Category Archives: career

identifying what you want in your next role

Finding your next role is a difficult but important challenge. How do you know what you’re looking for? You could simply look for your current job title, or maybe the next job title on the ladder, but that doesn’t help you know whether that’s a good job for you.

When I’m trying to figure out what I’m really looking for in my next role, I spend some time doing a deep review of job descriptions. Here’s my process:

  1. Search for jobs with relevant titles. I like to cast a wide net and look for different titles, different levels, and different size companies. LinkedIn is a great place to start for this search. Collect a good set of JDs. Don’t worry if they don’t look amazing, that’s going to be the next step.
  2. Collate the JDs into a document. Copy the text of these JDs into your favorite word processor. I insert a break or line between them so that they don’t all run together.
  3. Evaluate a JD carefully.
    • Highlight everything that you like about this JD with one color. I use yellow for this.
    • Highlight everything that you don’t like, or that raises a potential red flag for you, about this JD with another color. I use blue for this.
    • Review your good-highlighting and write out a list of what you like.
    • Review your bad-highlighting and write out a list of what you don’t like
    • Write out a list of open questions that you have after reading this JD.
  4. Repeat this process for the rest of the JDs that you’ve created.
  5. Evaluate your lists. What themes do you see emerging in each category?

When I’m first starting a job search, this exercise helps me hone in on what I really want to do in my next role. If I’m considering a role that is somewhat different than what I’ve been targeting, it helps me evaluate whether the role might still move me towards my career goals. This also helps me know what I don’t want in my next role.

After you’ve identified the themes of what you really want and don’t want in your next role, you can use that to help you rank which roles are most interesting to you. For those roles that are most interesting, you can prioritize looking through your network to see if you have a close connection to that role who you can leverage. For those roles that are the least interesting, you can decide whether you want to spend your time on pursuing them at all. Being more focused in your job search will help you manage your time and your resilience better.

the goal-setting conundrum

Setting career goals is hard, especially when it’s time to do it as part of the usual performance review cycle. As I’ve coached my teams through goal-setting, I’ve observed several different reasons why it can be hard to set goals. These reasons include:

  • Analysis paralysis. “I could work on any number of things, but which ones are the ‘right’ ones to work on?”
  • Future hazy, try again later. “I really don’t know what I want my future to hold, so I’m not sure what goals I should have when I don’t have a three- or five-year plan.”
  • Too much happening right now. “I’m already in a period of personal or professional upheaval and I feel like I am only barely holding on. I can’t think about the future because the present is already too much.”
  • Impostor syndrome. “I don’t think I’m actually any good at what I do today. I can’t set goals to help me address my perceived deficiencies because that would be revealing to someone else that I’m an impostor.”
  • Dreaming about leaving. “I think I want to do something different with my career that isn’t available to me here. I do have goals, but I don’t want to talk about them with you for fear of repercussions.”
  • In the zone. “I’m happy with where I am right now. I do not want to get promoted. I just want to come in, successfully do my job, and get paid fairly for that.”
  • No role model. “I have no idea how to do this because I’ve never seen anyone do it well. I’ve not really tried to do it myself.”
  • No point. “This is just HR bullshit. No one pays attention to my goals. I’m going to write them down today and then no one will look at them again until my next performance review.”

Once you understand the root of what makes writing goals feel difficult, you can use that to help craft the type of goals to set. Here are some strategies to unlock the goal-setting conundrum for the reasons I outlined above:

