How to Get Job After Grad School Without Work Experience

VK Asks About possibility of getting Job after Masters Degree without Work Experience Read more

Part Time Jobs and International Students in F1 Visa

International students can work in US and earn some money, but how much can they earn? Avinash has heard wrong information Read more

What Not to Say During Job Interview

If you are preparing to attend a job interview the way in which you answer questions will help you get the job. Here’s a good vidoe of what not to say during job interview. Read more

IBM Hiring 1300+ for New IT Center – Dubuque, Iowa

This news will be much welcome sign for many job seekers. IBM plans to open new IT Center in Dubuque, Iowa and they are planning to hire 1300+ employees. Looks like for current 300 positions more than 3000 resumes were submitted. Read more

What is LinkedIn.com?

I’m big fan of LinkedIn.com and I use it as much I use my Orkut and Facebook profile. But, main difference between LinkedIn.com and other social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook and Myspace is that Linkedin will help you find your dream job. Read more

Job Interview Tips – Eye Contact

Do you have fear for Job Interview? Do you carry Pepsi or Coke instead of water with you for job interview?

Well, I didn’t have any kind of tension for first job interview I had to attend the internship interview in school. I was packing for my vacation/trip to India and had the interview call. If I was given chance for next round of interview, I was planning to cancel my trip and head to California for the interview. Read more

19 Do’s and Don’ts After Job Interview

Job Interview is tough, but there are ways to make a positive impression even after the job interview. I have had chance to screen resumes and interview candidates. I have had pleasant experience and have also had not so good experience during job interview process and after the interview process. I like to highlight the lessons I have learned when I was applying for jobs as student few years back and during job search and job change. Following tips very well apply to internship interview. Read more

Job Search using LinkedIn.com

Did you know on an average students do online job search for 5 to 7 months after Master’s Degree?

The one who gets the job is not always the one who can do the job best, but who knows best how to get the job!

Do you want to avoid 5 to 7 months of online job search in your OPT, then this article will give you exact tools and techniques for students to help them in online job search in U.S. When a students is planning to study in U.S. the first question that comes to his/her mind is, Can I get a job after studying in particular university? but, not many realize that online job search itself is a full time job. They realize this only after 2-3 months of their online job search. That too with fears of recession in U.S. economy, students must be well prepared for the effort in job search they would have to put in. Though above few lines might scare you, but job search tips, techniques, strategies, .. in this article will definitely ease the job search efforts.

This article is going to be lengthy one. First of all I would like give few specific scenarios on how usually students search for jobs. Following 3 example are my own observations from my friends.

Job Search : Example 1

One of my friend who didn’t really explore about online job search or didn’t apply for any jobs until after Graduation with Master’s. It took him 2 weeks after graduation to get his resume drafted and formatted. So, that’s a waste of 2 weeks OPT time. Then, it took another 2-3 weeks for him to really get into job search mode, since after 2 years of college, he relaxed for 2 more weeks visiting friends and families in different states in U.S. Since there was no preparation done before, every student had to go through the learning curve for online job search.

So, as every student begins his online job search, he went to Monster.com created an account and uploaded his resume with search key word “Software Engineer” with locations not specified. It listed 1000’s of jobs and he applied to some 10 to 15 jobs randomly to different cities where his friends were working. 2-3 weeks went by and there was no interview call, only ‘Thank you for applying’ – no-reply emails. Majority of the students during online job search are open to relocate to any locations within U.S.

Since that approach didn’t help much, he decided to get the list of Fortune 500 companies and started applying for jobs from Fortune Rank 1. So, he applied for some 400 companies and another 2-3 weeks went by and had a phone interview and there was no reply from the HR after first round of phone screen. As you can see, so far 8 weeks went by and there is no interview calls and which means 8 weeks of time is wasted in OPT period.

He got frustrated at the online job search process and decided to take a break for 1 week and went on a trip and was hoping to see some positive replies when he got back from vacation. There was none. Now, it was time to get serious about job search. He started getting up early and working late night to apply for jobs. Now online job search was not limited to Monster, but he started using Yahoo Hotjobs, CareerBuilder, Dice, local news paper ads job postings. But the key words used increased to entry level software engineer, software quality assurance, software test engineer, with location still not set. So, at end of 3 months with just 1 interview call, he decided online job search approach was not working and something has to be done to get a job. So, the desperation to get a job increased as his part time earned money got emptied and 3 months of OPT time was wasted. Let me stop here and say, he went to on to get a job after 5 months. But, how did he get the job, continue reading.

