How to optimize job search?

N/A at Taro Community5 days ago

Reflecting on my experience based on the Taro course on landing a job, I want some guidance on what my best course of action is right now.

It's been about 6 months since I've graduated. I have around 1.5 years worth of internships in Canada (SDET intern) and come from a non-CS background (math).

I've gotten interviews at Robinhood, Tesla, Amazon, and RBC but I'm starting to think that I'm running out of options since I've already applied to 400+ companies and those 4 were essentially the only interviews I've gotten in the last 4 months since applying (I went on a grad trip then did some leetcode practice before applying).

Should I consider building mobile app side projects (based on the side project course on Taro) to expand my job search opportunities? My current project list is a ML API during Stanford Treehacks in 2024 and a test automation group project that I like because we built a framework for reusable functions for the test automation and used continuous integration.

I also found that applying to US jobs to be kind of rough since Tesla has been the only US location that gave me an interview (others were in Canada offices). Should I optimize my search to only Canadian offices then? And for 2 of the 4 interviews I've gotten, usually they ask beyond leetcode questions, but every job was a different kind of test automation (infotainment/mobile+web/data) so should I be focusing on a main topic to review/study or should I be expanding in my area of focus?

I'm happy to share my resume through DMs as well!

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(3 comments)

3
Thoughtful Tarodactyl
•Taro Community
4 days ago
Youre doing everything right and you should 100x your effort on leetcode. 1% interview rate for new grad is the norm from what ive seen so youre doing fine getting interviews in my opinion. The fact that youre getting top tier interviews where most of it is just leetcode is also good sign. The question is why did those interviews not convert? The leetcode rounds will be the most difficult round to pass and almost every single interview will have atleast 1 leetcode round. You need to do really well on every single round.

I'm not too sure about the test automation rounds, but given your internships i'm guessing those probably arent the bottleneck for you

I dont think doing projects/open source is going to help you. As youre already having ~5 internships i dont think most ppl will look at your projects much. I am also going to guess youre at waterloo (its the only canadian college i know that makes you do so many coops) and thats very good on the resume. Doing more projects will take you from 1% interview rate to maybe 2%. But if youre not crushing every single interview its not going to help

In this economy you need to learn to do really really really well in the few interviews you do get. In other words its not a numbers game anymore where you get dozens of interviews. You'll get a few interviews and you need to nail every single one of them. and the biggest bottleneck ive seen for everyone is waiting for an interview to start grinding leetcode. The questions are getting harder and harder and you cannot wait to start getting good at leetcode. It takes months of prep to get to the stage where youre reliably crushing the interviews

Other advice

Apply to minimum 100 jobs/week. Use simplify to speed up the process. At 15 jobs/day shouldnt take u more than 30-40 mins

Are you getting hackerrank/OAs?

Please push back the interview if youre not ready for it. ask your recruiter about headcount but you're generally better off pushing an interview rather than bombing a DSA round

Follow up: are you not able to take an RO at any of those internships you did?
- 0
  N/A [OP]
  •Taro Community
  4 days ago
  Thanks for the advice.
  I think the area where those interviews weren't converting is either because of the test automation portion (since 3 of these companies were for SDET/SQA roles) or because I wasn't able to portray my experience enough through storytelling (SDE1 at Amazon + screwed up on the LLD). I found the leetcode portions to be easier than test automation as I grinded pretty hard on the basics through Neetcode.io and reasoned my thoughts while solving them (and they're pretty easy questions for SDET/SQA), but test automation comes with experience. In that sense, I think Alex's advice on side projects might be a consideration to help me with the test automation part although it'll be a bit tough as I'll likely be using ChatGPT as a mentor on areas I'm unfamiliar with. Let me know if you have any comments or advice about this path.
  
  It's nice to hear that a 1% interview rate is fairly normal, my peers have all landed big tech companies (Meta, Tesla, Microsoft) and I feel like I'm the only one left. On another note, I do get some OAs but not often, and I do usually get all tests passing and finish early (I've been getting most of them from IBM).
  
  In terms of the follow-up, it's actually quite a sad situation. In my latest internship, I worked on one project that ended up being cancelled. For the other work experiences: student role at university, startup shutdown, and for the place where I worked 8 months, I kept pushing the software engineering manager to let me do a full-stack developer internship and ended up leaving for my most recent role because he couldn't help me get the role due to business demands, and I think there's some bad blood there. The team was very keen on having me back when I graduate but the QA lead sounded hesitant since he was in on the full-stack convo too.
1
Alex Chiou
•Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
4 days ago
As I talk about in the job searching course, the problem here seems to be that you aren't getting enough interviews.

Here are the options you have to fix that problem:

Optimize your resume - You can share it in #job-searchers-accountability-group in the Taro Premium Slack and offer to review other people's resumes as well

Optimize your LinkedIn - You get 100 connection requests per week on LinkedIn. Just use them all (connect with people in Taro and just click on all the suggested connections)

Do side projects - This is a powerful option, but as I mention in the course, it will take time. I don't recommend doing mobile unless you have a lot of mobile experience from your internships. 1.5 years is a lot, and it's enough to build a coherent narrative about your skills. Whatever is the most common theme in your internships, expand on that

Do open-source - This is also powerful, but again, getting real results will take time

Network more - Especially in person (hackathons, career fairs, Taro meetups)

Apply to more jobs - This is the basic one. You should apply to every Canadian job you possibly can