  • Analysis paralysis: You could make finding the “right” focus your goal. To do this, choose one of your potential goals and work on it for a set period of time, up to a month. If you really can’t choose one yourself, ask a friend or colleague to help, or even pick one randomly. At the end of the month, evaluate your progress, how you’re feeling about it, and what impact it has made. If it’s particularly impactful and you’re feeling great about it, you’ve got your goal. If not, you can choose another goal to try for a time boxed period.
  • Future hazy, try again later: You could make figuring out what you want to do your goal. Outline a handful of options for what your future might hold. Don’t be afraid to dream big! From there, you could have informational interviews with people who have followed that path to leverage what they learned along the way. Or you could create a payout matrix to help you think through which path you might want to take. You could create a set of experiments to help you decide what you want your future to hold.
  • Too much happening right now: Depending on why you have too much going on, you could set a goal to reduce the number of things on your plate. What can you offload so that you’re not so overburdened? If you simply can’t offload things, you could instead set a goal to reflect on your situation and what you’ve learned from it. These types of retrospectives can help you and those around you avoid getting into situations like this, better handle those inevitable times when it feels like everything is going wrong at once, or even simply recognize that this happens and sometimes all you can do is keep on keeping on.
  • Impostor syndrome: Setting goals to help overcome impostor syndrome requires vulnerability and support. You have to be vulnerable in admitting that you feel this way, and you have to have support from a good leader who will help you move past it. If you aren’t sure if you’ve got a good leader or you’re not ready to be vulnerable, one way to sidestep this is to leverage your career ladder. Look at the competencies for the next level. They’re probably the same competencies as your current level, but they have broader scope and impact. You can frame your goals in terms of growing to that next level. You could also set a goal about getting in-depth 360-degree feedback from those around you to help you better understand what you’re great at and what you’re not, if that’s not already part of your performance review. That might help you combat your impostor syndrome, or at least help you decide where to focus your energy.
  • Dreaming about leaving: This is another one that requires vulnerability and support. If you’re ready to be open that you’re thinking about doing something else, you can set goals to make that decision. If you’re certain that you want to move on, you can set goals that help you and your organization be ready to move on, such as ensuring that you’ve wrapped up a key project and fully documented all of that great knowledge that only lives in your head. If you’re still exploring options, you can follow the strategies above for “future hazy, try again later”.
  • In the zone: You could make your goals about cementing your place as a solid contributor. Potential goals include improving documentation, improving processes, or mentoring.
  • No role model: Ask others to share their goals with you. Personally, I like sharing my goals with my team so that they can see what I’m working on.
  • No point: You can choose to treat this exercise as only an HR exercise, or you can choose to treat this exercise as something that you do for yourself. Setting goals is about your professional growth. You have to reframe the exercise for yourself and not let poor implementations of goal-setting get in your way.

As you’re framing your goals, you can use strategies such as SMART goals to help you create meaningful goals that you can make progress on. After you’ve done that hard work, the next step is to create an accountability structure to help you make progress. I like to set up monthly check-ins on my professional goals with someone such as a manager, a coach, or a colleague. That external accountability helps remind me to invest time in my goals, and reflect on what I’ve learned as I’ve worked on them.

climbing the leadership ladder: from manager to director to VP

Recently, I’ve been asked several times what I’ve found to be the difference of being a manager, a director, and a VP. Each of those roles is an interesting one with its own challenges. My thinking on this is heavily influenced by this blog post from Peter Merholz. In his post, he introduces what I think of as the three distinct modes of management: managing down, managing to the sides, and managing up.

Managing down is managing those who report to you, or through you if you’re managing managers or directors. Managing to the sides is working with your peers to communicate information, resolve issues, and make decisions. Managing up is the skill of giving your manager, whether they’re a C-level or a senior manager, the tools and information that they need to help you, your team, and your company be successful.

As a first-line manager, where you’re only managing individual contributors (ICs), almost all of your time is about enabling them to be happy and productive. About 60% of your time is directly managing them: keeping them on track, giving feedback, coaching them, making sure they’re working well together, etc. Another 30% of your time is managing to the sides: ensuring that you’re aligned with your peer managers, resolving conflicts, communicating status information, and removing roadblocks. The remaining 10% of your time is managing up: working with your boss to manage priorities, identifying additional resource needs, communicating status, managing the budget, asking them to remove roadblocks, and setting the strategy within your area of focus.

