❖What Industry

❖Digital Presence

❖Getting Interview Invitation

❖Interview Process

❖The Offer

Materials

Industrials

Consumer discretionary

Health Care

Tech

Communication services

Utilities

Energy

Consumer staples

Financials

Real Estate

Education

●CEO/Founder

●HR/People Ops

●Business Areas / Departments

●Managers

●Direct Manager

●Team Members

❖Government Agencies

❖Semi Autonomous Agencies

❖Low Funding Start Ups

❖Small/Family Businesses

❖Mid Size Businesses

❖Large Companies

❖Multinationals

❖Well Funded Startups

❖Consulting

❖Product

❖Platform

❖Mission Driven

❖Outside Consultant

❖Temporary

❖Permanent

❖Full Time

❖Part Time

❖Remote/Hybrid/On-site

Many - math graduates who can write code are popular - high endurance, abstraction, creative thinking:

❖Data: Analyst / Engineer / Scientist / Architect

❖ML: Scientist / Engineer / Consultant

❖Statistician

❖Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Cheminformatics

❖Computational Marketing

❖Quantitative Analyst

❖Software: Developer / Engineer / Architect

❖Risk Analyst

❖Operations Research Analyst

❖Actuary

❖Teacher, Professor

●Meetings

●Triaging requests on Slack

●Reading research papers (specific positions)

●Writing code

●Sourcing data

●Daily stand up (ritual: team progress, plans, updates & blockers)

●Training

●Presentations

●Demo days

❖Reflective

❖High Pressure

❖High Performance

❖Competitive, Collaborative

❖Slow, Fast

❖Impacting

❖Toxic

❖Break Things, Move Fast

❖Meaningful

❖Innovation, Staid

Laptop

❖Data & communications locked to device, everything monitored

❖Traditional: business laptop with windows

❖Creatives: usually provide Mac/Linux

❖Take to every meeting

❖Don’t open whatsapp/fb/instagram/personal email or install programs

Personal Phone (BYOD)

❖Install monitoring software

❖Access work docs/email/comms

Cloud

❖Some legacy organizations have servers

❖Organizations processing big data use cloud:

➢Amazon AWS, Google GCP, Microsoft Azure, Huawei, Alibaba Cloud

❖Tech & start-ups are mostly using cloud

❖Everything will be locked down and visible

❖Use email/chat only for work

❖DM service like Slack/Discord/Teams

❖Reply quickly and professionally

❖Keep communications short and business-like, not too formal

❖Email is mostly for old economy companies

❖Use calendar; be punctual

❖Invest time

❖Infinite scale SQL engines

❖Highly scalable managed servers

❖Deep Learning and more

❖Docker + Kubernetes

❖Manage Security

Small Data

●Shared drive: KB, MB, GB data volume

●Working on laptops

●Legacy industry applications

●Some working in Excel

●xslx, tsv, csv, txt, db, sql file formats

Big Data

●Cloud based storage: GB, PB, XB, YB data volume

●Work with servers using Python, SQL (sometimes R, Node, Java)

●Expect security to be paramount PII (Super sensitive data)

●avro, parquet, orc, json, bson, fasta, fastq, sql file formats

❖Salary

❖Stock

❖Vacations

❖Perks: Massages, Relocation, Healthcare, Education/Travel Budget, Work From Home, Gifts, Food

❖Clean

❖Organized

❖Professional

❖List out skills relevant to roles that interest you

❖Demo your projects

❖Or a working app

❖Only quality repos

❖Repo names: use-skewer-case

❖Commits should look professional

❖pdf format (additionally word/online)

❖Have an sharable link (with a tiny url)

❖1 page: usually for first screening

❖2 page: when requested

❖Spanish, English (English is really important for many jobs)

❖Bash, Python, R, SQL, Linux

❖Windows, Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, etc.)

