Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

Get a LinkedIn premium subscription and ask alumni of your school for referrals. Just random alumni.

I was given this advice and thought it was brazen and aggressive and that nobody would do it. I didn't after graduation. I was wrong and when I tried it later, it worked. And I ended up doing it for others who messaged me.

Apply though the back door for VIPs. Plenty of people are happy to put you in. Random people on Hacker News have referred me. Random people from whoishiring threads have been willing to ensure I got an interview.

It behooves a company to miss at least twenty good candidates if it means avoiding hiring one bad one. A bad hire can utterly destroy a company. See the fiasco with Timnit Gebru.

Bigger, name brand tech companies have way more applicants than they can accept so they have a crude recruiter funnel that is tossing out resumes for any reason they can find. They're literally trying to turn thousands of resumes from hundreds of schools into curated packets of dozens of candidates. But recruiters don't know a thing about software engineering. At best they can keyword match a few buzzwords they got from some VP of engineering who hasn't actually coded anything in 20 years (if ever). If you don't have the right 3-4 signals (school and program prestige, internship number and prestige, GPA) it's in the bin you go. The actual front line hiring managers won't even see your resume.

Try applying to smaller companies. Smaller companies aren't going to land the candidate from a top 10 school who already interned at multiple Fortune 500 companies. But small shops need to hire talent too. They're digging deeper and they have to read the resumes more closely. There isn't much of an HR department, and the hiring manager might be sifting through the raw resumes themselves.

If you still want to land a big company job, you're going to need to bypass the HR filter by finding a direct line to the hiring managers. Maybe you have some friends or alumni you've met who are at the company and can refer you directly to a team. You can meet these people at networking events, recruiting fairs, or other social activities. Creativity, determination, and luck play a big factor.

View it as a software engineering problem. You're there to learn from what responses you get (and early on it'll be a numbers game) and refine your approach. Then you can iterate based on how interviews go.

Any entry-level or graduate position is going to have to train you, good employers know and acknowledge this. Really there's always an element of learning how things are done when entering a new business.

Don't worry too much about job fit. Be broader than you might feel you need to be. Highlight relevant experience for individual jobs. If it's a python job, put your python projects first (for example).

Single page resume, no picture. Find an attractive template and use it.

You can use a section on technology interests to add more technology and express keenness for particular topics. Especially since you're soon to graduate.

Beyond all that, hiring is a high variance activity. There's a lot of randomness with how people review resumes and what will stick out for them. Don't get discouraged.

It's probably a bit late, but co-op programs are the way to go. I've hired multiple U Waterloo[1] graduates and not once have I been disappointed.

[1] https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/co-op