Getting Recruiters to Reach Out to You
Work smarter, not harder.
As an entry-level college student, your experiences recruiting are much like riding a bike up a steep hill. You put in a bunch of effort to move a couple of feet at a time with no end in sight. That’s because you’ve got a ton of competition and recruiters don’t have the time to go through every single candidate, so you’ll likely get overlooked.
But the idea that a recruiter might reach out to you with an interview offer isn’t farfetched at all and happens more often than you think. Let’s go over a few simple ways you can get noticed and land an interview.
Make yourself easy to find on LinkedIn's Talent Solutions
I'm sure you've received messages on LinkedIn from recruiters asking you to join events or company workshops. Have you wondered how they found out about you? Well, they use something called LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Think Google Search but it only spews out people.
Talent Solutions' search algorithm loves it if you have the same characteristics of past candidates who've landed that job before. So if I'm going for a software engineering internship at Microsoft, then it's better for me to have the "skills" of previous candidates who've held those internships.
You may be thinking "Well, I don't have those skills yet." Here's an article I wrote about how to get them for any role.
Try to think from the perspective of the recruiter. Do you think they'd want someone without any skills to actually do the job?
Join programs that partner with your target companies
Many of the companies you're looking to work for may not have partnerships with your college. In this case, you'll need to look at joining other programs that do.
For example, CodePath partners with Microsoft and Walmart (i.e. a direct pipeline to these companies). Additionally, every semester they have a big career fair with top tech companies for fellows who completed their free tech-prep course. Here's a full list of over 70+ programs across tech, finance, real estate, and more.
Get into companies' recruiting newsletter
Many companies have an email newsletter where they send out early applications to their internship or full-time roles. This is a gold mine. Try to find your target companies' recruiting newsletter and subscribe. It essentially gives them permission to reach out to you. Here are Salesforce and Twitter's recruiting newsletters. Go subscribe if you're interested in those companies.
The idea of getting into a recruiter’s peripheral vision is simple: become part of a small pool of candidates where your likelihood of standing out increases drastically. Soon enough, recruiters will start seeing you as a standout candidate.