from Guide to the Job Hunt on Dec 25, 2022

How to land interviews in a job hunt.

Conventional wisdom says to start filling out application portals like mad, but the unfortunate truth is that most of these portals are never looked at. You need to rethink who we're addressing, how we're reaching them, and how to impress them.

To land interviews, you need impress key players. Throw out conventional wisdom: Don't apply to standard application portals; these are rarely looked at. Don't squish into crowded career fairs, excessively; it's hard to stand out from hundreds of highly-similar candidates¹.

This post will cover the three parts to landing your first interview: who to impress, how to reach them, and how to impress. The focus here is on communicating your talents and qualifications. Building up qualifications is another matter entirely, but especially if you're an undergraduate, most profiles look highly-similar anyways — communication sets you apart.

Address the decision makers: hiring managers, recruiters, or leadership.

There are only four kinds of key players in every company, for your job hunt — those that control hiring decisions, those that control interview scheduling and sourcing, those that have social influence over the decision makers, and other employees, with referral power. Here are all four:

• Hiring managers: These are usually your future manager. Hiring managers have the most influence that an individual can have over the final hiring decision. Ultimately, your goal is to convince the hiring manager. There are exceptions: For example, large centralized programs programs handle hiring for AI residencies. For internships, the "hiring manager" is a general hiring committee.
• Recruiters: These are your primary points of contact, and one of their main roles is to filter candidates in a first pass. Other key roles including matching candidates with hiring managers and scheduling interviews. Recruiters are usually the first representatives you'll encounter, and, just like hiring managers, recruiters are an integral part of the process — just more so coordinators than decision makers.
• Leadership: Endorsement of a candidate by senior leadership certainly carries more weight. However, beyond referrals that any employee can submit, senior leadership really only additionally holds veto power, when a hiring committee recommends a hire. After the offer is made, senior leadership may play a more integral role — approving compensation or chatting with candidates to convince them to join.
• Other Employees: Any employee that's not a hiring manager, recruiter, senior leader, or interviewer has one additional superpower. These employees can refer candidates to the company. Like senior leadership, they don't have direct influence over a hiring decision but can put you in front of relevant recruiters and hiring managers.

In summary, your goal should be to reach and impress decision makers, from most influential to least influential, these are hiring managers, recruiters, leadership, and any other employee. The biggest mistake in a full-time job hunt is under-valuing the importance of the hiring manager. They are the ultimate decision makers. Recruiters are the primary contact — not the primary decision maker.

The priority for outreach is not quite as simple, however. Hiring managers and senior leadership are harder to reach. In addition, leadership or recruiters may also effectively play the role of hiring manager in certain cases. In reality, your priorities look like the following, for outreach:

• Structured internship programs: Large internship programs at Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. are highly structured. For these, hiring happens in a centralized way, and a generalist hiring committee reviews applications. Your goal is to reach recruiters, who are effectively the hiring managers in this case, or employees. Senior leaders don't usually participate, and there isn't a clear hiring manager to reach out to.
• Ad-hoc internships: Startups and Apple don't have structured, centralized internship programs. In this case, your goal is to reach hiring managers, recruiters, and employees, in that order. Senior leadership can make recommendations but in that regard, they're much like any other employee.
• Structured new-graduate hiring: Large, team-agnostic new-graduate hiring happens at companies such as Meta, where there's a common "bootcamp" process, before candidates actually pick a team. In this case, your priorities are still recruiters, then employees. Again, senior leaders don't participate, and there isn't a clear hiring manager.
• Full-time at a large company: In most other full-time hiring, there exists a clear hiring manager. This is especially true of research roles. So, in these cases, your goal is to reach this hiring manager. Next highest priorities for outreach are recruiters, then other employees. I suggest only reaching out to leadership, if you have an existing connection directly or indirectly.
• Full-time at a startup: For startups, it may be less important who you reach out to first. A strong startup will likely be growing quickly, and in this case, hiring will be a priority company-wide. In this case, senior leaders are themselves hiring managers. Recruiters may not even yet exist at the company, and for a small startup, every engineer's referral matters. Prioritize reaching out to leadership. Then, hiring managers, then recruiters, and finally any other employee.