❖Google App (Drive, Sheets, Slides, Docs)

❖LLM: ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude

❖Time is money

❖Can cost 5-15% of the total budget, 30% of first year salary, 200% to replace a bad hire

❖Productivity declines

❖Too many online applications

❖Filtering is error prone

❖Bad hires are a weight on the organization

❖Boring & exhausting process

❖Serious candidates need to demonstrate motivation

❖Learn to work in groups of 2-5 people, ideally cross functional teams

❖Many organizations work on quarterly budgets and allocations

❖Could apply around the quarters (Dec/Jan, March/April, June/July, Sept/Oct)

❖Probably best to get to a big city, you’ll learn more quickly working with highly skilled people

❖Live close to work for the first year (even if it’s a small apartment share)

❖Work crazy hard for the first 6 months

❖Don’t mention you want to go back to university (PhD/Masters)

High Probability of Interview:

❖Friends

❖Family

❖Conferences

❖LinkedIn coffee meetings with potential colleagues

❖Not fair, but filtering is expensive and boring

❖Be nice (your prospective colleagues will spend more time with you than their partner)

❖Don’t be nervous or desperate

❖Don’t boast

❖Listen carefully, speak slowly

❖Go to office if possible

❖External (not ideal - will eat into your compensation - maybe 30%)

❖Internal

❖Semi-internal (contracted by business)

Don’t apply for jobs directly

❖Don’t worry

❖Only a guide (sometimes a senior post, will consider a good junior)

❖Often copy/pasted by HR

❖No one completes all the requirements

❖Work out if the position is in a cost center or revenue driver for the business

❖Make the resume fit the job

❖Highlight skills relevant to the jobs

❖Remove skills not relevant

Google then write to the internal recruiter

❖Most platforms have ATS software

❖This is a classifier

❖It filters on experience, universities, age, keywords, companies etc

❖Write to internal recruiters directly, write to prospective colleagues

❖Understand their business model

❖Know sector themes

❖Industry press

❖CEO/CFO/CTO/Prospective Colleagues Interviews/Posts

❖Understand revenue/profit/cost sources of the organization

❖Smile (Lots)

❖Positive energy

❖Confident, can do attitude

❖Professionally attractive version of yourself

❖Dress code depends on industry sector

➢Traditional (Law, Finance, Govt, University): Conservative dress, hide tattoos, piercings

➢Creative (Tech, Media, Arts, Startups): More permissive on self-expression

➢Senior

➢Junior

➢Business Area Manager

➢Hiring Manager

➢Second Manager

➢Random jr to check fit with culture

➢Random Manager to check fit with culture

❖First Stage Screening

❖Second Stage Screening

❖Technical Screening

❖Interview Panel

❖Technical Interview

❖Check candidate is suitable and realistic

❖Filter out completely unaware

❖Very important

❖Send a polite email thanking the interviewer(s) for taking the time to interview you

❖Do this for after every interview - make sure to write to all interviewers

❖Many can fail at this stage

❖0.5-3 days

❖On-site at the office (Could be off-site at a hotel/resort)

❖5-8 interviews with 2-3 interviewers in each interview

❖Introduce yourself, small talk about weather, journey

❖If asked, mention you have other interviews in process

❖Wide ranging types (group, in-tray, interaction)

❖Related to job

❖Show enthusiasm for the mission of the organization

❖Smile lots

❖It’s not an academic free thinking environment

❖Try to give middle response

❖Usually not very important

❖Looking at repetitive baseline skills

❖Could be important for specific roles

❖Not good for creative positions

❖Can practice hundreds online (people do: leetcode.com, hackerank.com)

❖Pattern matching

❖Watch YouTube for examples

❖Big-O, Loops, Recursion, Conditionals

❖Programming Style

❖Slow response (days to weeks)

❖Don’t take it personally

❖Many reasons

➢Bad Organization Fit

➢Funding Withdrawn

➢Better Candidate

➢Internal Candidate

➢Poor performance

❖Valuable

❖Try to get specifics

❖Suggestions for how to improve

❖Be grateful

❖Fast Response (Hours to Days)

❖Informal call/email from HR

❖Subject to offer, accept provisionally if you like the organization

❖Formal offer: can be a zoom with all interviewers

❖Try to Negotiate

❖10-30% increase possible

❖stock/salary/sign-on bonus/vacation/other benefits

❖startup stock options mostly don’t work out

❖Often the improvement is stock or relocation costs (might not be worth much)