How To Get Into Tech After Graduation - HubSpot

Sift Through the Noise

Most job boards, like Indeed.com, allow you to set up instant alerts that'll immediately email you when a position is posted with specific keywords in your chosen area. Twitter is another option for monitoring job listings in real time. Get yourself in the habit of searching for specific keywords like "product manager" or "software engineer." As you find specific companies or job sites tweeting about positions regularly, you can add them to a public or private Twitter List to make monitoring easier.

Tap into Your Network

If job boards are not returning the results you’d like, opt instead for targeted, personalized emails to either members of your address book, second or third connections on LinkedIn, or companies of interest who may not have current open job listings. Don’t be afraid to send direct messages to developers or managers, admiring a specific aspect of their work and asking for their creative expertise over a cup of coffee. Best practices are to attach your CV, shorten your recent experiences to a few quick bullet points in the body of the email, include your ideal job titles and companies, and of course thank them graciously for their support.

Stay Organized

Once you’ve done some initial digging and perhaps a few informal chats, your goal should be to narrow down and strategically focus on a dream list of ~10-12 companies. Glassdoor can be an amazing resource to get an insider’s view on what it’s like to be an employee at X company and read up on missions, policies, and perks. Following companies’ blogs and social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Snapchat) can also help you research the most up-to-date news on the company, its performance, and its people. After compiling your list, staying organized is crucial; we recommend keeping a job application tracking template with key information such as the title of the position you’re applying for, the location, the type of company, the date you applied, who you included as your references, and the name and email of the hiring manager, for starters. The more detail the better.

Researching Tech Companies

• What is the company's tech stack?

The first question you should ask is what tech stack the company’s development team uses. Are they using the latest and greatest technologies and coding languages? Or are they stuck on an old stack? Tech moves extremely fast, so you don’t want to get stuck in the past. If the company hasn’t upgraded recently, you should inquire whether they have plans to do so in the near future or if they are open to stack suggestions. The best development teams will be open to your input. To get familiar, learn more about HubSpot's tech stack.

• How much of an impact can I have?

For your first job out of university, you want to be learning, but you want to make sure you are also at a company where you can have impact. If you have the talent, there is no way you should be spending the formative year(s) of your career in testing or just fixing bugs. You want to have work on real problems and make sure you are quickly given the chance to develop code and deliver features that will give you the foundational experience you need to grow your career in the coming years.

• Will I enjoy the development culture?

There is nothing more frustrating than spending loads of time writing software that takes months to see the light of day. At most corporations, sometimes it can take over a year to release your code, depending on the time between test cycles. That’s why it’s critical to ask potential employers how often their development team pushes code live, what is the average time it takes for a product to go from conception to launch, and how long is the deployment process (ideally, it should be short, like five minutes or less). At HubSpot, our development team pushes code live weekly, if not daily. We ship fast and iterate often.

• Who will I be working with?

Lastly, make sure to inquire about the caliber of the engineers you will be working with. Are they influencing the software industry as a whole as well as building great product? A great indication of this is their contributions to open source projects.