Keep in mind the caveats we noted previously; the above is a rough guideline, taking some weighted average of each employee's influence over the hiring decision and their reachability.

The biggest mistake in job hunting for full-time positions is under-valuing the importance of the hiring manager. They are the ultimate decision makers. Recruiters are the primary contact — not the primary decision maker.

Now that you know who to address, focus on how to reach those decision makers.

Chat with decision makers one-on-one.

In short, your goal is to maximize quality over quantity of interactions. Making one strong impression on a decision maker is far better than getting 30 quick glances from recruiters sifting through hundreds of applicants. To do this, prioritize one-on-one interactions where possible:

• Reach out on LinkedIn: Lookup recruiters for your field, and reach out on LinkedIn. Most my interview pipelines for my last job hunt started on LinkedIn. Notably, it was most effective for me to followup with recruiters that had previously reached out to me. Cold outreaches were much tougher.

  • If the recruiters aren't available for messaging on LinkedIn, email them. You can often times guess their email address. Use an email address checker, and guess some combination of names, name abbreviations and initials, optionally with an underscore in between. For example, try [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc. All of my corporate email addresses fall into one of these categories.
  • Although less effective, another technique is to find employees at a company on LinkedIn, and ask for referrals. However, if those employees are not the hiring manager, this is much less effective than reaching out to recruiters directly. The same goes for senior leadership; all they have the power to do, is to forward your profile to a recruiter.

• Hackathons, competitions, and meetups: This is mainly for undergraduates. Consider events where recruiters and other company employees are present but where there aren't swarms of applicants.

  • At a hackathon, most participants are busy with the hackathon itself, and recruiters are sitting around largely idle. The same goes for employee-mentors from those companies. The first internship I ever landed started from an interaction with a Meta recruiter at CalHacks.
  • At on-campus competitions, you may find employee-mentors as well running around or acting as judges. Recruiters are often in attendance to recruit the winners.
  • At technical meetups hosted by employees, you'll find a collection of engineers and researchers with similar interests — if you share that interest, it's the ideal place to both develop your interest and also see if any teams are hiring.

• Conferences, workshops, and corporate events: For research roles in particular, consider research-oriented events: there are plenty of researchers and recruiters at these events looking to hire. Given the plethora of highly technical employees on-site, make sure more than ever to refine your pitch. They are looking for experts or budding experts in their field. This is mainly for graduate students.

In sum, maximize one-on-one interactions where possible, by attending events with lower candidate-to-recruiter ratios. Get started with a few action items that you can complete immediately:

• Reach out on LinkedIn. Right now, find a recruiter on LinkedIn that recruits for teams you're interested in. See the example LinkedIn messages below. Any recruiter that has messages open or a guess-able email address, works.
• Attend hackathons, competitions, or meetups. Right now, add 1 of these events to your calendar. If you're at UC Berkeley, this is easy. Add CalHacks to your calendar.
• Attend conferences, workshops, and corporate events. Right now, add 1 of these events to your calendar. First-tier conferences are likely added already, but consider second-tier conferences and smaller-scale workshops as well. Research caliber may differ, but corporate recruiting efforts won't change much.

Here are some examples of successful LinkedIn messages that led to interviews, for me. Here was a followup with a LinkedIn recruiter that previously reached out (years ago, I might add):

Here is an example of a successful cold outreach on LinkedIn that also led to interviews.

If you'd like to see the specific companies I applied for and their interview timelines, see How to plan your job hunt. Once you've found opportunities to reach decision makers, you'll need to make the most of those opportunities, by making a strong impression.

Impress decision makers verbally, in writing, and with an online presence.

There are three key parts to impressing any decision maker: verbal, preferably in-person; written, via your resume; and online, via profiles or a personal website. All three are important, as the verbal pitch forms the first impression, your resume is a ticket to passing the initial filter, and the world wide web offers unlimited real estate for you to put up accomplishments for decision makers to see. Here are rough guidelines for each category:

• Verbal: Mention previous companies you've worked at and famous collaborators.

  • If you're an undergraduate, your pitch should include your year, major, university name, and something notable. Remember to include something notable, even if it's unrelated: Better to be unrelated and memorable than related but forgettable.
  • If you're a graduate student, your pitch should include your year, university, graduation month, and research focus. Find a paper to pitch in a few minutes. If your interests align, they'll remember you. If your interests don't, ask if they can connect you with others.