As a second-line manager (for simplicity, I’m going to call this “director”), where you’re only managing managers, your focus shifts. You’re no longer the one directly responsible for enabling a team of productive and happy ICs. That’s the job of the first-line managers who report to you. Now your role is to ensure that the teams who report to you are happy, productive, and working on the right things. For a director, I’d estimate that 40% of your time is managing down to the team: ensuring that your managers are being effective in their roles, coaching your managers in how to be effective coaches and leaders, communicating needed information, resolving issues, setting direction for your team, setting your team’s culture, and removing roadblocks within and for your teams. As a director, managing to your peers is more important than it was as a manager. I estimate that managing to the sides is about 40% of your job. This is ensuring that you and your cross-functional peers are aligned on strategy and prioritization, that you’ve got the right folks working on the right problems across your teams, and that you are removing roadblocks for your teams and for your peers’ teams. The last 20% of your time is managing up: working with leadership to set strategy, communicating needed information, advocating for your teams, identifying roadblocks that need leadership intervention, and so on.

As a third-line manager (for simplicity, I’m going to call this “VP”), where you’re only managing directors, your focus shifts again. Now your directors are the ones responsible for having their teams be happy, productive, and working on the right things. You are accountable for all of that, plus be part of the team responsible for setting corporate strategy, and delivering on the commitments that you are making on behalf of your team. This means that much less of your time is managing down, maybe 20% of it. Managing down involves is communicating strategy, coaching your directors, resolving conflicts within your organization and between your organization and others, setting your organizational culture as part of your overall company’s culture, and ensuring that your directors are aligned amongst themselves. Managing to the sides is still about 50% of your job. Now that it’s at another level higher, it is even more cross-functional. Now you’re setting strategy across the entire company, identifying opportunities for your company, setting policies, removing roadblocks across your org and for your partner orgs, and communicating needed information across the company. The last 30% of your time is managing up: working with the senior executive team on setting strategy, communicating, making decisions, representing the company, and so on.

Looking back at Peter’s original post, the percentages that he lists don’t match my experience. I think he’s underestimated the amount of time needed at each level to manage up and to the sides, especially at the lower levels. While Peter frames his thoughts in terms of design orgs, I’ve found in my conversations with other leaders as well as my own experience in managing engineers and product folks that it’s held generally true cross-functionally.

If the things that you love are communicating, unblocking, and coaching, you must do more of that at higher levels. The shift that you’re making at each level is that you’re more abstracted away from your core discipline, and that you’re seeing and making decisions on a much broader swath of the company and the business. You are responsible for making a lot more decisions, often with less information than you  would like. I’ve found it to be a lot of fun, and a lot of responsibility.

the discovery problem in your career

A long time ago, I believed that merely doing great work was sufficient to get promoted, and that it was my manager’s job to not only know that I was doing great work but also to ensure that I got promoted for it. This is not true. As your career advances, and this is doubly true when you’re leading a team, the more that your success is measured in terms of others’ perceptions of you. You cannot wait for recognition to come to you. You have to tell others why you deserve recognition.

I know that this is not easy. It’s hard to know where to start. It’s sometimes hard to know when you’re being successful. It feels like getting people to understand the impact of your great work is taking away from you being able to do more great work. Not being able to concentrate on doing more great work makes you worry that you really are selling snake oil. But that’s not true. What you’re doing is enabling people to discover your great work and build on top of it. Help them understand why it’s great. Help them understand how it contributes to them doing great work.

In user experience, we know that one of the common challenges of any product or service is discoverability. I’ve experienced this many times. You get user feedback that says that the one way that you could make your product or service better is to do this thing really awesome. “But it’s already there! I spent months delivering that feature!” Not only is your user frustrated that they think they can’t do what they want to do, but also you’re frustrated that you spent all that time and energy developing the very feature that they need and they’re not actually using it. You’ve got a discoverability problem. You’ve got to figure out how to fix it so that your engineering effort isn’t wasted and your user can accomplish what they want to do. Fix your discoverability problem, and you’ll fix two different frustrations.

And it’s the same with your great work. It’s not enough to do great work. You’ve got to make it possible for other people to discover your great work, to understand it and how it’s a contribution, to be able to build on it. Don’t think of the time that you spend changing perceptions as a waste of time. Think of it as solving the discoverability problem in your career.

10 Lessons learned about job hunting

Joining Grand Rounds has been an educational experience in so many ways. In the 16 months that I’ve been here, I’ve interviewed more than 200 candidates across all levels of user experience, product management, and engineering. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot about the hiring process that I want to share to help folks who are looking for a job.