Job Search: Example 2

One other friend graduated with M.S. in Computer Science and applied for OPT and was never really into job search. He will apply for job once in 2 weeks, and will wait for the interview call, then applied for few more companies. In mean time he was working as research assistant under a professor in OPT. So, money was not a problem and it continued for about 8 months.It was August end and H1B has to be filed before Oct 1st and there was no lottery system or so much rush to apply for H1B visa couple of years back. Finally by mid September he found a consultant who filed his H1B visa and got a very low paying job with commission of 50-50. Which means, if company pay the consultant $100 per hour, my friend will get only $50 as pay. The consultant will take $50. Usually its 70/30, but if you are very desperate to get a job, that’s how consultant company will exploit the job seekers.

Job Search : Example 3

Also, a student with Electrical Engineering degree after Graduation with Master’s and without much interest in online job search joined a consultant. He didn’t even think of job search. Consultant asked him to add 3 years of experience to his resume, since he didn’t have any previous job experience. So, he made his M.S. as Part time and stated that he had 3 years of Software testing experience. Attended interviews with few companies and ended up getting a job. It’s actually illegal to do resume fraud. If he’s caught with incorrect details in resume, he will lose his job. But, thats what is happening with consultants ( majority ).

Job Search : Example 4

I was chatting on of my college junior who is currently 3 semesters into her Master’s degree. She was applying for summer internship directly through the companies website using PDF format resume. After 2 months she stopped applying for internships, and reason was, no one was calling her for interview. Mistake she did was using PDF formatted resume. Companies career web page usually has keywords filtering tool to select resume from thousands of applicants. Keyword filtering tool works very well with ASCII formatted resume and word document, but it wouldn’t parse very well in PDF file.

Questions for you:

Do you think you fall into any of the above 4 online job search examples?

Do you know anyone ( friends ) who belongs to any of above 4 examples?

Do you want to know, what is the better and much efficient ways for online job search?

Lets explore what possible ways are available, so the online job search process will be much more fun and tension free. Again, online job search techniques I’m going to list here, involves time and effort. But the amount of effort you will have to put in will be rewarded.

Introduction to Professional Networking:

According to Careerxroads’s research article on Source of hiring,

1. Internal Transfers and Promotions constitute 30.0% of all the positions a company fills.
2. Referrals (employee, alumni, vendor, etc.) make up 28.7% of all external hires and are arguably the number one external source. The efficiency of referrals i.e. “every third referral turns into a hire” is one of the single most important characteristics of US hiring practices…and not leveraged as well as it might be.
3. Hires attributed to Job Boards (including the Company site as a job board) represent 25.7% of external hires.
4. Unfortunately Hires attributed to the Company Website are half of the Job Board category and, in our opinion, suspect (we maintain that the company website is a destination not a source).
5. The most visible trend in 2007 was the growth of Direct Sourcing (and a related reduction in agency hires).

As you can see any jobs applied by students directly in their website contributes to only about 12%. Now you know why my friend in example 1 and 2 as well as many you reading this article didn’t receive any phone calls from companies. So, the next question is how to find someone who will refer you to a job. Well, that’s were professional networking comes into play.

LinkedIn.com : It’s time to network and build contacts:

There are many Professional networking websites, but nothing beats Linkedin.com. I’m sure some of you will have heard about this or you might have an account at LinkedIn, because someone invited you to join. But,if you haven’t created an account with LinkedIn, go ahead and use your professional email id to setup your profile.

How to create LinkedIn Profile:

You can describe what technologies you are good at. There is no magic to get your profile 100% right the first time you log into LinkedIn. Visit other students and professionals profile and see how they have presented it. So, you can modify it accordingly. For instance, you can set the title as “Student at University of Texas” . But make sure, you try to fill in all possible information. It will be viewed by lots of professionals, employers, HR’s. Make sure you try to add all the information from your resume into the LinkedIn profile. Its not necessary to include your projects.

LinkedIn profile is set, next add contacts:

Now, you have set up your profile, next start inviting your friends to get a feel for how adding contacts works. Its simple, fill in your friends name and email address and send an invite with default message. Just let your friend know about this article and also about your invitation to join. Linkedin has very nice feature to list other friends from same college, schools or work place. So it makes easier to connect with friends.

After getting the feel for LinkedIn start searching for people from companies. For example, you want to work for Cisco, you can do a search like this

- Go to People tab

- For Company : Cisco

- Interested in : Hiring Manager

- Leave other options to default and hit search

It will list Hiring Managers who are currently working in Cisco. Next, you need to contact them, and add them to your network. But remember, you are going to contact Hiring Managers of a company, so you will have to be very professionals in your email. For more information on

- How to compose email to establish contacts

- Can I ask them in the first email, if they have job opening?

- How long should my email be?

- What should be the contents of the email?

- What if I don’t have any connections in my network to contact them, do I need to pay for the service?

- When do I need to start building my network?

