Here are some stats and insights about my four years of undergrad recruiting!
During my four years as a computer science & engineering student at The Ohio State University, I completed about 103 applications and 26 interviews, resulting in 3 internship offers, 3 full-time job offers, and 7 other role offers (non-tech or research-related). I’ve also coached & mentored several students through this process. This article provides some data and thoughts from my recruiting experience.
The particular audience for this article is students in technology or engineering or people who work with them. But if you’re not one, I hope you get something out of reading this anyway.
Note that the recruiting landscape is fundamentally different now in 2023-. A lot of the same principles and advice still applies, but the field is more competitive.
College Jobs
Here’s a brief summary of the jobs I worked in these past 4 years. I typically worked 6–15 hours a week while employed during school, so all the school roles were pretty light. I jumped around a few roles to figure out what I liked.
Communication Assistant @ The Ohio State University, Honors & Scholars Center (1 year, 7 months)
My first college role was varied work from phone calls and emails to some interviews and website editing. I gained a lot of soft skills and met awesome students and staff.
Research Assistant @ The Ohio State University, Business Analytics Group (3 months)
Then I did some data analytics research in Tableau & Python with Columbus-related data. It was neat but a little undirected, so I decided to leave and focus on my other job at the time.
Contractor @ Teamup Calendar (3 months)
I worked briefly for a calendar software startup based in Switzerland. I worked on a project that interested them and they took me on to work remotely as a technical support & writing contractor with potential for software dev, but I wasn't a good fit and was let go.
Research Assistant @ The Ohio State University, Engineering Education Research Group (3 months)
I worked over the summer on cleaning, classifying, and improving data for surveying women of color tenured professors across all universities in the US.
Research Assistant @ The Ohio State University, Interactive Data Systems Group (1 year)
My longest research role was working on a multi-device data coordination prototype and other projects. I was surrounded by really fantastic peers and a great PI.
Software Development Engineer Intern @ Amazon (3 months)
In summer '18, I interned on the Marketplace Payments Systems team, building full-stack programs to explore and manage payment data for 3rd-party vendors.
Software Engineering Intern @ Facebook (3 months)
In fall '18, I interned on the Pages Publishing team, building tools for Facebook’s mobile ecosystem to improve page admins’ publishing experiences and ideas.
Part-Time Software Engineer @ Mobikit (3 months)
I worked part-time during my last school terms on data visualization and exploration tools for a geospatial data platform startup. Founder was PI from previous research role.
In November of my senior year ('18), I had full-time offers from Facebook, Amazon, and Google, and accepted Facebook.
Recruitment Data
I collected this data throughout the last 4 years, adding most applications, interviews, or other jobs correspondence into the spreadsheet. It helped my scatterbrained self keep track of things :).
Some Notes About the Data
- Exclusions: I’ve excluded personal data, company thoughts & notes, interview questions, contact info, and negotiations. I think all of these data points are important to keep while you’re in the recruiting process. I also store a lot of other docs (application materials, offer docs, etc.) related to these in a career drive.
- Follow-Ups: I excluded follow-up/thank-you emails, but I think it’s super important to follow-up after chatting at career fairs or interviewing and thank recruiters, interviewers, and other reps for all they do. Sometimes things slip the cracks and a reminder always helps keep you in the loop.
- Terms: ECS: Engineering Career Services at OSU, refers to school career portal Buckeye Trek: 2-day tour of tech companies in Bay Area hosted by ECS| Engineering Expo: Fall career fair at OSU SWE Career Fair: Spring career fair at OSU OSU Emails: Emails received from various school mailing lists
- Key: FULL-TIME: Full-time software engineer role INTERN: Software engineering internship PART-TIME: Part-time role, typically research or school related
- Interview includes HackerRank or other online technical assessments Declined means I received and declined an offer Cancelled means I withdrew consideration or the employer cancelled the role Blank means no response after initial application, implied deny
Some Stats
Some Takeaways
The recruiting process usually sucks. It’s tedious, long, frustrating, and sometimes seemingly random, and these are all symptoms of an imperfect process. Here are a few takeaways I had through this time.
- Rejection: Don’t take rejections or ghosting personally. Follow up if appropriate & carry on! You’ll notice a lot of companies (~59%) did not give formal deny emails; this is very typical. Some companies might even deny you 6 months later. You’ll rarely, if ever, know why you were denied and you'll have to figure out blind spots via intuition, trial-and-error, and mock interviews or coaching. I applied to Google 5 times before even getting an interview. Your "dream company" might reject you. But it's okay–there are plenty of companies out there. Learn from rejections and carry on.
- Quantity: Lots of jobs are also very easy to apply to so the initial input cost is very low. The actual time required to apply for jobs is tiny compared to interviewing and interview prep, so I would recommend applying to a very wide net until you get more experience. Treat interviews as learning experiences. My spreadsheet helped me keep track of things and know where I was at throughout the process! Be data-driven; apply a lot.
