| As a hiring manager, there are a few very basic things that any inexperienced candidate can do to radically improve their chances and these have been true in all the institutions where I've been a hiring manager (from big corporates, investment banks, tiny startups, software companies, media companies, whatever): 1) Do some research. Know what the company does and some of the basics of how their industry functions. Try to know where the money is coming from etc. This base understanding will help you not to come across as a total liability. 2) Do some research (2). Read and reread the job description or if unclear give the recruiter a call and ask them what they are really looking for. The job spec should have some info in there and it would be good to decompose it a bit. - Stuff they will expect you to know. eg "We're looking for a pytorch dev...". OK you need to know python and pytorch. Yes if you've been doing tensorflow still apply, but play around with pytorch a bit going into the interview so you know a bit about the differences. Say you've mainly done tensorflow but you've been using pytorch and it's been faster/slower/more ergonomic/whatever. Try to be positive though - Noone wants to hire someone who is going to spend all their time whining about the tech stack. - Stuff they will expect you to be able to do. eg "...to help optimise our data ingest and embedding thingummybobber." OK so as well as basic ML dev stuff I'm going to need to know a bit about data wrangling. Maybe brush up on sql and a few other things to do with making data pipelines, cleaning data etc. Or maybe it mentions training so reread your stuff about gradient descent, regularization etc. You don't need to be the world's expert but you want to give yourself the best possible shot. - Characteristics that are desireable in some way. eg "... The ideal candidate will have some knowledge or experience of ML as it is applied to customer-facing yadda yadda". OK so scratch your head about what you've done that you can say relates to this etc. Ideally for each of the main things you have thought through how this applies to you in some way and have some bullet points in your head ready to go if you get asked. For a first job they aren't expecting you to know everything so the main things they'll be looking for is your potential. Do you seem smart? Are you going to be able to learn quickly? Are you likely to be able to get shit done? etc. Try to think through what you might be able to say that is evidence of each of those things. Smart: think of something (even unrelated) that you have learned deeply. Eg you became the resident expert in regexes in your computer lab at school or you got totally into abstract algebra and nerded out on that or whatever. Quick study: When you went to school maybe you only had done Javascript dev and then you had to pick up python or vice versa. Some evidence that you can learn and adapt. You can really help yourself a lot if you think about these things so you have something at your fingertips when they ask you a question about how you're going to be able to learn. |