Dear readers,
Welcome to my story! I will put my story, my work log or thought in this story to share my experience and personal thought with you. I am looking forward to hear what you are thinking on my experience. Feel free to add / comment if you think my contents do not align with you, so that others can help from your considerations as well!
Here is what I did to get the opportunity to have FAANG interview. This is my experience, so this is always not the answer to fit your situation as well. Please look at this article as an example of the hiring case.
Below contents is my personal opinion. There is no relationship between the company and this article.
https://9gag.com/gag/adgvwKd , believe me you will be not like this LOL
Prepare your Linkedin profile
Sadly, if you do not have any action to get attentions from recruiters of top tech companies, they won’t be able to recognize you. Of course, you can apply the position you think that seat is yours. However, there are at least more than one hundred people who think the exact same thought you have. Furthermore, they received tons of applications from the (potential) candidates around the world. This is not a good tactic to get a job.
What I can suggest you is that you need to have attractive profile. As you know, Linkedin is very well known platform to advertise yourself to recruiters.
[Junho Kim - Software Engineer - 아마존 | LinkedIn
View Junho Kim's profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. Junho has 4 jobs listed on their…linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/in/junojunho/ "linkedin.com/in/junojunho")
Here is my profile. I don’t know what keywords are captured by recruiters. The key was putting your own contents in your profile. At least, you need to describe your location, your work history which contains what you did in that position.
Additionally, you can get referral from existing employee in that company. This will be more easy to pass your application and gain next step chance. If you know someone who works at that company, don’t hesitate! Just contact that person and chat about the fact you are interested in that position. If you are luck, you will get referral to apply that position. It will be much more easier than above.
Also, you can aim hiring event on specific location. In my case, I attended South Korea Hiring event. This event usually focuses on interviewing many candidates on each location, so you don’t need to have one week vacation to just have interviews.
Prepare your one page resume
Linked profile is just entry page. You need to make your up-to-dated resume. In there, you can describe your work history in one depth more. But sadly, you don’t have to put too much contents in your resume. Think about that if you are recruiter, what will you do if you see 5 pages resume candidate and 1–2 pages resume with same contents? I would prefer later one.
You can search multiple examples of good resume. Also, software developer’s resume is pretty straight forward. You just need to describe what you did in that job. Rest of things will be handled during your interview.
Prepare Coding test
I know, I know. This topic is very very well-known topic. If you apply developer position, you definitely need to have an ability to describe your computer science fundamentals. The good news is that because this topic is very common, there are good materials in the web / books as well. I personally recommend this book “Cracking the Coding Interview”
[Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions
Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions: Gayle Laakmann McDowell: 1235264539136: Books …amazon.ca](https://www.amazon.ca/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming-Questions/dp/0984782850/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=cracking+the+coding+interview&qid=1648183465&sprefix=Cracking+the+c%2Caps%2C136&sr=8-1 "amazon.ca/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Program..")
This is kind of bible of coding interview preparation. This book covers most of topics that you may meet in coding interview questions. But believe me, the coding interview question is mainly for checking you are capable of doing coding, not checking you are the person who can win the coding competition like Google CodeJam.
In Amazon, the company has a policy providing feedback/result of given stage within 2~5 days. It means that you will face coding problem within a week or 2 weeks after your submission. It would be too short to prepare something for your coding skills, so it would be great to prepare this skills prior to submission.
Familiarize company’s ethics, principles
Each company has its own culture. In Amazon, there are leadership principles that every amazonian should have them as a mind set. Even though each candidate/applicant is competent, they will not get offer if they are not aligned with the company’s culture fit.
But, this case can be avoidable. Every recruiter will reach out you and guide you how to prepare such principle questions. Each principle has its own behavioural questions. All are about your work experience. You need to express your work experience is linked with company’s some leadership principles. This is somewhat easy, but somewhat hard if you don’t have enough experience to express this.
Conclusion
Above things are overall what you need to prepare to show yourself into interviewers/recruiters. Next time, I will conduct step by step what interview happened in my personal experience.