I currently have a little over a month left of school before I graduate, and move to Washington. Although my job search is in full motion, I've had little luck. I feel that I'm a decent candidate for any entry level position in my field (computer science), so I recently paid a visit to the School of Engineering and Computer Science director of recruitment to see if she had any insight to why this may be. I came away with a lot of little pointers I thought might be helpful for other students out there in my position so I will pass them on to you here:
Where to look – I've been using popular job search sites like monster.com or careerbuilder.com, but I've found that these sites don't have a lot of entry level listings. Other sites you may want to try out are indeed.com or cybercoders.com. Both are aimed more towards the tech industry with a bit more entry level positions. Another good place to start are large companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Intel, or many others. These companies usually have a specific place for new graduates to apply to, and may be a better bet for someone like me with little real world experience.
Get your resume seen – It is important to include the job title and ID number in the objective statement of your resume. The common hiring process includes large bulletin boards for each open position at a company. The hiring committee will post resumes on the board with the matching job title and ID. For a company that receives hundreds of resumes for each position, your resume may not even make it to the board if they can't quickly identify which opening you're applying to. Don't forget to bold applicable skills and languages so they are easily spotted when hiring teams are glancing over their boards.
Applying through official channels gives you a 20 percent chance of getting hired. This number jumps to 40 percent when you can find a way to get your resume in the direct hands of the hiring manager, and jumps to over 50 percent when you can get it to him from someone he knows. use your family, friends, professors, and career resource center to get your resume in the right hands through both official and unofficial paths.
Got an interview? Study! Study! Study! - your grades, diplomas, awards, and certificates don't mean much in the interview. They will find out if you know your stuff. Use a book like, “Programming Interviews Exposed,” to aid in studying for the technical portion of the interview. You won't be able to memorize solutions to the hundreds of different exercise problems, but the important lesson is to build a good process for breaking problems down, solving them, and explaining them in a clear way. You can search for company specific questions on a site like glassdoor.com. These types of sites are in message board form with users posting questions and topics they covered categorized by company and job listing. Sometimes users will post there solutions, just be aware that you can probably come up with a more efficient one yourself if you put in the time.
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