led...

Tell Me About Yourself

⚡️ asmbld · Issue #008 Written for engineers on the job search, EMs building teams, and founders hiring them. 01 · STAND-UP “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” — Peter Drucker Most candidates answer “tell me about yourself” by narrating their resume. The interviewer already has the resume. What they’re actually listening for is whether you understand your own work well enough to explain it to a stranger in ninety seconds. Here’s the framework I developed...

Networking Saved My Startup

⚡️ asmbld · Issue #007 Written for engineers on the job search, EMs building teams, and founders hiring them. 01 · STAND-UP "Your network is the people who want to see you win." — Sahil Lavingia Most people hear "network" and think LinkedIn requests. Sahil meant something different. He meant the people already watching — who notice a typo in your GitHub repo, who forward your message to someone who books you on a panel. You don't build that in a day. You tend it over years. Start now. 02 ·...

Rejection is Not Feedback

⚡️ asmbld · Issue #006 Written for engineers on the job search, EMs building teams, and founders hiring them. 01 · STAND-UP "Feedback is the breakfast of champions." — Ken Blanchard Most teams serve cold coffee and call it a meal. The debrief happens. Someone types two sentences into the ATS. The candidate gets a rejection email written by a lawyer in 2019. "Unfortunately, we moved forward with someone with {insert variable reason}..." And everyone wonders why the next search starts with the...

One Resume Prompt to Rule Them All

⚡️ asmbld · Issue #005 Written for engineers on the job search, EMs building teams, and founders hiring them. 01 · STAND-UP “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African proverb I’ve been thinking about this one differently lately. It’s not just about speed or distance. It’s about information. Recruiters go fast — alone, with proprietary playbooks, behind closed doors. Engineers and EMs run the same broken job search loop a thousand times over. Nobody goes...

Why your resume is your homepage

⚡️ asmbld · Issue #004 Written for engineers on the job search, EMs building teams, and founders hiring them. 01 · STAND-UP “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” — Will Rogers Most resumes are designed to be read. The best ones are designed to be scanned. There’s a difference. 02 · SPRINT I have a confession. I have over 15 resume formats saved on my computer. Different file formats. Different fonts. Different lengths. One of them — I’m not making this up — has headers...

I hope more startups do this.

⚡️ asmbld · Issue #003 Written for engineers on the job search, EMs building teams, and founders hiring them. 01 · STAND-UP “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln (Kind of...) Most hiring managers spend zero hours on the axe. They open a role, start sourcing, and wonder why the first ninety days feel like a slow-motion stumble. The sharpening isn’t the job description. It’s the question nobody asks before the search opens:...

Hiring is a product. Design it like one.

⚡️ asmbld · Issue #002 Written for engineers on the job search, EMs building teams, and founders hiring them. 01 · STAND-UP “Before you build, you must understand the problem.” Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux Every engineer I’ve ever worked with knows this instinctively. You don’t write code before you understand the system. You don’t ship before you define what done looks like. But when it’s time to hire, most engineering teams skip the design doc entirely. And then wonder why the search...

It's not you, it's the system

⚡️ asmbld · Issue #001 Written for engineers on the job search, EMs building teams, and founders hiring them. 01 · STAND-UP “The system is not broken. It was built this way.” common observation from anyone who has been inside one long enough Most engineers on the job search eventually ask the same question: What am I doing wrong? They optimize their resume. Rewrite their summary. Practice their behavioral answers. Apply again. Wait again. And the system — silent, inconsistent, weirdly...