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My Recruiting Advice

How I got most of my jobs without referrals

Intro

As every Chinese American in tech does, I often get requests from my parents to help out relatives/friends who are looking to break into tech, whether it’s a resume review or just general recruiting advice. My mom is a prolific WeChat user and I love mentoring people, so it’s honestly a match made in heaven.

Coming from the North Bay (not Silicon Valley) into Berkeley where a ton of CS majors already knew the industry, it was tougher to get internships than my peers. During that time, I developed a method to get noticed. I have been out of school for 3 years now, and I realize the macroeconomic trends have not been kind to early career folks getting into tech. However, I think the approach I had when it came to recruiting fares even better in this environment so without ado here is my philosophy/method when it comes to recruiting!

Philosophy

When it comes to recruiting in general, there are actually two separate problems that lowkey have very little to do with each other. The first is the resume review and getting into the interview process and the second is actually passing all of your interviews. I think there is a lot of writing on how to pass interviews, though it basically just distills down to grind LeetCode and get your reps in with coding interview questions.

The rest of this article focuses on what I find to be the more interesting portion which is to get noticed by recruiting in the first place.

I think the more interesting part of the interview process is the first half and it also happens to be applicable to more than just SWE positions. As is true for many things in life, recruiting is actually basically just sales, and you should treat it as if you are selling yourself. In order to maximize your change of success, you should be strategically gathering as many prospective company/positions as possible, evaluating your options for attack for each one, and execute on the one with the highest return on value possible.

Mechanics

Populating your internal database with job postings

When recruiting, I keep track of all positions I am interested in some sort of database. Personally, I find Notion to be great for this kind of organizing but ymmv. For each position, I keep track of:

I personally just use LinkedIn to source all positions, though sometimes I’ll comb through career sites of companies I am interested in.

Ideally you will have dozens of jobs you find, and some sort of idea of which ones you have a decent shot at and are also interested in.

What to do once you source a job you’re interested in

For folks who have MIT + Jane Street + FAANG + USACO on their resume, submitting your application is probably enough and you probably don’t need this article.

However, for the rest of us, we need to evaluate our options on how to best get the attention of recruiters and get to the recruiter screen. Here, I have an internal hierarchy of checkboxes from best (and warmest connection) to least good (and coldest connection).

Also, before applying, make sure you edit your resume to try to best suit the posting. For the sake of readability, I will save resume tips for a possible future article.

Referrals

I have thoughts about how referrals are probably terrible for DEIB, but the reality of tech recruiting is that this is the gold standard for getting to the front of the line to get interviewed. The first thing you should be thinking about is if you have any connections at the company that you can leverage.

It’s easy to get referred if you’ve got a friend at the company, but I’d consider reaching out to a close friend of a close friend or an alum of an organization you were in (e.g. a frat, club, etc). I personally think that once you get to the level of connection of “you both went to Berkeley” or “you both were in the same frat but at different schools”, you shouldn’t spend tooo much time on each individual message reaching out as it’s probably pretty low expected value.

If you have multiple options for referrals, you should consider how much influence they might have on the hiring committee and also how close you are to the person referring you. If your referrer is on that team, you’ll probably have a great chance at an interview. If you are close to that person, odds are they will be willing to follow up on your application multiple times if need be.

Try and reach out ASAP after you see the position as it may take time for your connection to refer and oftentimes these positions only take applications for a couple weeks.

Career Fairs + More

Strategy of how to navigate career fairs and tech talks at schools is also a whole other article for another time but note that this is also a super valuable way to get your foot in the door. Talk to recruiters or employees, be normal and not too needy/aggressive/showoff-y, and show that you are competent. Look aggressively for any ways that you can connect with these people. Some ways include:

Most important part is just them getting your resume, it typically goes into a separate pile from other applications and it’s almost as if you got a referral.

Cold Reach out to Recruiters

IMO this is where the meat of my strategy is, it’s more aggressive than what others might suggest, but I think you have to be in this world.

If you don’t have any prior connection to a company, which for most of us is most companies, this is the process you go through to get noticed.

Step one is to find your target(s):

Find the most relevant recruiter (ideally) or engineer (less ideal) for your position on LinkedIn by filtering the search by the company name and then by the title recruiter or talent. For new grad folks, this will likely be someone with the title University Recruiter or Early Career Talent or something especially if the company is big enough to have special recruiters for intern/new grad positions. For google, both terms seem to come up with results.

Also, try to make sure you're targeting the right type of recruiter. Companies often have separate recruiting teams for different roles like sales vs engineering. You're probably looking for a technical recruiter. Recruiters typically specify their focus on LinkedIn, either explicitly in their profile or implicitly through their posts and comments (yes, you should to stalk their posts to check).

