How to Stand Out During the Recruitment Season

5 Tips to Help You Stand Out During This Recruitment Season

January through March marks the advent of internship recruiting for many non-ABC, also known as Accounting-Banking-Consulting, undergraduates. As I enter my third year of recruiting, I'd like to share five tips that have helped me stand out during the application process and interviews. Utilizing these five tips has helped me secure six internship offers this past spring semester.

1. Setting realistic goals

Setting realistic goals is crucial if you want your recruiting process to be fruitful and enjoyable. If you have no previous experience in an industry, I highly recommend applying to smaller companies and start-ups along with a few "target" Fortune 500 companies (especially for freshmen). Smaller companies are more forgiving and understanding of your lack of past work experience.

Smaller companies are by no mean inferior to their counterparts. Smaller companies boast smaller teams, thus allowing you to be cross-functional where you can develop multiple skill sets in one summer!

Most importantly, once you start applying, do expect to not hear back right away or at all in some cases. Internship hunting is competitive, so don't be discouraged with the first sign of rejection or lack of response. Keep your head high and keep applying!

2. Casting your net wide

In an ideal world, you would only need to apply to a few places and will receive your top choices. However, recruiting is competitive by nature, thus apply to as many places as possible! Similar to college applications, you will need to have both safety and reach internships. Safety being companies where you know the chance of landing a first round interview is fair to good. Reach being companies where you know there will be a few hundred competing applicants and the odd of landing an interview is slimmer. To put this into context, last spring, I applied to roughly 100 places before hearing back from eight (yes, only eight!) and ultimately six offers. Casting your net wide is extremely important.

3. Recognizing and aligning KSAs: knowledge, skills, and abilities

Although personality and cultural fit are components of a hiring decision, your knowledge, skills, and abilities to execute the prospective role is just as equally important. Before applying to a role, review its minimum qualifications and ask yourself whether or not you can do most of tasks listed (>80%). If your answer is no, then the role might not be a good fit for you. An internship should push you to grow, but your employer also needs someone who can work independently to deliver the role's respective summer projects.

If your answer is yes, then re-read the job description and tailor your resume and cover letter by the relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities listed. Recruiters and hiring managers will view your candidacy in good light if they see an alignment in the job description and your skills.

4. Doing research prior to applying and interviewing

Doing proper research will demonstrate that you are a strong candidate who is highly interested in the role you are applying for. This goes beyond a simple search (i.e. what does company x do?). Take some time to read the company's mission, values, and recent press releases.

For example, does the company's values align up with your values? Perhaps you enjoy doing community service and the company also values service. This may also a good time to see whether the company will be a good fit for your or not. Finding alignment and weaving that into your cover letter and interview before and during your interview will be huge pluses, respectively.

5. First impression: resume and cover letter

Your resume and cover letter will be your first impression to recruiters and hiring managers. Craft your resume and cover letter to impress because with hundreds of applications in the system, your chance of getting a first round interview does depend on what you submit (and of course who you know as well).

Your resume should be up to date with relevant work experience. For freshmen, be sure to take out high school activities that are no longer relevant to your industry or can be replaced with college activities. Template varies from person to person, but to keep it simple, remember that your formatting should be consistent across your resume: grammar, tense, number of bullet points, etc.

Your cover letter should be tailored to each job you apply. Tip #4 on doing your research is crucial because the recruiters and hiring managers can tell from the interview whether or not you have done outside research prior to applying and interviewing for the role. I recall receiving positive feedback after an interview with Amazon that it is extremely easy to do research on a company, yet, many people rarely do it. What to research? Company's mission, values, revenue generation activities, customer segments, latest news, recent acquisitions, to name a few.

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Tai is currently a business undergraduate at UC Berkeley. He is ready to disrupt the tech industry with his infectious passion and energy for marketing! Learn more about his marketing and networking course at the Haas School of Business.

Reach out via email: taitran@berkeley.edu.
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