Tips on reaching out to recruiters

Question

Hey all,I am a 4th year CS student with one year of internship experience, a few mid-sized freelance projects under my belt, and some experience leading a small dev team for a business /side-hustle. I have been trying to reach out to recruiters via LinkedIn and email for many of the top tech companies that I would love to work for, as I am hesitant to directly apply and get lost in the black hole where resume's seem to go.I haven't had the best of luck so far though as I haven't heard back from any recruiters. Is this the wrong approach? Should I just keep finding and contacting recruiters until I get a response? Are there any strategies that could help get me interviews at these companies?Any advice would be appreciated, thanks everyone!

skycomputer · Accepted Answer

Volume is the name of the game. Conversions always going to be low, but I sent around 100s of emails and got maybe like a 2% hit rate to get anything out of it. So just got to send even more. For smaller startups I email the founders directly and provide product ideas and almost flatter them. They tend to respond or at least forward to it someone on their team that actually moves you forward in the interview process.

For gathering a bunch of recruiter emails, this group used to be pretty helpful: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2054888934622756

19g616kynm1glg · Answer

Internships are a hiring pipeline. Do you like the company you interned at? Did they make a full-time offer? If not, have you considered doing an extra year for a masters program, and trying for another internship through the grad program?

7nh139rfdhg4xju · Answer

Another strategy is to pitch a company feature or product publicly as a blog (check out https://twitter.com/mathurahravi/status/1475942889167507459?s=20).

Great way to get your foot in the door!

Taylor · Answer

Echoing volume advice... Your response rate will be very low. But you only need 1 actual offer. I reached out to a lot of CTO and CEO's of mid/small companies when I was looking for my first eng job. Worked pretty well.

Tips on reaching out to recruiters

About

Software Engineer

Members