Step two is to find out a way to reach out to them:

There are a ton of ways you can reach a recruiter. One way is to DM them on LinkedIn, which I think works many times. However, these recruiters oftentimes get tons of DMs and might not spend much time on each one. Also, you typically have to connect to a recruiter to properly DM them and they might not accept your request.

This might creep some people out, but I’ll see their location tagged in their profile and send DMs at ~8:45AM their time zone. A lot of folks start out their day with checking LinkedIn/Email and you want to be at the top of their stack when they do.

My preferred strategy is to find their email and then email them (also at 8:45AM in their time zone). To find their email you have a couple different strategies. First, they might just offer it up on their LinkedIn profile. Also go through their comments- oftentimes they will respond to other posts or comments with their emails asking folks to reach out to them.

However, if that doesn’t work, you can kinda brute force it. Most companies have some one or more schemas for how they format their emails. For example, it might be <first initial>.<last name>@<company.com> like b.cao@creditkarma.com or something. Even if you can’t find your specific person’s email, you can probably guess the schema if you are able to find an email from anyone at the company (which is a lot easier). You can also use online tools like RocketReach that claim that they know these schemas, though ymmv based on tool and company.

There are a few caveats here- oftentimes for smaller companies, the first few employees will have some vanity email like <first-name>@company.com before moving onto another schema with more info to avoid email collisions. You have to see when they joined to maybe get a sense on which they might have. If it’s a massive company like google, multiple folks might have the same name and you just have to trust you’ll get the right Kevin Nguyen.

However, not all hope is lost. One last line of defense is that you can often check if emails exist. You can use tools like Hunter’s email verifier where you input the email and the tool pings the email server to see if the address exists. It’s not foolproof but is a nice safeguard. If the address doesn’t exist, go back to the drawing board- if it does, time to draft an email!

Step three is to a draft an email

There is a decent amount of advice on how to cold reach out to folks online, so this is just my take.

You should not write a long winded email, like it should be 2-3 short paragraphs.

Briefly introduce yourself and establish credibility. Mention relevant previous work experience, research, teaching, or classes without going into deep detail. Prioritize work experience if you have it; only mention classes if you lack other relevant experience.

Deeply read the job posting multiple times and find a way to express interest in a way that comes across as genuine. E.g. if they mention that they like folks with TA experience, mention that you have some and love working with other TAs.

You should mention that you’ve applied, but still link your resume for their convenience. Lastly, I would ask an quick and easily answerable question. By easily answerable, I mean it should take them only a sentence or two to answer. Don’t ask a question that is already answered by the job posting, because that signals that you probably didn’t read their posting closely and are not that interested in the position.

The point of the question is to get the recruiter to have a reason to reply but at the same time make it as easy and high value for them to do so as possible. If you ask some super deep question that takes a long time to answer, odds are they’ll ignore your email. You need to find a sweet spot where they think it’s valuable to answer but also low effort. An example of this is a logistical question like do they separate front end vs back end recruiting pipelines or something about how long it takes for a candidate to go through the pipeline.

Once you they have replied once to your email, just follow up and you have really good odds they’ll look over your resume and give you an interview.

Example of what a recruiting work session may look like

So putting this all together, let’s see what a work session might look like. I might spend 45 minutes going through LinkedIn searching for new postings to apply to and adding them to the database I have. Or just go until I don’t see any postings I’m interested in anymore

Next, I work on the postings I have. I have some sort of internal measure of priority measuring which positions I have a decent chance at and am also excited about. If there is a next step for any of these applications, I will work on them in order of the previously mentioned priority.

That might be crafting a version of my resume suited to the specific job posting, brainstorming connections I have to the company, researching contact methods for recruiters, writing an email for a recruiter, etc. I will repeat these tasks until all current applications are at a state where I am waiting on someone else (friend to refer me, company to get back) or until I can’t focus anymore.

Keep in mind that this is just to get your resume noticed and you still need to grind LeetCode/interview prep and you can see why finding a job is actually exhausting.

Closing Thoughts, Acknowledgements

If you made it this far, thanks for reading and I hope you learned something! I know this is a tough market, but you’ll get through it! Also, maybe it feels weird to take advice from someone who grew up in the bay and went to Berkeley for “low connection” recruiting advice, but I actually got my Blend SWE intern, Credit Karma PM intern, and Cockroach Labs SWE position without referrals! Happy hunting :-)

Lastly

shoutout to BEACN for forcing me to do client acquisition for our sustainability consulting, taught me mechanics of reaching out to randos