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Best Way To Land Entry-Level Job?
chemicaldave writes "I'm graduating this May and have been seeking a programming position for months. It seems that the biggest hurdle to landing an interview is getting past the doorman that is HR. After reading this entry from Coding Horror describing the lack of programming candidates who can actually program, I can't help but scratch my head. I can program! (See how I put that link in?) If I can't land an interview, then even a short online evaluation of my coding skills would suffice. I just want a chance to prove myself. Alas, sending resumes to companies has rarely led to anything but an auto-confirmation email of my submission. I understand that sending resumes online is not the best method to landing an interview, but I come from a small rural school so job fairs rarely offer anything more than IT support positions let alone a programming position. It seems to me that developers are always looking for talented young programmers. We're out here looking for you too. Am I missing something?"
The sad fact is GPA and the school you went to really matter a lot when getting past HR. If you have a sub 3.0-3.2 GPA and/or went to a low ranked school you should try to bypass HR.
I would consider traveling to another University's job fair if you don't have good local ones. Here, you can talk directly to engineers/programmers who can gauge your skills far more precisely than HR can glean from your resume.
A bit cynical... but mostly true.
I am still in college, and I was hired last week for a full-time position. I was lucky (or prudent) to gain programming experience through a 3 year internship in college. If you don't have any relevant experience, as the parent post points out, you are really going to need to put together some demo code. I wouldn't consider anything less than 500 lines, which if you really can program, should only take you day or two. Try to make it as original and non-trivial as possible... Be sure to document the code well using whatever documentation tools there are for the language you are using.
Also, are you getting the basics right? Do you have a good resume? You should get some feedback from professionals if possible on it. Are you writing cover letters that explain what YOU can do for the company? Be sure to tailor your resume/cover-letter to the job description; expect to spend 2-3 hours on each.
If you would like me to offer some feedback on your resume/cover-letter, I could do so. I've been able to help friends land interviews by doing this before.
Good luck, keep your chin up, expand you skills, and realize that you don't know jack.
When it comes to development jobs, the main difference between entry level and 20 years of experience is salary.
You can't beat being really good at what you do for getting jobs. It's almost magic!
Also, it helps if you're not a dick and you don't smell bad. People don't like hiring or working with dicks or people who reek.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Being a fresh graduate isn't as hard as people make it sound - if you've coded before, and you're good at it, you've got a way to sell yourself.
I hope you don't pay to much attention to this guy. The world is not nearly as dark as he's proclaiming.
I'm going to tell you a fact that you may or not find comforting.
9 out of 10 programmers who are applying for jobs suck. I'm probably being too generous here, but whatever. I've interviewed people at Microsoft, and I've interviewed people at small start ups. Doesn't matter, most interviewee's are just terrible. I don't blame this guy for being jaded. If you had to interview crappy programmer after crappy programmer, you would be too.
BUT if you're the 1 out of 10 who's actually good, than you have a very bright future ahead of you. Companies are always hiring, and if you're truely talented, they'll often hire you even if they weren't planning on it. No good company lets a great programmer get away when they find one.
Entry level jobs have a lot of advantages, in that you're still new, and have no idea what you're actually worth. People are inheritantly loyal to the first company they work for, so they tend to stick around for a lot longer. Plus you get to train them to your style of programming.
Now in terms of actually getting those jobs...
Luckily for you, HR is ridiculously easy to get around. They don't know technology, and you can use that to your advantage. School, GPA, hobbies, cover letter, prior non programming work experience, awards... none of that matters. The only thing they care about is the programming buzzwords you have in there.
Right now, the big one is FLEX, or AS3. Learn that. Put it on your resume. There's a big shortage there, because most people who learn Flash are graphic designers with a minimal programming skill set. If you're a programmer with a minimal graphic design skill set, they'll love you.
Find out what else is "hot" but becareful not to confuse programmer trendy, with what's actually in demand. (Nobody in HR cares about Ruby on Rails).
Just pretend HR is nothing but a search engine that scans your resumes for keywords, and you'll be fine.
Now as far as experience goes. Work on an open source project. There's really no excuse not to. Just think about all the programs you use that are open source, find something that you'd like to change, and than go about learning how to change it. Don't "apply" and ask "what can I do to help". Just jump in and have at it. It's way easier to work on a project when you're doing something you want done anyway.
Good luck!
I'll second the resume suggestion and I'll comment a bit more on this, as this hasn't been discussed much so far. This might indeed be his main problem (besides the fact that the economy is just starting to recover and lots of companies have hiring freezes) if he's not getting any responses at all.
The shittyness of some resumes can be simply staggering, and the OP's might be one of these. It's not that you need embossed print or watermarked paper, but following some basic rules of typography and design helps immensely. I'm not a designer myself, but I think just sticking to one font (maybe a different one for the name/heading is ok too) and keeping the layout as clear and as consistent as possible can make a huge difference.