As a result of all of these interviews and conversations with my colleagues about these interviews, I’m sharing my top lessons learned about looking for a new job.

  1. Looking for a new job is frustrating, time-consuming, and difficult. Find or create a support system as you look for your new role. You need folks who can hear your frustrations, give you feedback, and help you keep your morale up as you’re trying to find the right next role for you.
  2. Don’t treat the job description as a list of absolute requirements. Under the best of circumstances, it’s written to describe the most ideal candidate. There is no real human being who actually matches that entire list.  If you meet ~50% of the requirements and you think you might be interested in the company, apply for it. 
  3. Get feedback on your resume and LinkedIn profile. If you’re in design or product management where portfolios are common, get feedback on those too. There are a lot of different resources for resume feedback, such as professional groups and mentoring circles. Many of the professional Slacks that I’m on have channels for resume and portfolio feedback. If you’re still in college (or boot camp) or a recent graduate, your college might offer resume and portfolio reviews through their career center or alumni association.
  4. Have appropriate expectations for each part of the job searching process.  Cold applications to a job through LinkedIn or their careers website have the lowest rate of responses, whereas an internal referral often gets more attention.
  5. If you can find find someone in your network who works for a company you’re interested in, check in with them to tell you more about the company and the culture. They might be able to give you an internal referral, too.
  6. Practice your opener: what’s your short (~60 second) response to “so tell me about yourself”? Say it out loud. Preferably say it to an audience and get feedback about it, but at least say it out loud to yourself often enough that you feel comfortable saying it.  I usually start by writing it down so that I remember all the points I want to hit, then reading it out loud a few times. I edit it as I practice it. Then I give it to someone and get feedback. As I say it more, I learn how to riff on certain parts of it, depending on the context where I’m giving my opener.
  7. Take some time after an interview to reflect on your performance.  What went well?  What didn’t go well?  If you feel like you answered a question particularly well, jot down some notes about it so that you can reproduce that great answer in the future.  If you feel like you didn’t answer a question very well, come up with a better answer for it, and then practice saying it out loud. 
  8. … but keep yourself from spiralling into shame or frustration or worry or any of the other negative emotions associated with job hunting.  Don’t beat yourself up if you flub a question, or even flub a whole interview.  Interviewing is a skill.  You get better at skills through practice. Flubbing a single question in an interview doesn’t necessarily remove you from the running.  Flubbing a whole interview, as painful as it is, is probably a learning opportunity for you to determine what went awry and how you can prevent that from going awry in the future.
  9. The job interview is a two-way street. You are evaluating the company and the team to see if you want to work there. Make sure that you gather information to help you determine whether you want to work at that company, with that team, and for that manager.
  10. Finding a job is difficult in a normal situation. Finding a job during a worldwide recession is even harder because there is a much larger candidate pool. You have to find a way to keep your morale and self-esteem up through this process. Job hunting can test your resilience, so know some ways to help recharge yourself as you find the next great role for you.

Now that I’ve dusted off this blog, perhaps I can make some writing momentum and share more here!

Systers at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

I am a long-time Syster, and I have attended and spoken at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing a few times before.  This year, I’m speaking again, and wanted to support my fellow Systers as well.  To that end, I have compiled a list of Systers who are speaking at GHC.  Come see us! (Last updated: 2017-10-03 13:02 PT)

Wednesday, 04 October 2017

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: The Engineer’s Journey: Choose Your Own Adventure
Panelists: Cindy Burns, Pi-Chuan Chang, Leor Chechik, Mary Dang, Nadyne Richmond
Panel discussion of engineering career paths and important decisions along the way

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: The Myth of the Unicorn: Perspectives of Native American Women in Computing
Speakers: Amanda Sharp, Kylie Bemis, Nicole Archambault, Squiggy Rubio, Sarah EchoHawk
These extraordinary women in the tech industry identify as members of indigenous tribes from across Northern America. They will discuss their experiences, what it means to be a unicorn— a “mythical” or “non-existent” figure in tech—and what the tech communities can do to increase support and visibility.

