Best Way To Land Entry-Level Job? 441
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?"
Re:Apply (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Many companies get their talent through temp agencies, so submitter should consult the area temp agencies - they'll do much of the legwork for you and bolster your visibility if you don't have any existing connections. It's not as prestigious as waltzing into IBM's offices and walking out with a job offer, but we have to accept the reality that all new workers are basically temps anyway. You were lied to if you were told that you'd walk out of college with a 50K job offer. You may have to work for chump change in a lower-level position for a while just to prove your mettle to the company. In that case, it'll be up to you to take initiative and demonstrate that you can do more. Company bosses aren't going to magically see all of your skills and pick you out for promotion. You need to go above and beyond the job description. Examine whatever you can and reccomend bug fixes, or create programs that serve a purpose.
As an example, I wrote a small program to detect duplicate serial number entries so that nobody could print the same serial number for 2 machines without a warning. I also wrote a Rube Goldberg proof-of concept GUI program, based on the Java robot(in before noob, java sux), that simplified and made for safer data entry. Everybody on the floor thought that I was some kind of guru, and I'm only a lowly repair tech.
Timothy: please lift my Slashdot ban. I know i've been a bad boy, but I'm not going to e-mail you and beg for forgiveness.
-- Ethanol-fueled
It is not a great time (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now is a really hard time to try to get your foot in the door. As a manager, I posted for an entry level position and ended up with a ton of candidates with a strong background. I don't believe in the whole "overqualified" paradigm, so I ended up getting the best candidate -- over twelve years of experience pertinent to my business, glowing reviews from previous employers and excellent interpersonal skills.
I got a ton of resumes from college students. Several sounded promising, and I would have loved to give them a chance. But when I have someone with a proven track record who I KNOW will not require only minimal supervision and will bring more to the table... why should I waste my time and money?
Is it fair? Maybe not. When I was in this position almost 15 years ago it sucked. But with 10%+ unemployment it is very hard for the entry level candidate to get his foot in the door.
My solution.... if you are still in school... get a fricking internship. It may not put you at the same level as those I did end up interviewing... but it will help/
Re:show off your programming skills (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm sick and tired of canned "write open source" replies like this on Slashdot. I'm not saying you're wrong, let me be clear. It's just such a cliché response.
Breaking through the HR firewall is nothing special to computer-related jobs. This is universal. Therefore, be wary of this canned response, as it doesn't take much insight into your situation to say "do more work to show you can do more work."
Friends and family (Score:5, Interesting)
That's were most of the jobs are. Which is a bit sad.
And remember, don't take just any job. You have a degree and you've spent a lot of money on it. The salary of your new job should reflect this.In Norway for instance starting salary for an uneducated is about 280'000,- kr. The cost of 5 years of study is 333000 in loans. 20 years from now your education will have cost you 1'400'000 (5 years of lost income) + 999'000 in down payments = 2'399'000. So if you are planning on paying that down you need to make close to 400'000,- kr a year.
Conform while being unique (Score:2, Interesting)
To understand how to get hired, you have to understand how hiring works. Here's a simple 2-step generalization:
Part 1)
A great number of companies out there rely on their HR staff to do the hiring and applicant-seeking. The project lead or ~maybe~ even manager writes up a job description, and the HR staff formalizes it; breaks down each skill individually, adds 'years of' or 'proficiency level x-out-of-5' etc. This means that either a computer program that scans for buzzwords, or a person with no computer experience is going to be the first one to decide if your resume fits the bill.
They are not going to know that someone with 10 years experience with c++ can probably write pretty good c, or that J2EE is the same thing as Enterprise Java. They won't understand why no applicant has "MVC programming" on their resume. This is your first gauntlet.
Conclusion 1)
You need to conform to their specifications.
Rewrite your resume to tailor it for each position you're applying to. Make sure you include every single keyword listed in the job description, exactly as it's listed. Include easy-to-find "years of experience" for skills. When in doubt (say you're submitting without a job listing) investigate the company, make a best guess, and liberally sprinkle buzzwords.
(... and if you're submitting 100% blind, like on dice or monster, rewrite your resume every week or so to change up the buzzwords. It seems that the company searches are re-run upon resubmittal, generating new 'matching candidate found' indicators)
Step 2)
Now you've made it to a person. Hopefully a technical person, but sometimes it's an HR person with a 20 question programming quiz - really just an extension of the resume step (JMP step 1). They're going to do the technical and social evaluation.
Conclusion 2)
You need to be unique.
