I was representing our company at an event at the Berkeley campus last month and I got to interact with a lot of students about to graduate. In reality, the hot topic was finding jobs in this economy. I always happily give resume advice and generally try to help answer the many questions about finding a first job.
I know the pain. I was a new grad once. It was horrible: it took me 10 months to find my first job.
Back to 2009. One student showed me her resume: it showed perfect GPA, lots of classes with impressive-sounding titles. But no summer job, no internship, no side project.
Another student showed me a less than perfect resume, but it had all kinds of extra-curricular projects and activities, showing exposure to technologies, people and business challenges.
I have been a hiring manager long enough(1) to tell you the one thing we look for: relevant experience.
Which by definition, being a new grad, you don’t have.
We don’t care much at all about GPA or extra-curricular activities. In 20 seconds or less, we decide whether to discard the resume or not.
Don’t get me wrong. You need a good GPA. Think of it as a pre-requisite. But you need to go the extra mile. For an idea of how far you can take this concept, check out this post from Jason Calacanis. While I don’t agree with all of it, it should pour enough fire in your belly to get you moving.
Experience for the Inexperienced
So what can you add to your resume within a few months, that will make a difference?
A favorite is joining an Open Source project. Go to github or Sourceforge and pick up an existing project. It will prove that you can contribute to a large piece of code and work with others.
The Mini-MBA
But there is an entire dimension that is usually ignored by both university curriculum and open source projects: Business. Will anyone spend money on this product? Who is my customer? Being business-aware and customer-centric is a major skill that you might as well acquire early.
Allow me to suggest one example of a slightly different kind of project that will give you such exposure. Join one of our Fair Projects. Even going through the list of projects and figuring out for yourself which ones are likely to succeed commercially is a worthwhile exercise.
Alternatively, write a $0.99 iPhone app. Those 99 cents make all the difference. Will someone buy your product? That’s exciting but it also teaches great business lessons. Can you triple your number of customers? How? Then go ahead and try. The beauty of the iPhone store is that you can iterate and learn extremely quickly.
I am not a big believer in MBAs, but early exposure to business issues is very important. Think of this as earning your mini-MBA.
Resume Help
I’ll be happy to provide free feedback on the first 100 students who e-mail me their resume (PDF please). I won’t find you a job, but I’ll tell you how you fare on the side-project-o-meter. Contact me ‘Alain’ at SoftwareBillofRights (dot org).
(1) My advice applies to small and mid-size corporations. There are still a few very large corporations (IBM, Google…) that hire quotas of new grads with 0 experience, because they are willing to train them internally.
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