The content itself is of course very important. Even as a fresh graduate, you don't want your resume to look like this:
*-paraphrasing, but this is an actual line I saw somebody write on their resume.
Obviously, make sure there aren't any spelling or grammar problems, or just awkward phrasing anywhere. I'm not going to say what exactly you should write to guarantee a job because I don't know that myself, but in my opinion (well also in the opinion of people vastly more experienced than I am) the most important thing here is to show how you are different and better that others who would be applying for the same job. Unless there are more jobs that possible candidates, you are going to compete with them. Sure you can code in C, but so can I, and I've never went through a fancy CS program.
So, think about how you are better than others, like those who will be graduating with you. If you can't think of anything, well, that's your problem. Do something about it ASAP before you graduate and become unemployed.
It's possible to argue that skills required for making a nice resume don't overlap much with those required from a code monkey, but if the resume looks like it was designed and written by a thirteen year old, I think the HR drones are more then justified in tossing it in the bin. At the very least, a nice resume shows the employers that you care about finding a job, put in the effort to do it right, and that you could also pick up the skills which were necessary for the task, even if they weren't your area of expertise originally.
OP, if you're reading this (and I hope you are, I didn't type all this for my own amusement!), why don't you post your CV so we can critique it for you?
PS. the cover letters can be just as important.
Rude? No. It's the simple (if perhaps unpleasant) truth. The single most important thing that can happen during your course of study is your internships. When you graduate with your shiny new CompSci degree, you should already have experience. Your competition will.
I didn't do the all important social networking part while in college, and that set my career back by at least 3 years. You see, no one explained to me that the internships were the important thing. I was busy trying to learn what the professors were trying to teach (all of which is nearly irrelevent to getting a job), instead of getting work experience, and building a network of friends who would recommend me.
To answer the question from TFS: just about the only way to get your first job out of college is with the recommendation of someone already working for the hiring manager. Otherwise, you'll be playing HR roulette indefinitely.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I worked in a tech staffing office for about 7 years and I know the industry pretty well. There is what seems like a large markup at first, but you have to take a few things into consideration. When you work direct at a company, there's a lot of hidden fees that you don't see that come with your employment. There's overhead, computers and office equipment, holidays, administration, etc. As with all businesses, they're going to make money off of you; however, you have to realize that professional staffing agencies (not "temp agencies") are there to build a working relationship with the client. In addition, they want to build a good working relationship with you as well. If your job doesn't go temp to perm, they want to be able to place you somewhere else to keep that source of revenue. There's good agencies and bad agencies, yes...but when you find a good agency it becomes a mutually beneficial relationship.
As far as the agency taking a percentage of your pay, this is 100% inaccurate. You negotiate your compensation with the agency, then the agency decides markup based on your compensation and presents it to the client...so at no time is anything being taken from you. In addition, if you take a temp position through a staffing agency, 95% of the time you should be looking to make MORE than you would if you were working a direct/perm job in your field. These companies pay top dollar after your salary and agency markup because its cheaper for them to pay more for a short term job everytime the short term job pops up than it is to bring someone on staff. Insurance, 401K, etc. is a large part of this. This is why you see so many professional contractors out there. I can work contract positions 9 months out of the year and make roughly the same as I would working a salaried position. The only downside is job security.
Someone being employeed through a staffing agency will have the exact same tax situation as someone working full time at a company. You become an employee of the staffing agency and you are not a contractor in the sense that you do not deal with 1099s.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I have to second this statement. I'm also a student graduating in May. I have had four job offers. No matter what anyone says about a recession there are always opportunities in any economy. Three of my four offers came from social networking, the first two came from simply chatting up some guys I met at a conference, while the third came from a friend of one of my professors. The fourth offer is a government agency. If your having trouble finding people to meet, I would say try getting to any sort of industry conference you can. It can be pretty pricey but there are often student rates, and you almost always meet developers at conferences, not the HR staffers. Just talk to people, ask them about what they do, and see where it goes from there. It worked for me. Three times.
Here's my story, for what it's worth...
I graduated from U of Illinois in Spring of '90 with a CS degree. Unfortunately, I kept my head down in school, so all I had was classwork, and I spent summers working in my dad's business. Both of those added up to zero experience.
I finally got an interview in October based on a newspaper ad, and borrowed my grandma's car to go to it (I wasn't sure mine would make it the 90 miles, and hers had air conditioning - I wanted to look decent.) The interview went OK, and I ended it telling the hiring manager something like this:
"So look, I need a job. Pay me enough to live on and I'll be happy. We can talk about what you're paying me in 6 months after you decide I'm good."
Fortunately, they hired me. 9 months later they gave me a raise from $22,000 to $29,000 a year. Biggest raise, as a percent, I've ever had.