How to get FAANG+ interview calls for technical roles.
Direct applications on Career portals have a very low success rate — Here’s what you can do instead
Applying for job positions sometimes works — and mostly doesn’t. Here are some ways you can optimize your time spent applying for roles.
Not all job platforms are worth spending(or wasting) your time on. Below are some tips that can help you get the interview from your dream company :
Most Important: Create a good resume — try to use a single column, one page resume format. Anything too fancy doesn’t help your case. I’d rather see a boring but structured resume than a fancy but confusing one.
Best Platform — LinkedIn + Referrals.
- The best way — Hands down is to get a referral from a current employee — or better, reach out to a recruiter. More chances of this working if the person knows you or your field of work, or if you have a stellar profile. Think like this — I might consider referring an unknown person if their resume is really good.
- Ask from someone who can understand your resume: if you are cold DM-ing as a Backend Engineer, don’t ask a Frontend Engineer to refer you. Rather find Backend Engineers in that company to ask for a referral.
- Use LinkedIn’s easy apply feature for some job openings. Try to completely avoid career page applications as chances of getting noticed there are scarce.
How to best leverage linkedIn :
- Step 0 : Turn on job alerts for the role you are interested in.
- Step 1 : Find a particular opening for a company, e.g., Data engineer at amazon.
- Step 2 : Send a connection request for few recruiters and 4–5 Data Engineers at amazon(With note attached regarding your work and referral request)
- Step 3 : Draft a letter highlighting why you are a good fit, along with your resume as PDF and the job ID you want to be referred for. Be crisp and concise.
- A sample letter might look like :
Hi ,
Hope you are doing well.
I’m Currently working at ____ as a Big data / Software engineer, would you be willing to refer me for Data Engineering positions at your company ?
Also attaching my resume if that’s helpful.
About my current role at xxx : Working on Spark + Scala + Python on a data lake in a devOps & Agile environment. Also familiar with Data Analysis using Jupyter notebooks.
Thanks & Regards,
Jake Peralta | NoiceAndToit@gmail.com
Other platforms Ranked from best to worst success rate :
- Naukri.com : Especially if your last working day is coming close, you’ll get a lot of calls from recruiters. Use the free service only and ensure that your activity rate is close to 100% on the portal(Visit the platform every few days).
- Instahyre/Hirist : These platforms also might get you an interview. Usually you can get offers from good startups.
- Other sites that you can create your profile on are :
- Shine.com
- cutshort.io
- TopHire
- Angellist
- Monster Jobs
- Indeed(had little to no success here)
One final note — Getting noticed by big tech companies might be a bit difficult, especially if you don’t have experience. In that case, join a startup first, learn from there and later join your dream company :)
Remember to keep your hopes high — keep working hard and you’ll be surprised to see how far you’ve come. Hoping to hear positive stories from your side :)