To know answers to above questions and many other tips about job search, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or Subscribe to email updates. Once I write about Job search tips, it will be delivered to your Inbox.

28 Quetions About Resume

I have listed some of the common questions students will have to find the answer while writing the resume. If that’s the first resume writing experience, I’m sure they will have at-least 90% of the questions I have listed below.

1) What should be the length of the resume

2) Which resume template should I select?

3) Where should my educational details go, before or after the project, academic experience section.

4) I have low GPA, should I indicate that in the resume?

5) I have filled contents of resume only for 1.5 pages, can I leave half page blank?

6) I don’t have any work experience, can I add few work experience, since there is space left in the resume?

7) Should I list when I graduated from school?

Do I list summary of qualification or objective section to start the resume with?

9) I want to write a good resume, but my mind just freezes when I start to edit the resume, I really don’t know how to proceed further.

10) I applied for some 50 or more jobs, I haven’t got any response, should I change my resume template?

11) What is the difference between functional and chronological resume?

12) I’m entry level student, I don’t have any work experience, can I have 2 ore more page resume?

13) My friends has good looking resume template, can I use the same template?

14) Do I have to list all the people who gave reference about me in the resume?

15) Do I need to write about the company I worked for in the resume?

16) I know what C programming language is, and have written 2 small programs, can I list C in my skills set?

17) How do I make the resume fax-able?

18) I have less then 1 year work experience, but my resume is more than 5 pages, do I have to reduce the length of the resume?

19) Description of the project I worked in school is 2 page long, how do I explain it in 3 lines in resume?

20) Do I need to change the resume for each job I apply?

21) I have certification logo, can I use that in the Microsoft Word format resume?

22) Do I need to have special format resume to upload resume in websites like Yahoo Hot Jobs (10 best web sites to search for jobs)

23) Do I need to keep updating the resume?

24) Can I print the resume in 1 paper on both sides or on 2 separate sheets of paper?

25) What is the best font size and font family to use?

26) How do I create a ASCII format resume?

27) How to make MS word format resume scannable?

28) Will this resume format, contents is sufficient enough to get me a job?

In future posts, I will write about resume and also answer to all the above questions, including job search tips, internship search tips. Hope you enjoyed the article. To find better jobs, I recommend Yahoo Hot Jobs. More details on job search engines in future articles. Good Luck in your job search.

How to find a part time job

Part time would definitely make student life easy. It will pay your monthly living expenses atleast. But, you must be aware of the fact that, it must be of least priority in your list for finding way sot meet your financial ends. Order of importance would be as follows

1) Research Assistantship
2) Teaching Assistantship
3) Scholarship
4) Part Time job

In this article, I’m going to talk about part time jobs. As an International Student, you are allowed to work 20 hours per week within University Campus. Any work outside the campus, like gas stations, restaurants, hotels, motels, is considered illegal. It can lead to deportation from U.S.

One of my friend was working in an restaurant nearby the university. One of the International Student Advisor was at the restaurant for lunch, and he happened to his waiter. Couple of days later, he went to IO for some paper works, and same International Officer happened to meet him. He advised him to quit working at restaurant immediately, without any adverse action. This was few years back.

So, there is very good chance of getting deported back to India, if you were found working outside campus. But, do student take that risk? Yes, of course. But, I feel its not worth the risk to work off-campus jobs.

Requirements for Part-Time job:

If you don’t have RA/TA, start looking for part time jobs oncampus, from Day 1 you reach U.S. Because, it will help you in many ways, like

1) Part Time jobs will get you an SSN
2) That will indirectly, help to get Credit Cards, Driving License and build Credit History and Driving History.
3) Above all, will pay for your monthly expenses.

You would need…

• One Page Resume for part time jobs.
• Know where to look for jobs
• Know who is right contact person for that job
• Know few seniors who has part time job, who will give your pointers
• Be proactive during job search

Some schools, finding part time is very difficult. Especially, when number of International Students are more in the University. Not everyone will get RA/TA. Also, number of jobs that will be available will be very less. If that’s the case, you need to be looking for all possible opportunities to find a job.

Some job will pay you like $10 per hours and some will be $6 per hour. Look for jobs in Library, Multimedia Labs, Computer Labs, Department Offices, College Cafe, Football, Basket Ball ground, Administrative departments, Registrar Office, … I have heard that in Texas A&M @ College Station there is an RA position for feeding and observing the research animals like pig. They pay around $1200 per month.

If you attend big schools in terms of students strength ( > 35,000), more chances for you to find the part time job very easily. If there is medical school, look for jobs over there too.

I will have to talk about significance of One Page Resume in future posts. If you like this post, I would appreciate, if you can pen down few comments. Thanks!