Career Fair & Interview Tips

As a Product Development Engineer fresh out of college, the possibility of an occasional recruiting or interviewing trip wasn't something I expected to be doing. The career fair part, maybe. But I was rather surprised to have been given the responsibility of interviewing potential new hires after being with my current company for about a month. This week, I'm heading up to Penn State for my 3rd recruiting trip. I am very much looking forward to it (as any other trip to State College). Surprisingly, I really enjoy recruiting & interviewing. Most of all, I enjoy learning about what other people are working on. In light of this trip, I thought it would be helpful to offer a few pointers to anyone who might stop by our booth.

1. First and foremost, if you want a job, your stature and excitement better reflect it. If you aren't confident in how you present yourself, you will be among the first that I throw in the trash pile. You might be a 4.0 Ph.D. student with a 3 page list of publications, but if your excitement level matches that of watching pro-bowling of TV, and I need to hold a megaphone up to your mouth just to hear what you’re saying, I'm not interested. If I don't enjoy talking with you for our 1 minute conversation, I REALLY don't want to draw it out to an hour long interview. Standing around all day giving the same spiel once every 2 minutes for 6 hours gets to be rather tedious when 98% of the students that come up to you all sound exactly the same and really don't sound or look like they want to be there.
2. At least have an idea of what we do before you hand me a resume and ask for a job. We're one of the world's largest companies, if you haven't heard of us, you're out of touch with the industry and you sound desperate. I definitely underestimated the value of this in the past, but simply writing the name of the company with whom you want a job with goes a LONG way. Plan ahead, you look much more interested and prepared (even if you're not). At my first career fair, my boss gave an interview to a guy simply because he wrote our name on the "purpose" section of his resume - his background had nothing of what we were looking for.
3. Resume buzz words are a waste. Avoid like the plague cliché phrases such as "I'm a hard worker", "I am awesome", "I want to excel in the industry"...according to 97% of the resumes that I've seen, so does everyone else. Odds are that I'm going to breeze through your resume. Focus on what you did. Be specific. Don't fill your space with cliché phrases, you will blend in with everyone else.
4. What do you do besides school? Sure, first and foremost we want to hire someone who can work. But we also don't want to hire a zombie. Don't focus on this, but if you were a part of the Navigators, put it on your resume - it shows that you're versatile and can potentially give a little more common ground to talk about which WILL result in me remembering you.
5. If you took 5 years to finish your B.S., or if you have a large gap between school and full time employment be prepared to say why. If you were just being lazy, come up a good story or something, but please don't lie or make excuses. If you screwed around in your freshman or sophomore year, admit it, tell me what you learned and we can move on. If there was one person who had no shot of getting a decent job, it's someone who comes across as lazy (either if they are or I perceive them to be)
6. If you end up getting an interview, and they ask you to do a quick presentation of a project that you worked on, print out your presentation (4 slides to a page is preferred, by me anyway) and emphasize what YOU did (keep the emphasis away from "we"). Also, make sure you have a copy of your resume for everyone that you're interviewing with.
7. I always thought that I had to use that fancy resume paper. I now realize that no one cares if you do or don’t. We want to hire a person, not find a new office supply store. Multiple pages is fine for us, because we're not scanning resumes and the ability to fill up 2 pages is a plus in my book. However, Intel, GM, or Raytheon might not like your unorthodox staple. More important to me is that you don't hand me a piece of paper with size 6 font. My boss is a grandfather - he can't read that, you could have written the Declaration of Independence and he wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.
8. This isn't as big of a deal to me as most older recruiters, but get a haircut, shave, and look presentable. If you smell bad, I'm going to do my best to get away from you.
9. Two weeks ago at the University of Illinois, one girl kept bad mouthing everyone else on one of her projects. My boss still keeps laughing about it. I wish I was in the interview room at the time. I can only imagine how terrible it must be to work with her. She might have had terrible partners, but a good leader will straighten them out. Odds are good that an interviewer will ask about a time where you were placed in a team environment or had to work with a difficult person, rather than focusing on their flaws, focus on your strengths.
   
10. Finally, if you still have the pockets of your suit sewed together, odds are that my boss is going to laugh at you. He might also laugh if you wear white socks with a black suit. I might laugh with him.
    

That's pretty much all I have. Feel free to post a question or comment. And, Penn Staters looking for a job, good luck.