Everyone else who's made it to this stage is identical. They all have the same buzzwords, years of experience, etc. Assuming all of them have the actual technical capabilities, there's nothing to differentiate you from anyone else, which means that selection of a candidate is still pretty much random choice. So, you need to find a way to stand out.
One good way available to everyone - in life as well as interviews - is to ask a lot of questions. Get the interviewer talking about their most recent projects, engage their emotions by getting them to talk about customers (no one has a customer-neutral stance). If you can get them talking about themselves, they'll leave with the perception that you were really interested in what they do, and pretty impressed with them in general. It doesn't hurt in most cases to sideline the 'real' interview to talk about their hobbies. Then, the next time they see your name on the page, they remember your face, the discussion, and you're head and shoulders above everyone else.
One person I know had his girlfriend call three times during the interview. He did the check-the-number-frown-send-the-call-to-voicemail thing for the first two times, and then asked for a quick reprieve for the third. Embarassed, he explained it was his girlfriend, and they were meeting her parents for the first time tonight, etc, etc, don't forget this, can you pick up that. That sort of thing totally humanizes a person, turns them from a name on a paper to something more.
Of course, if you have some interesting resume fodder, like the google participation listed in a previous comment, that's good to bring up too. Still, people like to talk about themselves or their code, so usually asking THEM the questions instead of just responding or talking about yourself seems to be a better shot.
Re:Missing something (Score:2, Interesting)
To that I'll add (Score:5, Interesting)
If your experience with programming is having a CS degree, you aren't a developer. You are, well, a computer scientist. The same thing you say? Not hardly. While both deal with programming, it is from different aspects. Computer Science is a theoretical field. It is based around the research of computers and algorithms, around the theory of how to program, how to make them better. Fine, but that isn't what most companies are hiring. They are hiring developers, which is the practical side. They are hiring people who will be told to solve real world problem X and do it quickly. They want people with practical knowledge of how to develop apps on today's systems, not theoretical knowledge of computers over all.
So if all you experience is in computer science, that's a disadvantage. Don't get me wrong, having a strong theory background can help, but it isn't what companies are after. If you feel a bit cheated by your university, well, ya, kinda happens that way.
The problem derives from the history of universities. They have historically been high level, theoretical institutions. Time was, that was really the only reason you went there. When Harvard first started, then called Oxford after the English school, you had to know Latin and Greek just to get admitted. It wasn't a place where you got practical training for a job, it was just the polish to an already fine education that included many purely academic pursuits. Few people got those sorts of degrees.
Ok well our current universities get their heritage from that system. So while we now have more complex jobs that want more training than high school gives, students still by and large go to theoretical institutions. The universities are trying to present more practical training, but aren't doing a great job over all.
Now please note, I say this as someone who works at a university. It is just something you need to be realistic about. Your degree can be helpful, but you need to get practical experience outside of it. The only time you tend to see an "All degree," field is if you are seeking to become a PhD and teach/research at a university. Anything else, you need to get practical experience as well as the degree.
Re:The sad fact is... (Score:4, Interesting)
For me, I do not want to put all of my personal details in a 3rd party online application form of some company I have no relationship with, have never heard of, know nothing of their security, and will likely forget has my info in a few years when they finally get pwned by some foreign script kid. Luckily, as for the credit check BS, at least 16 states are moving to ban the practice and two already have (HI and WA).
Re:Apply (Score:3, Interesting)
You were lied to if you were told that you'd walk out of college with a 50K job offer.
It probably depends on what part of the country you're in. I got $23/hour (so about $46k/year) in the midwest a couple months after graduating (graduated December 2006), and then $51k/year about 8 months later when I went from being a contractor to being an employee. (And then they re-did the job descriptions, and the whole department got bumped up a pay grade.) This being the midwest, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to expect $50k+ for entry-level positions in some of the more expensive coastal areas. Especially for people with better internships and social skills than I had.
Re:Missing something (Score:4, Interesting)
couldn't figure out why a string named string was a problem
You know something? I ran that code through g++, and after adding an #include for cstdlib (to get "system()") it compiled just fine. Having a string named string is actually perfectly valid c++, compilers that can't handle it are just broken.
The purpose of the HR department (Score:5, Interesting)
The purpose of the HR department is to come up with bizarre and absurd reasons why mid-level supervisors can't get the human resources that they need to keep their division profitable.
All the other functions of a 'human resources' department could be done by computer or out-sourced to some distant third-world country. So the alleged humans in the HR department need to constantly come up with reasons to justify their salaries. So they specialize in coming up with weird and irrelevant reasons to prevent YOU from being hired.
