Don’t interview in bulk! Look for the positions you really want and think can grow you in a way that matters. Then find out what skills you need to do that. If you have them, go talk to that set of organizations and tell them about your skills! People desperately need good people!
If you don’t have those skills yet, either look for a different match... or think about where you’d need to go to get those skills. ... and then go talk to those organizations!
Figure out something you’d like to work on. Figure out where your skills are the best match for those things. Then interview for those!
Your conversations will be more focused. Your approach will be more focused. You will get jerked around less. And people will be thrilled to talk with you and figure out how your passion aligns with what they need. And if it’s a match, they will want to hire you.
Do not mindlessly grind. Do not scattershot. Do not play games.
All of that is unfocused, unsuccessful and unlikely to connect you with a position you even care about!
What ends up happening with these people is they set up this huge funnel and then at the end of it they play offers against each other and have agonizing decisions about which numbers to accept for a set of positions they aren’t even excited about instead of focusing on what matters:
1) Which position will grow you the most?
2) Which position do you think you can exceed expectations in?
You want to optimize for the sweetest mix of both of these. And both of these factors are complementary to each other. Organizations grow the people exceeding expectations and you will exceed expectations most in a position that provides you the glide slope of growth which is the best match for your interests.
If you’re early career, an offer is the start of a business relationship. Not the destination. And if you’re doing it right, the initial offer is what they want to pay you to try things out. What they will want to pay to keepyouhappy will be more than that after you join. If you’re later in your career maybe you and the company are so correctly calibrated to each other and in sync that your initial offer hits it exactly on the head and the adjustments are for growth from there. Whatever. Who cares. Even if what you care about is money: go for the job where you will grow the most and provide the most value, because ultimately that’s where you’ll have the most leverage to grow numbers either in the same company, or in a different one.
To say nothing about the obvious fact that this is a huge chunk of your time each day you engage in it and it’s 100% worth it to do something you’re excited about instead of just taking the offer for the person who pays the most. This field pays well. A 150k/yr base isn’t a disaster even if you could have gotten 220k/yr elsewhere. Which is totally a huge difference! But will round away over time when your growth is explosive and the engineer plugging away logging hours at a 220 base goes nowhere, stalls and ends up with uninspiring refreshes and trajectory.
Your advice is (in many words): Be picky. In fact, most people don't have the luxury to be picky. When you need a paycheck, you spam your resume because the whole thing is a numbers game. You are trying to get past filters that tighten up and loosen up randomly day-to-day.
It is definitely worth applying for lots of places at first though, that is if you’re not blessed to have people around you to help steer you. The problem is writing a good CV is hard. Knowing how to present yourself in interviews can be hard for some people too. So applying for a few jobs early on gives you a chance to refine your CV and improve your interviewing skills so that when you start applying for the jobs you actually want you are a stronger candidate.
Of course, if you already have friends or family who work in the industry who can help train you on these skills then you’ve already got an advantage. But there’s a lot of people at the start of their careers who don’t.
60 interviews in 30 days is not a process in which you’re carefully learning and calibrating to tune yourself, extracting lessons from each one.
60 interviews in 30 days is throwing an entire pot of spaghetti against a wall and not even waiting to figure out if you cooked it right before dumping another pack on the stove and firing back up the burner.
This not a person carefully working towards a thing or getting practice to calibrate. This is a person who has read too many blog posts like this and regrettably and agonizingly thinks the process of finding a job involves interviews in bulk and funnels and a spreadsheet at the end of which pops out some offers that are then mostly weighed based on numbers and one gets accepted.
This process is what way too many people who blog about their job searches do and it is completelyunhinged.
And it is also, not what most of the good engineers I know actually do.
My point is if you’re at the start of your career and only have blog posts for guidance then actually you’re only friend is trial and error. So it’s better to fail early so you up your chances when opportunities you’re really passionate about come along.
Obviously once you have enough experience to know not to spam every job out there, you would also have enough experience to know how to apply for those jobs you have purposely selected. But to get that experience you have to either have someone watching over you or just accept that you’re going to fail and learn from that.
When I started my career, I had no friends nor family in the industry. I didn’t grow up in an affluent area nor go to any distinguished colleges. I had literally no idea how to break into the industry and it took many mistakes to get as successful as I am now. There are plenty of others in the same boat as I was. So teaching them it ok to fail is just as valuable as teaching people how to succeed.
I think it depends on where you are in your career and how well you understand what you really want to do.
Out of engineering school (in pre-email days) I did on-campus interviews and sprayed out a lot of generic resumes. Because it was booming at the time, I got a bunch of interviews in the oil business and ended up taking one of those jobs for a few years. Somewhat similarly out of grad school although more on-campus interviews and ended up taking an offer from a company I hadn't been that interested in interviewing and worked there for more than 10 years.
Since then, the other 3 jobs I've had have come through reaching out to someone I knew and I probably didn't even need a resume except pro forma.
This is great advice. It also helps expose one of the fundamentally broken pieces of advice that come from scattershot interviewers: "make sure you know at least one thing about the company so you look good!"
Why are you interviewing somewhere when you don't know anything about it? Sounds like a great way to line up jobs you don't even want, which is a waste of both your time and everyone at the company whom you spoke with.
I think your focus is a bit too narrow. For a mid/senior role, regardless if its in tech, your advice is probably good. You have experience, you know what kind of work you like and dont like and you have more knowledge of your industry.
If, however, you are a new graduate, you dont have this knowledge. I recently graduate from university. I'm looking for junior roles. I have a vague idea of what I like and dont like, but also realize that the field is so unbelievable big. There are so many companies out there, especially smaller/medium sized ones that make great products and are probably fun to work for. I would love nothing more than to take my time and research what each company does on a detailed level. But I dont have this time. I need a job that pays my bills.
In the beginning of my job search I went out and wrote detailed cover letters and fine-tuned my resume to match the job position. I even researched what they were doing in depth and made sure to mention this. Do you know the most common response I received after ~2 months of writing applications? Nothing. Not a single word. Keep in mind I didnt just apply to the big ones. I looked for companies of all sizes that really matched what I studied and would love to do.
One month ago, I started the shotgun approach. I looked for companies that had somewhat good ratings on glassdoor and similar platforms, made reasonably sure that I could see myself working there, put them in an excel list, and starting blasting generic resumes. So far I got 8 invitations to interviews.
I know that times are a bit unusual and everyone is stressed, but right now, for me, and from what I hear from my friends, its unfortunately a numbers game. Your mileage may vary.
I agree. Especially out of school, barring a thesis/project/etc. that really lines up well with certain employers, it's really a numbers game both for you and for any large company. Heck, way back when, I got a job offer from Boeing without even a phone screen based on my resume and cover letter; I had on-site only after I asked to visit.
In the days before email and online applications, I just sent out tons of letters/resumes plus on-campus interviews. Mid-career I totally switched tactics and the few jobs I've had since came entirely through contacting people I knew.
I send an email to four or five external recruiters that I have been working with or years , they send me a list of jobs, matching requirements, pay range and location.
I tell them which jobs I am interested in, they submit my resume to the company, handle all of the scheduling and follow up with the hiring managers since they don’t get paid if I don’t get hired. I didn’t need to do any research.
Without being a special snowflake, I’m batting close to 100% using the process -Application/non rejection.
