[theWold]

So, I graduated last December (2014) from a small accredited University in Texas with a BS in CS. I applied to 137 companies before I accepted at Capital One. I had many friends of friends who were HR and recruiting at other companies and during my arduous process I picked up many things that I felt helped me (and hopefully they'll help you). I ended up getting 43 offers, and at least a ~80% return on contact back (I forgot the actual statistic).

If you choose the shotgun approach, as I did, Keep a spreadsheet, or something, to help organize all the information.

Always Customize your resume by using the words that they put on their job hire post. (This will get you past electronic screenings and non-technical HR people who just look for keywords). This is really annoying (writing your resume each time) but I felt it helped me.

I always researched the company the night before resumes and try to find a technical blog that a company may produce, or some niche thing that the company does. (Capital One and it's AutoNavigator is what I focused on when I was interviewing).

Lastly, I did embellish the truth a little in any of my stories. Not to the point of a lie (... sort of ...) but I made my past technical experience an enjoyable story to listen to. There was a quote I read in 'Iterating Grace', paraphrasing it: Great Stories are better than Great Facts. Don't lie in the facts, but like statistics, you can bend the truth and still let it be truth.

Another piece of advice is make sure you are confident when you walk in. Even for technical roles, confidence is key. Being able to talk and have the interviewer like the interviewee is one of the many keys I found to being successful.

If you don't mind lying, most companies will never check your GPA past the transcript you hand over (if you do that at all). So you want to embellish that 3.2 GPA to be a 3.5+ go ahead. Most companies never check. (Come to find out I didn't have the correct GPA on my resume when I changed semesters even though I had an updated Transcript I was sending out. No one ever bothered me about it). I did not ask the HR at my company this question as well and they did not confirm this fact.

I hope that helps you some :D

[DanBC]

> If you don't mind lying, most companies will never check your GPA past the transcript you hand over (if you do that at all). So you want to embellish that 3.2 GPA to be a 3.5+ go ahead.

That's potentially a criminal offence in the UK, and probably the US.

(Fraud act 2006 in UK)

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3bbd58ec-6df3-11e1-b98d-00144feab4...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10941476/...

[hacknat]

From the US, and am a hiring manager, can confirm. I'd suggest people just leave their GPA off their resume/CV. It won't hurt you to do so, and if the company wants it you can give it later (or not and run away from that company).

Such outsized importance is placed on projects these days, and the state of most CS programs is so bad, that I would only care about GPA if you graduated from a very good school or I was an academic admissions person.

[alain94040]

Please don't lie about your GPA. Having read hundreds of resumes, I won't freak out when I see 3.2, as long as you have interesting projects. Anything that shows initiative beyond class work. If you didn't do any internship, didn't write any open source code (even the tiniest of code), I'm more likely to pass on your resume.

[philbo87]

Wow, this is really interesting. I have never considered a shotgun approach before when looking for a job. Can I ask you how you chose the 137 companies?

[theWold]

1) Does the company work in the Tech that I know (at the time I was Java, C, SQL, JS, and R mainly)

2a) Did the company recently have any bad press? (Smaller companies were harder to judge on this, but larger ones are easy. i.e. JP Morgan Chase was not on my list, However Capital One was.)

2b) (This was only used if I was unsure after 2a) If I knew someone in the company over my professional network, or a frined of a friend, etc. I would reach out and ask them about the company. Most people responded to me which was nice. Come to find out we would talk about our mutual relation and then I could ask them about what they do. I also got some good general advice as well.

3) Does the company 'smell bad'. This was something I didn't really use until I was applying/in the process of getting hired. I would keep my nose out for bad signs. (looking at you Cerner (Great Engineers I chatted with, but their recruiting was a nightmare to deal with, but that may of just been me)).

If you can't tell, I did my best to logically choose and look at data in a very organized fashion. This was due to the amount of data that I knew I was going to manually be mulling over. I needed a way to figure out to to translate my research/feelings of one company to the research/feelings of another.

(Also, you have no reason to believe me, but I did get to last round interviews with Google. I never even applied with them. They reached out to me via LinkedIn. At first I was like 'This must be spam trying to phish me or something', nope real deal. I was keeping a Blog on Blogger about Software Engineering, School, and other semi-professional things. I blame that for them reaching out to me.)