Job search 101

If you’ve never done this before, you’re at the right place in this guide! Job searching often involves multiple things and has extremely fluid deadlines. Treat it like a class with a syllabus that has no due dates but multiple weekly assessments. Let me break this down:

  1. Assignment 1: Resume
  2. Assignment 2: Leetcode
  3. Assignment 3: Behavioural interview prep
  4. Assignment 4: Finding and applying for jobs
  5. Assignment 5: Solving OAs (Online Assessments), HireVues, and any other assessments
  6. Assignment 6: Interviews
  7. Assignment 7: Handling offers and rejections

You’ll have multiple of these assessments throughout the week and will need to keep track of various deadlines, so a good organization system is key. You will also need to reply to emails from recruiters to schedule interviews, ask for extensions (yes! You can ask for an extension on OAs) and send thank you notes to your interviewers.

Once you start submitting applications, it will also inevitably follow with rejections. The most important thing to keep in mind with rejections is to not take it personally. This is hard but rejections could have been due to a lack of headcount, different skill set needs, lack of experience, not the right year of study or possibly all the internship spots being filled. Nearly every one of these is out of your control so you cannot blame yourself for a rejection.

Job Search Timeline

Depending on the season and work location/country, your job search season will vary. The 2 most popular options are either Canadian or US internships.

US internships are mostly in the summer and start hiring a year before the internship. So if you want a Summer 2024 internship, you would need to start recruiting in late Summer 2023. Most US internship positions go live in July/August of the previous year and the companies hire on a rolling basis until February.

Canadian internships are split into 3 seasons: Fall, Winter, and Summer. Canadian companies typically hire a term before the internship starts, so for a Summer 2024 internship, you would recruit in Winter 2024.

Once you identify the recruitment season, I would recommend starting your preparation a month or two before. Say you want to apply for US summer 2025 internships and decide to start recruiting in August 2024. Ideally, you would start preparing your resume and LinkedIn in June 2024. Then, you would start leetcoding in June/July 2024 and keep an eye on job boards. Once you see a posting, you should apply early/as soon as you can!

Leetcode tips

Refer to the Leetcode guide.

Interview tips

Refer to the Interview guide.

A good organizational system can ease the stress of the job search. Some popular tools are Excel spreadsheets, Notion databases, Notepad (don’t recommend this but if it works for you, go for it) and Google Sheets.

Here are some popular templates for each of the tools mentioned above:

A good system would include:

  1. Date/Deadline tracking: Each job application will have multiple processes to it, there’s the online assessment, multiple interview rounds and offer deadlines, so you would need some sort of calendar/date/deadline tracker
  2. Company name and other research: This would include the culture points, any cool tech the company has and other information you would reference during the interview. You could also store any information you find online about their interview process here.
  3. Recruiter name, contact info: This person would be your main point of contact and keeping their information along with the job application would help you easily find this instead of digging through your inbox and relying on the Gmail/Outlook/Hotmail search (which may not always give you this information easily).
  4. Coffee chat/LinkedIn Influencers/Intern or Employee blog posts: These are often good things to reference during an interview to show you did your research and having it on hand makes it easier to reference.
  5. Resume version: If you tailor your resume, I’d highly recommend storing the pdf along with the job application.
  6. Job description: Often by the time you get to the interview stages, the job descriptions get taken down or are no longer available, so saving them makes it easier to keep track of the things you need to prep for.

8 tips have been outlined in this blog post

Job Board

If you’re a CS student at UofT, please check the CS undergrad Quercus site for the job board. These postings are updated regularly with postings from various companies including startups.

Other popular job boards include:

  1. LinkedIn

  2. Indeed

  3. GitHub repos:

    1. Canadian summer internships
    2. New grad - Every year someone creates a repo and it becomes popular, so keep an eye out in reddits/discords

  4. Websites like Simplify Jobs, CS Careers

There are multiple job boards and it can be overwhelming to keep track of all of them. I recommend picking 2 job boards to actively follow and focus on distributing your energy into the other parts of the job search.