Resumes to Interviews to offers-Part 2

The First round(s) of screening

This is generally a phone interview and can sometimes be just a one on one interview at a job fair or through skype. One of my friends had a phone interview followed by 2 skype rounds after which they decided to call him for onsite interview (phew!). However, he had by that time got a better offer and hence fortunately did not undergo the grilling here.

The job fair, at least in my university was more of a formality. That situation was amplified due to the recession in the 2008-2009 period. That does not deter the recruiters there to ask you some questions when you hand them your resume. So, go prepared with the basics to a job fair. I was not interested to pursue a full-time analog position. However, when I went to the job fair, Microchip volunteers asked a series of analog electronics questions to many candidates standing in the queue before me. I was afraid to some extent as I was not prepared for it. I however wanted to apply for the digital positions in the same company. I was waiting for a long time in the queue and then moved on to meet volunteers of another company due to time constraint. This was accelerated by my lack of confidence in analog electronics.

Now, the above situation might not seem to be a very bad one because I was not confident in what I did not what. However, it was partly responsible for me not applying to other positions here. It becomes detrimental when you are not prepared to answer questions upfront in your own field. Search for a technical volunteer rather than a HR person in amongst the company personnel in a job fair. This is actually one of my friend's tip. This can give your resume a better possibility than a paper shredder.

Phone interview can scare students especially the first time. However, there are candidates who are tensed even in their 4th or 5th phone interview. Apart from each person's nature, this is greatly influenced by the amount of knowledge that you have gathered with respect the position. Also be very clear about all the projects and internships that you have listed on the resume. Students sometimes(or often?) list projects that they have not actually done in school(this word is used as a synonym for a college too in the US). This is because, there could be a dearth of projects/courses related to areas that are typically required for the industry. So, if you are resorting to this tactic, then be very clear about what you have exactly written there , down to the grassroot level. Not knowing something in the resume is a very serious blackmark for a candidate.

For the first couple of interviews if you are not confident in certain areas you can write down brief hints on a sheet of paper, so that you are not stuck up badly in fundamentals and other expected questions. Skype rounds could be a little tricky as you might not have this freedom.

Average length of a phone interview is 1 hour. I have faced a half-an hour, a one hour and a one and a half hour phone interviews during my search. A friend of mine has had a 2 hour phone round too! . Sometimes interviewers have a very specific topic in mind and  hence make the interview short. The other possibility for a short interview is poor answering from the part of the candidate. 

A peculiar problem that some candidates face in the phone round is difficulty in understanding the accent of the  interviewer. A chinese person called one of my friends and he had to ask, ask and ask him to repeat his question until he realised that what the person in the other end was asking was a flip-flop instead of a FIFO. Sometimes, interviewers do not give much attention to how they will sound to the person on the other side. They sit in a conference room and just speak while turning around in different directions. So, the best bet for the candidate is to ask the interviewer till he gets the question right(the fear of giving a negative impression makes the candidate not to do this). Also, just make an intelligent guess simultaneously as to what the interviewer could be asking. This is probably not that tough. I faced this problem in an interview where after repeated queries, I heard his word as color display. I was thinking quite hard as to what exactly a color display is doing in a verilog interview. When I finally said, I don't know what that command does, he was audibly disappointed. Later, I realised that he had asked for $display (pronounced as dollar display) command. It was a very common command in verilog and hence his disappointment.

Usually, they browse the spectrum of topics that the candidate needs to know for the position. However one of my friends always advises us to prepare in depth even for the phone interview. I did not quite realise the importance of this statement until I myself faced an interview where the interviewer suddenly jumped to an area which In had thought till then to be an on-site material. So, more knowledge, the better. Many a time you can guess what is in store for the onsite interview by pondering over the phone screen questions. If you feel that there was some question that was a little out of place in the interview, then you need to pay attention to it. This is because sometimes what the candidate surmises as the areas required for the position  may not be an exhaustive list. If you get to know that the same person who interviewed a friend is going to call you for a similar position, then expect a very similar set of questions and prepare well.  The interviewer either calls or emails the candidate to ask for a comfortable date for the interview. Allow yourself a reasonable time to prepare because postponing an interview that has been fixed might not strike a good chord with the interviewer. Also, get the email address of the person who calls. This is a good idea because many interviewers call from numbers that can't be called back. I got calls from Microchip that showed up as "unknown" on my display. Intel was a lot courteous as they did not act so underground-ly when calling a candidate.

A friend( and  a guide) of mine who has worked for Intel for 11 years advised me to send a thank you note via email to the interviewer after both a phone round as well as on-site. It is good to ask when you will get to hear from them at the end of a phone interview. In addition I have tried asking them about my performance in a couple of interviews. One of them gave a straight answer that I did quite well. The other told me that they usually don't and can't discuss the performance with the candidate. This does not  necessarily mean that he feels negative about your performance. Ask this question only if you are not a pessimist. In the phone rounds that eventually led me to two offers, the interviewers themselves expressed a positive feeling about the interview and one of them actually told me that he would ask his manager to proceed to the next round within next 2 weeks.

Finally, one last experience. After some point in my job search, I applied to India positions even though I was stationed in the US. I got a call from Hyderabad for a FPGA verification position. This person said he will call me over phone at the scheduled time and asked me to ensure that I had access to the internet for code sharing. During the interview that went on for an hour, he asked me to write certain code snippets(in perl) through gmail chat apart from other questions.