My last job interview had a 22-year old ask me to explain a job termination that happened to me before she (always a she) was even born! How do you answer something like that?
Re:The sad fact is... (Score:3, Interesting)
The sad fact is GPA and the school you went to really matter a lot when getting past HR.
I think this is a common misconception on slashdot. Perhaps it's a regional thought process, but here in Austin, if you have the degree, it doesn't matter where you got it from (as long as it's accredited) and nobody will ever know your GPA (unless you tell them).
There is such a SHORTAGE of entry-level candidates with a B.S. in anything computer related, we hire pretty much anyone willing to apply and show up to work on Monday...and I live in a progressive tech-savvy city with two universities within commuting distance to my office.
Re:Missing something (Score:4, Interesting)
#include <iostream>
::Fnord(9);
class Fnord {
int x;
public:
Fnord(int x) : x(x) { }
int operator ()() const { return x; }
operator int() const { return 2*x; }
};
int x() {
Fnord Fnord(3);
return Fnord() *
}
bool Fnord(double x) {
return x > 5;
}
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
std::cout<<x()<<" "<<Fnord(4)<<"\n";
class Fnord Fnord(7);
std::cout<<Fnord<<" "<<Fnord()<<"\n";
return 0;
}
Ships passing in the night (Score:3, Interesting)
You aren't missing anything. The problem is HR. The people actually hiring don't evaluate resumes at companies of any size. They send a position summary to HR, who handle that. When you submit a resume, it goes to HR. HR then scans your resume for the keywords from the position summary. If your resume doesn't contain exactly the right keywords (which you don't know), then HR bins your resume and the people who know what to look for never even see it. Meanwhile the scam artists (whether the candidate themselves or the recruiter submitting their resume) know exactly how to put the right keywords in, so what does go through to the hiring manager is the people who aren't qualified. Which leaves both hiring managers and candidates griping.
Yes, I've been through this from the hiring side. After one particularly fruitless batch I got permission from my manager to go twist HR's arms until they coughed up the rejected resumes. And lo and behold, we found 5 interviewable candidates from the batch HR said weren't qualified. My manager was, needless to say, Not Amused, and made his lack of amusement felt.
Re:Or... get a 'real' major... (Score:2, Interesting)
Just went through the same ordeal... (Score:1, Interesting)
I recently went through the same thing. The big thing is not to get discouraged. You're going to put out a ton of resumes and not hear anything. Consider that if you're replying to monster or even craigslist ads that they're typically looking at over 100 resumes for a single position. Consider also that the economy sucks and there are many people with YEARS of experience apply for the same "entry-level position". Given those conditions if your resume has the smallest tarnish on it the HR monster will toss it in the trash, it's unfortunate, but they can be that picky right now. Keep at it, don't get discouraged.
1. Network. Use your family, friends, people you've had classes with, people you've met at conferences, your neighbors, the people you play online games with, whoever you can think of to ask that is in the field. If you can hear about and apply to a position before a company posts it publicly, you just drastically reduced the amount of competition you'll have for that spot, plus hopefully have an insider recommendation.
2. Do whatever you can to bolster your resume/portfolio. While you're in school you can typically find a professor or department that needs some programming or IT work and will pay you for it (albeit in beans). After school, you can work on side projects or take an internship while you're looking for a job. OSS, develop some code for something in your community (church, school, NPO, whatever)...you won't get paid but it will give you something that's in production that you can brag about.
3. Look for small companies. Maybe it's not where you want to end up long term, but when you're just starting out you need to get a couple years of experience. Find small companies that post job openings on their website but not on monster, dice, etc. It can be tedious doing the research but you can dig up all sorts of public records regarding companies in a state who employ whatever profession you're interested in. Then go to those companies' websites and see if they're hiring.
4. Make sure you're familiar with version control software like CVS or SVN, whatever IDE is applicable to the languages you're familiar with, and build tools such as ant and make. Your school may not have taught you about them or required you to use these tools. When you get a job you're almost certainly going to be working with a team of programmers in some sort of standardized development process using these tools...you WILL be asked about them in your interview.
Re:Testing is a bad path (Score:3, Interesting)
I think what he means is that a lot of people want to work in IT just because the money is better than being an accountant or whatever. These people are usually (but not always) crappy coders because they're not really all that more interested in IT than accountancy. When I look to hire a guy as a programmer, I want to hire the guy that has been tinkering around with PCs since he was 10.
Re:Testing is a bad path (Score:3, Interesting)