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Navigating Change: Ride the Waves of Change Without Feeling Underwater
Speakers: An Bui, Indu Khosla, Ariel Aguilar, Vanessa Hernandez, Alex Riccomini

1:50-2:10pm
Interactive Media Research Presentations: Inverse Procedural Modeling for 3D Urban Models
Speaker: Ilke Demir

3:00-3:20pm
Demonstrating Value Presentation: Managing Up: Managing Your Manager with Compassion, Humor, and Data
Speaker: Steph Parkin

3:00-4:00pm
Panel: Systers Celebrates 30 years Supporting Women in Computing
Panelists: Angel Tian, Danielle Cummings, Laura Downey, Neetu Jain, Dilma Da Silva

3:00-4:00pm
Workshop: Consciously Tackling Unconscious Bias
Speakers: Lilit Yenokyan, Amala Rangnekar, Saralee Kunlong

4:30-5:30pm
Panel: Navigating Change: Ride the Waves of Change Without Feeling Underwater (repeat session)
Panelists: An Bui, Indu Khosla, Ariel Aguilar, Vanessa Hernandez, Alex Riccomini

4:30-5:30pm
2017 Systers Pass-It-On Award Winners

Wednesday poster session, 1-4pm

Framework to Extract Context Vectors from Unstructured Data using Big Data Analytics
Presenter: Sarah Masud

Race against Troubleshooting: Predictive Maintenance for Data Protection
Presenter: Dhanashri Phadke

Thursday, 05 October 2017

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Why and How to Prepare for Hackathons?
Panelists: Bouchra Bouqata, Rose Robinson, Sana Odeh, Shaila Pervin, Xiaodan (Sally) Zhang

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Virtual Humanity
Panelists: Erin Summers, Jenn Duong, Gemma Rachelle Busoni, Elisabeth Morant, Charity Everett
In this panel, industry experts will share knowledge building and creating virtual reality (VR) experiences, games, and tools centered around the human experience.

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Hello, It’s Me! Differentiating Yourself With a Multidimensional Career
Panelists: Jenna Blaha, Vidya Srinivasan, Kelly Hoey, Ilana Walder-Biesanz, Cassidy Lara Williams

11:30am-12:30pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

11:30am-5:30pm
OSD Code-a-thon for Humanity with Project Jupyter
Organizers: Carol Willing, Jamie Whitacre

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Get Out of Your Own Way!
Panelists: Mayoore S Jaiswal, Carolyn Rowland, Maybellin Burgos, Lilit Yenokyan, Lulu Li

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Navigating Social Impact as a Techie
Panelists: Sharon Lin, Yada Pruksachatkun, Daniella Cohen, Gwen Wong, Gemma Rachelle Busoni
This panel will tackle approaches to creating social impact with technology, from eliminating social stigma of ‘civic technology’ to merging product paradigms from tech startups and philanthropic work.

1:30-2:30pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

3:00-3:30pm
Career Success Presentation: Negotiation Tactics to Make Your Manager a Strategic Career Partner
Speaker: Amy Yin

3:00-4:00pm
Panel: How Male Allies are Supporting Women in Computing through the Local Community
Panelists: Natasha Green, Anthony Park, Edwin Aoki, Evin Robinson

3:00-4:00pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

3:20-3:40pm
Career Success Presentation: Communicating, Promoting, & Developing Yourself Professionally: A Peer’s How-To Guide
Speaker: Rucha Mukundan
I will discuss key takeaways and lessons learned from her experience joining the workforce, and how professionals in their early career can use this information to position themselves for success.

4:30-4:50pm
Career Success Presentation: Negotiation Tactics to Make Your Manager a Strategic Career Partner (repeat session)
Speaker: Amy Yin

4:50-5:10pm
Career Success Presentation: Communicating, Promoting, & Developing Yourself Professionally: A Peer’s How-To Guide (repeat session)
Speaker: Rucha Mukundan
I will discuss key takeaways and lessons learned from her experience joining the workforce, and how professionals in their early career can use this information to position themselves for success.