• Written, via your resume: In your resume, highlight all the parts of your verbal pitch but with more information. Include the key parts: your university, year, graduation date, major, GPA, and notable courses taken. Include your work experience, including previous internships — bold and highlight company names, not the same generic "Software Engineering Intern" title that everyone else has.

  • For undergraduates, include any side projects, and remember, course projects are an absolute last resort. Generally, recruiters hire per university, so your university's dedicated recruiter will have seen the "BearMaps" project hundreds of times already.
  • If you're a graduate student, include your papers, coauthors, venue, and related links, such as recordings of the talk, summary videos, the arxiv link, slides, and the poster.

• Online: In short, your hiring manager should have something to read when they Google your name. It doesn't need to be yourname.com. It could be a student-athlete profile, a blog, or even better yet, a GitHub profile. Whatever it is, don't let it only be a TikTok with your travel montage. I'd like to think decision makers will look for substantive links, even in the presence of unrelated ones.

  • A significant number of hiring managers Google'd my name and commented on my personal website during phone screens. Some mentioned recognizing my papers, even. Your online presence is important.
  • If you're an undergraduate and ahead of hiring season, start putting up projects on Github. Build side projects, and learn different tooling — be it PyTorch, Bootstrap, or Electron. Anything that suits your fancy. For undergraduates without a concentration, side projects are your best and most accessible option to impressing generalist hiring committees.
  • For graduate students, your Google Scholar is all that matters; make one if you haven't already, and if you have, populate it.

All three of these pitches need review and discussion. You'll want to prepare in advance, and get together a group of friends to collectively work on all pieces of this pitch. For now, complete these immediate action items:

• Prepare a 30-second pitch for yourself. Right now, say your pitch for yourself aloud. Say it repeatedly until your pitch comes out fluidly. Pick a time to recite it to friends. Practice with colleagues. Use their questions and reactions to guide each subsequent delivery. See example pitches below.
• Prepare a resume. Right now, update your resume to bold and highlight companies instead of roles. If that's already done, check that the most important pieces of information are added. Run it by friends, and field questions they may have. Here's the resume I sent to recruiters.
• Finally, prepare an online presence. Right now, create a Github or Google Scholar profile. Link it accessible from your resume, if not from Googling your name directly. Here's the research profile I sent to recruiters.

Here's the verbal pitch I used when I introduced myself to recruiters and potential future managers.

The name of the game is to practice communicating your qualifications.

[In your pitch], remember to include something notable, even if it's unrelated: Better to be unrelated and memorable than related but forgettable.

What decision makers will ask you.

Decision makers may ask a number of hard questions about your background, whether it be at a career fair or in an interview. Pointing at some interesting-looking project on your resume, the most common "question" is "Tell me more about this."

This project can be for an internship or a lab on campus. Regardless of its nature — whether engineering, research, or some combination of the two — you should be able to break down the project into a story's components: problem, intuition, method, and result. See a more in-depth explanation of what a "story" is here, under "Tell Tried and True Stories" in What defines a "good" researcher?

If you don't address one of the above points, a good interviewer will likely as you about it. Remaining questions usually sound like the following, effectively asking for one of the story components above. Right now, pick a project, say the pitch for that project aloud, and prepare answers for each of these questions below:

• Problem: Why was this solution necessary? What challenge did it solve? Why is this problem important?
• Intuition: How does your solution address the problem? What led you to this particular solution? What insight led you to this solution?
• Method: (Insert any question here about the method. Basically, clarification questions about certain details.)
• Results: What happened after your implemented this? Did it work? Was the problem solved? How did you verify the problem was resolved?

Practice your pitch for each item on your resume. This could be the chance to list only the projects you're most excited about. One trick, by the way, is to direct the decision maker to a project you're more prepared for. You can say, for example, "Project A was certainly exciting, but Project B is a bit more recent and fresher on my mind; mind if I tell you about project B instead?"

In sum, get started on your outreach. You now know who to reach out to and how to do it. Perhaps even more importantly, practice, practice, practice. The name of the game is not how much you know but how well you say it. Practice, so you're ready to impress.

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