Guest Post - Huayi Zhu

Huayi is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. This post is about job interviews.

To get an ideal job is a big project. It takes a lot of effort and can be very frustrating.

The first issue is when should you start. If you ask this question to anyone who has experience in job hunting, most likely, you will get the answer: as early as possible.

This is because the thing that matters most for you to get a job is your background. Since academic background is kind of unchangable for each person, you should probably focus on your professional background.

There are a lot of ways to make you more professional. The first choice should be finding internship positions in related fields. For example, one who wants to go to Google is encouraged to take some internship in those technical companies that provide web based services. If you don’t have such a good opportunity to work in the industry, or you just simply have a very heavy workload, another wonderful choice is to take courses with large related projects. Finally, all these precious experiences can be wrapped into your resume.

After you build a solid background in your field, it is the time to send out your resumes. There are various ways to get your resume reach recuiters’ hands. The first one comes to your mind must be through companies’ online application systems. This method works but since these companies’ recuiters receive hundreds of resumes every day, it will be very hard to make your resume stand out. A better way to deliver your resume is through your school’s career service. Like CMU’s TartanTRAK, almost all the universities provide job application systems for their students. The best way to get recuiters’ attention is through reference. If you know someone in the company, and s/he is willing to refer you and hands your resume directly to the recuiter, you will probably receive an interview invitation. The referer can be your professor, your friend, your alumni or just someone you meet in a networking meeting. This brings building and expanding a professional network to a very important position. Again, you should try to build such a network as early as possible.

Now fortunately, you get an interview invitation, you know what you should do: prepare for it. First, you should figure out which kind of questions you will be asked. Expect for some basic questions like “tell me something about yourself” or “go through your resume for me”,  interview questions can be quite dependent on the certain company and the certain position you apply. The best way to get less confused is search “historical data” on the web. For instance, you can find thousands of former interview questions for the software engineer position in Google. Then you task is simply answer these questions and practice your answer.