What Helped Me Succeed in Interviews and Receive Multiple Job Offers

In my last semester, I interviewed with about a dozen potential employers for an embedded software engineer role. About half of them offered me a position of which I picked my first job after graduation. There are many things I learned about the interview process as I progressed from one interview to another. Here are some of my reflections on what helped get the interviews and ultimately perform well to receive job offers.

I believe there were two key factors which helped me receive opportunities to interview with multiple employers. The first one being an outstanding resume with a very high GPA and work experience in my field with several internships throughout my schooling years. Having a high GPA close to graduation can help reflect a hard-working and dedicated character as it takes years of effort and consistency to build. This along with having practical, hands-on work experience in industry and other engineering projects really makes one stand out from the crowd as it's usually difficult to find this combination. Having an outstanding resume takes years to build and it's something we must keep in mind throughout our journey in school. Although there are many success stories of people who are able to get job offers without an outstanding GPA and relevant internship experience, having this opens up several doors where we may not have any connections, recommendations or established credibility of one's abilities. It'll help catch employers' attention and open the door for an interview. The second key factor I believe was showing up at career fairs and employer presentations at the university to talk to recruiters, share my resume, express interest and ask how my skills may be a good fit for available opportunities. Without taking necessary efforts to reach out and connect with potential employers, it would be very difficult to receive interview opportunities as employers are only able to pick from the pool of candidates that reach out to them.

My efforts to reach out and speak with several potential employers at the career fair and employer presentations along with my resume enabled me to have several initial interviews with various employers. Before my first interview, I recall I Google'ed "interview questions for embedded software engineer" and reviewed various technical questions on the first few links. At the interview I was pleasantly amused to realize that some of my interviewers had done the same and were asking me the same questions! This happened multiple times with other employers as well where one even asked me "Have you seen this question before somewhere?" and I replied with a smile "Yes, I've seen it online". This made me realize how important it is to be aware and prepare ourselves. We may need to research online for potential questions and speak with those who've recently been through the interview process as well to better prepare ourselves. Also, after going through a few interviews, one can start to see a pattern in the types of questions being asked. In my case, I realized that I was not very familiar with certain terminology and concepts in the embedded software field as I had never learned or been exposed to some things in my coursework and internship experience. This was starting to become evident through the interview process as I was not able to answer certain questions. Rather than spending too much time feeling bad about not performing well in the interview, I acted fast and learned on my own by reading online to close the gap to be better prepared for next time.

Apart from the technical questions, it really helped having well though-out diagrams of projects I had worked on highlighting my individual contributions to the interviewers. One thing I realized was that it's not sufficient to just describe our work and contributions on our resume or even to speak about them. What matters at the end of the day is how well the interviewer can understand the contributions and their perception of our skill and abilities. It's all about being able to communicate our contributions and skillset in a manner that's perceived as valuable. In order to do this, I used some visual aids in the form of charts and one-page diagrams for some of my top engineering projects and internship work show-casing my contributions in an effort to better communicate with the interviewers. I believe this was quite effective and provided me an opportunity to better describe my work with comprehension.

After the interview process, the job offers I received were not all at the same time. As such, I had to choose to give up some opportunities while not knowing what else may be around the corner. How did I decide to give up a job offer in hopes of securing something better? What were the factors that contributed to my decision in ultimately choosing my first job after graduation? I'll share my thoughts on this in the next post.