Friday, 06 October 2017

9:00-9:20am
Open Source Presentation: Getting Started with Your First Open Source Project
Speaker: Mandy Chan

9:00-10:00am
Panel: Highlight and Recognize Your Organization’’s ‘Hidden Figures’
Panelists: Tamara Nichols Helms, Mona Hudak, Rachel Shanava, Larry Colagiovanni, Yolanda Lee Conyers

9:00-10:00am
Workshop: A Hands-on Dive into Making Sense of Real World Data
Speakers: Xun Tang, Jamie Whitacre

9:00-11:00am
Workshop: Learn to Negotiate And Stop Holding Yourself Back
Presenters: Karen Catlin, Poornima Vijayashanker
Learn how to discover your true value, leverage it to craft an ASK for decision makers, and handle common concerns and objections of decision makers. You’ll be able to practice your ASK and receive feedback on it.

9:00am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: From Passion to Product: How a LEGO Fan Learns Data Science
Presenters: Xiaodan (Sally) Zhang

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: Importance of Internships and Strategy to Get One!
Presenters: Deveeshree Nayak, Mayoore S Jaiswal

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: You were hired to be you!
Presenter: Angela Choo

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: How to Successfully Apply to Graduate School
Presenter: Laura Dillon

10:30-11:30am
Workshop: Designing Intelligent Hardware: A Day at Nest
Presenters: Jung Hong, Lulu Li, Soja-Marie Morgens
Hands-on experience of the decisions we make to build IoT intelligent hardware with close integration of cloud services, data pipelines and algorithms.

10:30-10:50am
Security Operations Presentations: When a Picture is Worth a Thousand Network-packets and System-logs
Speaker: Awalin Sopan

11:10-11:30am
Finding Your Fit Presentation: Finding the Right Fit: Discovering a Job You Love
Speaker: Kelly Irish

noon-12:20pm
Putting Yourself First Presentation: A Stay-at-home Mom’’s Guide to Continuing Your Career
Speaker: Adina Halter

noon-1:00pm
Panel: From Here to Internity
Panelists: Melissa Ann Borza, Kelly Irish, Marissa Alexandra Schuchat, Jenna Blumenthal, Chang Liu
Panel discussion of current/former interns and hiring managers on how to succeed in your internship

noon-1pm
Panel: Wonder Woman and the Amazonians: Build Your Local Community
Panelists: Bushra Anjum, Abigail Shriver, Melissa Greenlee, Maigh Houlihan, Marian Tesfamichael

noon-1pm
Workshop: Getting the Glass to Half-Full: Managing Your Moods at Work
Presenters: Mamta Suri, Beth Budwig, Harika Adivikolanu
Are you stressed out or negative at work? Do you react to situations at work impulsively? Being positive and well-balanced is a learnable skill. In this workshop, you will practice mindfulness and learn to apply techniques from Cognitive and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy to the workplace. You can use these tools daily to help manage your stress, stay calm, and improve your mood.

12:30-2:30pm
Workshop: Learn to Negotiate And Stop Holding Yourself Back (repeat session)
Presenters: Karen Catlin, Poornima Vijayashanker
Learn how to discover your true value, leverage it to craft an ASK for decision makers, and handle common concerns and objections of decision makers. You’ll be able to practice your ASK and receive feedback on it.

thoughts on career fairs

Career fairs are hard events.  They’re hard for me as someone who is there to evaluate candidates to fill positions that my company has open, and I certainly remember them being hard when I was in college and looking for a job.  Now that I’m on the hiring side of the table, I want to share with you some of what I’ve learned that might help someone on the please-hire-me side of the table.

At most career fairs, the employers are going to speak to dozens of candidates.  At some of the larger engineering career fairs that I’ve attended, we have walked away with hundreds of resumes.  That’s just one career fair at one university.  Now imagine how many career fairs our University Relations staff go to.  (For us engineers, we usually only go to one or two career fairs per year.)  We get a lot of resumes out of these, and we have to figure out which candidates we’re going to call back after we’re done with our career fairs.  Here are some things to do to stand out at a career fair.

