How I got into “The Big Four” — Pt 1 of 2
HUGE DISCLAIMER: These tips are purely from my end, these things worked for me and i’m writing this due to the incredible and immense response i’ve gotten on my LinkedIn, i’m going to share the things I did to get my self in front of the interview panel and then more importantly what I did to be remembered. AGAIN — before you go on criticising this worked for me and me alone, and i’m only sharing my journey-keyboard warriors shoo (jks I love trolls, come at me)
Background
Who am I ? I’m Vaibhav Namburi, an engineer from UNSW with no background on CS — I learnt most of it online. I’ve lived in 8 countries (I’ll tell you why i’m saying this), I speak 3 languages, I was lucky enough to play Football at a pretty cool level, I’m a founder, I run Five2One, I’m a drummer and a guitarist, I’m a Lecturer at the amazing bootcamp Coder Academy run by Dan Siepen and lastly I’m a software engineer, well I think I am.
So what even right ? Why am I running a software shop when I got the chance and at one point had offer letters from several of the big 4 in my hand, am I stupid to let that go, did I sacrifice a solid exit strategy ? I don’t know — I do know my Dad wasn’t happy when I quit and went the start up route haha ( Sorry Pa ).
Oh I also didn’t make my IELTS (English score) to get my Permanent Residency to get these jobs 8 times, you’ll know why this is important later.
Cool What Now
So similar to most of you graduating, I graduated with no job because of having no permanent residency, I applied to 257 jobs all rejected, and each and every single job I sent a different resume, I was trying and testing what was working, who know that this actually had a term “A/B testing”. I went through the general application process, you know, answer those questions they give you, with a hope that they read them.
Things like “why do you want to work for us”, “What is your background and how will you be able to contribute”, “Tell us a proud moment and how you achieved it” — see these questions they’re not trick questions they all have a pattern, STAR — Situation, Task, Action and Result and i’m sure you may know of this — its a standard interview answering process. But thats where we, or atleast I thought it was approached wrong.
Interviewers are people, literally just people, if you’re interviewing someone what do you look for ? Confidence, aptitude to learn, autonomy and technical aptitude, BLAH such a generic but yet true answer though. Its about making it stand out, just remember one thing, when you interview with someone they are not your first and you are certainly not their last, BE THE PURPLE COW — Be different.
Breakdown, V what are you getting to?
Be patient, i’ll tell you — its not that much to be honest and you’ll probably be like dude really ? This is why you made me read all this ? But then again what I think is normal you may not. Okay so I said purple cow and I told you about my background, lets piece it together.
You have to be remembered, whatever it is, whatever it takes YOU HAVE TO BE REMEMBERED, just make it your goal, be f***ing memorable, in a good way of course. This starts off with your resume, there’s services now — which weren’t there when I was doing the hunt that give you all this free stuff that you can parse and review, use something like https://resumegenius.com/ to get your points through, use canva to make your resume ridiculously beautiful and creative, just be different.
The job of your resume is to get you to the interview NOT TO GET YOU THE JOB.
But V people aren’t even looking at my resume
Alright, thats fine, so what did I do ? I looked at common terms used in my field or the field I wanted to get into software consulting, a simple google tool called google keywords to find out what words people are using as common search terms for what you know, like a really modern thesaurus and just paint your resume with those words.
Sell yourself, i.e don’t apply the normal way, there are SO SO SO MANY people doing exactly what you’re doing, stand against the crowd and you will be appreciated, trust me you will. So I actually never applied through a grad posting, I went straight to LinkedIn and started finding HR recruiters, I did this by using the paid version, because with that you can actually see the person who has put out this post. So by doing that I got heaps of names, and they I used tools to scrape their emails and tried to cross reference that with their numbers. Nowadays u can use tools like contactout to get you their private emails, phone numbers and so, this wasn’t easy before haha!
So I got a few emails, I then used my mac to send an iMessage to the email, you see if they had an iPhone, which I assumed most will because of work, they’d get a text message. I sent this “Hey xyz, V here, hope you’re well, great meeting you at the event earlier, shot you a LinkedIn message would be great to hear back”, now since you got their number, they’d assume they gave it to you at some conference and they weren’t aware, again huge risk but not like i’d be fined right ?. I’d also shoot a LinkedIn message explaining who I am, i’ll copy paste below the exact InMail that got me a response.
“Hi spongebob, I hope you’re having a fantastic day. Seeing that you have an excellent track record in dealing with graduates — some of them being my friends ; I was hoping to talk to you about future opportunities. I am a mechanical engineer with a strong background in client facing roles, software development and core engineering principles — a brief overview. I’ve worked in an amalgamation of positions each complementing the other to build a strong portfolio. Please do visit my LinkedIn profile, which corroborates my strengths: https://au.linkedin.com/in/vaibhavnamburi I’m looking forward to your response.”
You have to realise that these people are super busy, so keep it as short and simple as possible, also notice the spacing and short length of my paragraphs ? No one likes reading huge chunks, scares anyone away — we get lazy, so I kept it spaced to be easy on the eyes.
What I did, I created a relationship — in this case it was their previous work with my friends, did a very brief intro enough to let them know about me, and give her some excitement about who I am. Then I linked them to my profile, I kept a solid watch out, the second they visited my profile, I shot another inMail very casually asking how things are going, and sent an article about their firms HR stuff (had this ready) ALWAYS GIVE PEOPLE INFORMATION AND VALUE, provide value, value value value value. And don’t underestimate your age, you have the internet, and you won’t believe how lazy some people are, just have some data on you that is new — use google news, I use the charlie app to get information about people I’m meeting.
I then used marketing strategies, I would set up campaigns and follow up emails about my resume, use any marketing tool, nowadays mailshake is pretty good. Send out info, you can track their clicks you can see who saw what, and set up 2 email chain, the first is about yourself and attach your resume, the other two are basic educational reminders, have and find some content to share with them, always always provide value and ask for their opinion, make them feel important.
When you can, email or LinkedIn someone who is in a similar department and ask them for a coffee, tell them you have a few questions, and you’d like their expertise, people love importance, according to Dale Carnegie its the most effective drug to swerve people to your side, importance, and when you do get to the coffee by no means do you let them pay, YOU PAY, so now you have leverage, and you can end the meeting with “Well you can do next one” — boom you’ve just set up next meeting.
Now what, when you reach out to the HR person, name drop this new contact and share any information you’ve learnt from them in it, again keep in concise and short and punchy, name drop name drop name drop — We as humans work and life with familiarity and if you get someone’s eyes hooked on a name they know, trust is automatically created.
Anyway, this is post 1, next post is about what I did at the interview and how I did what I did to make their experience with me memorable.
TL;DR be confident, act like you’ve got heaps of other jobs, and emulate energy, positivity and drive drive drive conversation and familiarity, this requires ridiculous amounts of homework and preparation — will make more sense soon.
If you liked this and you think it makes sense, leave a like or a comment, it helps get the message across :) Also please leave any questions and I’ll try my best to answer
PT 2 coming up soon! Please leave your comments below on if this helped — i’ll expand further on points and questions you have