- Processes: Application processes vary heavily. Having a sense of what the job process is for a particular company (e.g. from Glassdoor, this post, or word of mouth) helps immensely. Knowing the application timeline is especially important for full-time consideration and negotiation, since there’s a chance a slower company may not overlap with your deadlines. Research processes and understand expectations.
- Factors: The largest factors in passing the initial undergrad resume screening are, in my experience: (1) resume strength, prior internships (2) being a junior in college for internship roles (3) application method, typically: referrals > career fair > college job portal > cold apply. Note the factors against or for you and adjust accordingly. Start early!
- Sources: Application sources and methods matter; vary them up! Angel.co and Woo.io were both ineffective for me with 0 reach-outs. I didn’t use any other platforms like Triplebyte but I might’ve if I was still looking. I didn’t follow through with any LinkedIn recruiter messages. The best conversion rates came via referral (1/1) and career fairs (~30%). I definitely think career fairs are worth it if you practice your pitch and research the right companies to talk to. In hindsight, I would’ve taken more advantage of getting referrals. For reference, I submitted 6 referrals at FB with a 4/6 interview rate and 1/4 interview pass rate. Vary application sources, get referrals.
- Luck: There’s some luck involved — improve odds by applying a lot, mock interviews, research, and other prep. Sometimes you’ll get a bad interviewer or a question you couldn’t answer well. It's okay! Beat the odds.
Note about Career Fairs
Career fairs had a pretty high conversion rate for me compared to online applications. As a freshman or sophomore (>2 years from graduation), you’re not typically going to have great results in general as most companies recruit juniors and seniors, but it’s a great learning experience.
Above is a short summary from my 2nd year autumn career fair where I talked to 21 companies and had 4 interviews. I took more elaborate notes too after each talk. The conversion rate (4/21) was really low, most likely due to lack of experience and being a college sophomore. But it was great practice  and I still got 4 interviews and an offer from it.
In my last (3rd year autumn) career fair, I went 4/4 in conversions to interviews. I think if I didn’t attend the previous career fairs, I wouldn’t have had the research, pitching, and speaking experience to do so.
Tip: Ask around to figure out which companies hire freshmen and sophomores (if applicable) and which offer interview conversions from the career fair. Figure out which companies to skip; many lines aren’t worth the time and might just have reps that tell you to apply online.
Caveats
This is just a single person’s spreadsheet that definitely isn’t representative of the experience of most CS students, so I hope you take it for what it is.
I don’t believe this spreadsheet should be a statement for "apply to these companies" or even "this is the work you should put into recruiting." This is was just the process that worked for me and I hope this data helps you in some way!
There are trade-offs at every company: sometimes it’s worse work-life balance for high scale work (large tech companies) or less stability for more breadth and autonomy (startups) or high risk / reward equity (private startups) or a balance of the above factors (mid-sized companies) or lower compensation for humanitarianism (non-profits). That statement in itself is a gigantic generalization. Even the largest tech companies (e.g. Apple, Google, Netflix, etc.) have very different work cultures that aren't necessarily visible from the outside.
An important thing to note is that a non-trivial proportion of interns at any "top" tech company choose not to return every year, despite the prestige or perks, because it wasn’t a good fit or they weren't happy there. And at any company, you’ll still get plenty of people who throw "the grass is always greener" statements about other companies and careers. Don't let getting one specific "dream company" job be your definition of success or happiness.
Every person has different tradeoffs, interests, and goals that matter to them. Find a work environment that aligns with yours; you have plenty of time do so :).
I hope that if you’re a up-and-coming CS student, your takeaway isn’t that you have to do >X applications or apply to [A,B,C,…] companies. I hope that you can use this data somehow to help you understand how the job application process works in its timelines, methods, and decisions.
As a side note, I worked a lot of different jobs in college and worked on a lot of projects, mostly because I'm a pretty scatterbrained person and wanted to try a lot of things, but the quantity of jobs or projects I had was not at all important. At the end of the day, only a few jobs and projects fit on a resume anyway.
If you're a student reading this looking for a job, I hope you'll find the right fit for you!
Conclusion
As you might guess, I’m very happy to be done with this process and happy where I landed. The job process can be stressful, competitive, and repetitive, but it gets better :).
As an aside, I often felt imposter syndrome-y throughout this process, and I think it’s something a majority of people feel at some point throughout their early careers. Even after finally accepting two internship roles after lots of interviews, I had a pervasive thought that it was all a fluke, that I just happened to get the right questions, and that I wasn’t prepared for the job. After the first internship, I stopped feeling that way.
Here's a great video from Jarvis about Imposter syndrome:
I hope this helps! There’s a lot more to be discussed here (especially on the preparation side of things) but I wanted to keep this article a little shorter.
For now, two helpful things for the preparation side are these resume tips (for all roles) and Cracking the Coding Interview (for software roles). And get as much feedback as possible via resume reviews, mock interviews, and mentoring.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments!
