Sorry, bad pun but I’m sure you’ve seen the recent news about Twitter laying off 50% of its workforce or Meta laying off 11k employees over the past week. I remember an industry professional talking about the upcoming recession during a career panel two months ago and he essentially told us that most companies will be looking for experienced and highly specialized software engineers which means my chances are looking grim, especially without an internship under my belt. Not all hope is lost though! I’m currently in the interview process with two companies in an area of tech I’m passionate about so I hope I have good news to share in a future blog post if I get accepted.

On a brighter note, I’m waist-deep in the application process so I’d like to share some tips that have helped me.

• Simplify – Chrome extension for quickly filling out applications. It handles everything from name, address, and phone number to automatically uploading your resume and filling out the veteran status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability section. I actively avoided filling out tedious Workday applications before I downloaded this.
• Resume Worded – ATS tool that rates your resume. Its free tier gives an evaluation of your action verbs, usage of metrics, and repetition. It also allows you to step through each of your bullets with individual ratings. The rating is not related to a particular job or field so it’s more of an evaluation from a writing quality standpoint.
• Jobscan – Different ATS tool that searches for common keywords between your resume and a given job post and rates the match. This seems like a more common usage for ATS so I would emphasize this score, though it has a lot more of its features locked behind a paywall than Resume Worded.
• LinkedIn – If you haven’t yet, turn on “Open to Work” to make yourself searchable by recruiters. About two hours after changing this setting, I had a recruiter reach out about a promising new grad position. Make sure to set up your profile with technical skills from your resume. When you’re applying to jobs, try to avoid the “Easy Apply” option and apply directly through the company’s career page instead.
• Pramp – I’ve personally never used this but a friend recommended it as a great way to get mock interview practice with peers.