  1. Spend the time now to get your resume into great shape.  Your resume represents you.  It should be clear, well-written, and underscore your unique combination of education and experience that makes me want to hire you.  If your university has any resume-writing resources, take advantage of them.  If not, get your friends and a trusted faculty member to review your resume.  A resume that has typos in it says that you don’t pay attention to details. A resume that lists every single Computer Science course that you’ve taken does not tell me why I should hire you.  A resume that says that you play intramural lacrosse makes me wonder why you think this is something that you want me to know.
  2. Tell me whether you are looking for an internship or a full-time position, and when you are available for this position (summer internship? full-time position starting in September?).  It saves me from having to scan your resume and guessing.
  3. Explain why you are a great candidate to work at VMware.  This tells me that you’ve done research on my company, which is always a good start.  You should tell me what from your background matches up with goals for my company.  Even better is if you’ve looked at some of our open positions and can thus reference skills that we often look for.  Also make sure that you look at our locations.  You should know the location of our headquarters and our other primary offices, and you should be comfortable with living in one of those places.
  4. I’ve got a standard spiel that I have ready to go for candidates at career fairs.  I’ll tell you about the company, where we’re located, what kind of work we do, why it’s awesome to work here, what kind of career opportunities we have, what our internship program looks like, and so on.  A candidate who already knows all of that, and we can get into details about why you would be awesome for us and who has specific questions for me about why they should come work for us is a candidate that is more likely to get my attention at a career fair.
  5. You should talk positively about your experience so far.  If you can take something difficult and tell me what was positive about it (“I learned a lot about how to handle uncomfortable situations with others in our group project when one of the team members was unable to meet their commitments”) makes me think that you’re resilient and can solve problems.
  6. Talk to your professors, your department administrator, and professional campus groups about companies that will be visiting.  For example, when I visit a campus for a career fair, I’ll often give a talk to a department or a class that is relevant to the user experience jobs that I have open.  You’ll have an additional opportunity to talk to me, it’s usually a smaller setting than the big career fair and so you have more time to make a positive impression on me, and you’ll learn more about the company and the work we do.

Here are some things that reduce your chances of being successful at a career fair.

  1. Ask me what my company does.  I’ll tell you (as I said, I’ve got that standard spiel), but this tells me that you didn’t do any research before you walked up to me.  You’ve lowered my expectations about you, and you’ll have to work harder to convince me that you’re a great candidate.
  2. Be unsure about what you want out of an internship.  It’s valid to say that that you’re exploring options, but that means that you should be able to tell me what kinds of questions you have about software engineering careers and how you think an internship will help you answer them.
  3. Start off by telling me that you don’t use my company’s products.  Since I work for an enterprise software company, I don’t expect that candidates at career fairs will have experience with our products.  Instead, tell me why you’re interested in working for a company that makes enterprise software.  (While “I really need a job” is an answer that’s probably true and I certainly remember that feeling, please come up with something better.)
  4. Don’t stuff a resume in my hands, ask for a t-shirt (or whatever other swag we’re giving away at that career fair), and then leave without talking to me.  That resume goes to the very bottom of the pile.  If you really don’t want to work for my company and just want a t-shirt because free clothing is a good thing when you’re in school, come around at the end of the career fair.  If we’ve got extra shirts at the end of the career fair, we’re pretty likely to give them out to anyone who asks, so that we don’t have to ship them back to the office.
  5. Don’t assume that talking to a woman means that you’re talking to someone who isn’t technical.  It’s perfectly okay to ask what I do.  Assuming anything about me, or any of my colleagues who are working with me at the career fair, tells me that you’re likely to make assumptions in the work that you do, too.  Invalid assumptions cause lots of problems in software development (“no-one will ever enter invalid data here” is the root cause of many bugs).  Doing this leaves me with a very bad first impression of you, and since our time to talk at a career fair is very limited, that very bad impression is likely to stick.
  6. Don’t have any questions about what it’s like to work at my company.  Remember, this isn’t a one-way interaction.  It’s not just about the company deciding whether they want to hire you.  It’s also about you deciding whether you want to work for the company.  As we talk, you should ask follow-up questions if there’s something that you hear that you want more details about.  You should also have questions about the company, the team, the product, or the working environment.  Not having questions tells me that you’re not necessarily as interested in working for my company as other candidates who did ask me questions are.

Our interaction at a career fair is limited.  There’s a lot that you can do to make that interaction very positive.  The more positive that interaction is, the more likely you are to move forward.