In general,prepare well, be confident and station yourself in a quiet place for the phone/skype rounds. Have a paper, pen, calculator nearby apart from any notes.(Dont rely on too many of them for you can't search for them during the short duration). Remember that most likely the interviewer is looking for a short crisp answer(not a tough one). Listen carefully and speak clearly. All the best for your phone interview.

To be continued in part 3........

Resumes to Interviews to offers-Part 1

When I told my friends, that I got an offer from Intel, there was visible happiness in their tone and faces. It was more so because I was one of the last in my batch to get an offer after a long waiting period. Since I have some interlude before joining the company, I thought of writing a post on job search.

 There are different kinds of students who look for a job in different disciplines and different market situations. However, there could be a few guidelines that can be common to all of them. I decided to put together this post because I thought it was prudent to do so before I forget what I went through during the job search. For those who are specifically in VLSI specialization, please see the follow-up posts for some interview questions that I faced.

Now, Resume is the first and important step in the job search. You do not have to really worry too much regarding many of the myths running around about these. There are people who vehemently oppose anything more than 1 page in a resume. It actually depends on the requirements for a particular position and what the general mentality of the people in a particular company is. If the position focusses on a specific subset in your discipline (for eg, digital electronics and related knowledge in electrical engineering), then you can exclude your other projects and coursework details (in this example analog related ones) from the resume(in which case the whole thing is called a C.V and edited version, the resume ). However, my personal experience as well as observation of my friends tells me that no one is bothered much if you give a 2 page resume. Many of us had 2 page resumes and did not fail to get calls from atleast 2 employers like Intel, Microchip, Marvell, Qualcomm, Apple, AMD, freescale semiconductors, Maxim etc. Don't get scared if someone suggests a top to bottom revamping of your resume. There are as many opinions on this as are people. Ask a couple of people and your own self about the clarity and content. If satisfied, go ahead.

Having an objective in a resume is optional. If you have one, then try to make it not too specific or too general. Another thing that most people make fuss about is references. There are mostly 3 categories of people when it comes to this. Some of them actually list down their 3 or 4 references with contact information in the resume itself. This has its own pros and cons. It shows that you are well-planned and confident but wastes that much of your resume space. Others just include one line "References available on request" . This is a better way because, it mentions about references but does not occupy space. I come under the third category of people who do not write anything about references at all in their resume. This option worked for me at least (I got 2 offers) and is advised by some experts too.

It is imperative that you talk to your references before listing them out on the resume. It is quite important to choose the references properly as they can make or break your offer in many cases. See this for an interesting tip.

 Professors(from both undergraduate and graduate colleges), collegues during part-time job, internship mentors could be possible references for RCGs. Every candidate should be careful in choosing someone who will surely talk positive things about them.

As for as the rest of the resume , the format should be neat and not too cluttered. Bullet points are helpful as the attention span of anyone and especially hiring managers and assistants are very short in the current era. List your skillset (relevant softwares, operating systems, instruments etc that are relevant). For many positions, the resumes are searched for key-words. So, just remember that including words like oscilloscope, digital multimeter etc can also help at times.

Listing relevant courses also helps to some extent. I have observed that it is especially helpful in a job fair, where this list itself can actually impress a potential employer. They know that RCGs rely heavily on coursework compared to experience and hence this is the base to build on. I had listed just the course names. However, one of my friends suggested that it will be even better to briefly indicate the important things that has been covered in the course(I know this sounds crazy because it is difficult to compress all that here but let me give an example). If I list computer architecture as one of the courses, then I can probably say things like assembly language programming, caches, pipelining, dynamic scheduling, Tomasulo algorithm, branch prediction, multi-threading, simplescalar, superscalar, virtual memories etc. or a subset of these key words. In fact this can be done for the most important areas that are required for the job.

After listing your experience in the reverse chronological order(for RCGs it could be internships done during undergraduation and graduation) list the college projects. Do not list too many of them. 5 to 7 would be a reasonable number. Give a brief description of what was actually achieved in each project/internship. List down the tool used to accomplish these tasks alongside. If your internship is little more than 2 years old and you do not remember all intricate details, then I would really encourage you to sit down and think about all the key concepts that were involved in the work. When I submitted my resume to Fujitsu in a job fair, the recruiter there saw my resume and was interested in it. She was looking for verification and design engineers. She went through the resume and asked me to explain my internship experience. When I was describing it, through certain questions she understood that I had worked on something that is exactly what she was looking for. However, I was careless enough not to mention it in the resume. Therefore right keywords can make a lot of difference.

After the projects, I listed out my extra-curricular activities and I would suggest the same to anyone else too. However, if you are hard-pressed for space already, then you can skip this one. This section helps sometimes in behavioral rounds which is often a detested round for many candidates.

Applying

I actually just have a concise message for candidates who apply to any kind of position, internship, full-time fresh grads or full-time experienced. A third party recruiter succinctly words what should be done.....

Though what she says is mostly true, I would ask you to apply to all jobs online in addition to  contacting recruiters directly. This is just to ensure that we keep all options wide open.

Ensure that you apply to as many companies as you can get access to. Though I personally had little success getting calls from any small company, my friends did get such calls. Use social networking sites and any other good way of networking. It sounds(and IS) opportunistic but that is precisely what one has to do if one has to land in a job. (It is imperative for International students as they do not have many benefits of greencard holders or citizens in the US). "Resume pushing" as it is popularly called, is the most important activity in the pre-interview stage of your job search. My personal experience (as far as engineering is concerned) tells me that more than 85 to 90% of all interview calls are through such references.

To be continued in Part 2.....