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> For others, who have no useful connections, it's possible to make these connections by cold-messaging people on LinkedIn, especially alumni from your school.
by kcorbitt 9y ago
> For others, who have no useful connections, it's possible to make these connections by cold-messaging people on LinkedIn, especially alumni from your school.
This. If the job you're applying to pays >= 50k/year, you owe it to yourself to take 30 minutes or so before you apply and find a way to differentiate yourself and make a connection. Ideally you reach out to someone on the inside that you have a shared experience/interest with, but if you can't, just prepare a highly personalized cover letter explaining why you're excited about the position and a great fit for it. For a position with 50 applicants maybe 3 of them will have done this, and those 3 are likely the first ones to get called in for interviews.
Treating job applications like an indiscriminate numbers game is doing a disservice to yourself and the companies you apply to.
- ianai 9y agoUnless those jobs don't pay >50k/yr. straight out of college most are going for low run entry jobs.
- d3ad1ysp0rk 9y agoCS grads in good markets make significantly more than 50k/yr.
- smt88 9y agoI'd be very interested to know about any market where they don't make significantly more than $50k/yr. Even in the town where I grew up (40,000 people in a dying state), new CS grads make more than that.
- ryandrake 9y agoI've gone down that dead end. 1. Spend weeks researching the company, 2. Craft the perfect (after a few drafts) resume and cover letter tailored directly to that company, 3. Meticulously make sure all the online form fields filled in. Subsequently receive an auto-reply 10 minutes after you submit it with a generic "We considered your application and decided NO." E-mail. All it takes is a few of these, and I would be an idiot to continue to believe it's about taking the time and tailoring your application.
- smt88 9y ago> only an idiot would continue to believe it's about taking the time and tailoring your application Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN and cheapen your response. Many other commenters, including myself, are responsible for hiring and immediately discard applications that aren't tailored. When someone spends time customizing their application, it means my company is near the top of their list. That indicates a higher potential for a good fit. If someone is mindlessly applying, there's a good chance they're wasting time for both of us. Only a big, badly-run organization would hire people from pools of robo-applications. I've never heard of any organization that has been happy hiring someone who did no research on the company ahead of time or didn't really care if they got the job or not.
- ryandrake 9y agoI've edited my comment--it was certainly not meant to be a personal attack against anyone but that hypothetical job applicant!
- lj3 9y agoYup. Been there. Done that. The numbers game gets a better result because very few companies can accurately describe what they're looking for in a position or a candidate. Unless you can directly talk to somebody with hiring authority, you're playing the same numbers game everybody else is.
- mundo 9y agoThere's a middle ground between that and applying to "hundreds of jobs in under two minutes". What I do, what I assume most people do, is spend an hour hand-crafting the perfect response for the first application, and then use that as a template and spend five minutes tweaking it for each subsequent one. Anything more than that would be better spent on things that improve your chances for every job you apply for (improving your resume, adding to your github, taking a course, etc).