How to Land Your First Software Engineering Job

The first job is the hardest one to get. After that, everything gets easier because you have experience on your resume. But getting from zero to one is rough, and a lot of the advice out there is either too vague or written by people who haven't applied to a job in 15 years.

Your resume

Keep it one page. Seriously. Nobody is reading page two.

- Projects go first, not coursework. A class project counts if you actually built something — but "completed CS 101" tells a recruiter nothing. If you built a web app, deployed it, and people used it, that's what goes at the top.
- Add numbers. "Built a React app" is boring. "Built a React app that 500 people use daily" — now you have my attention. Even rough numbers are better than none.
- Plain formatting. Those fancy two-column resume templates with icons and progress bars? ATS software can't parse them. Use a simple single-column layout. Jake's Resume template on Overleaf is a safe bet.

Interview prep

Most tech interviews look roughly the same:

Recruiter call — 30 min, mostly behavioral, checking if you're a real person
Technical screen — 45 min LeetCode-style problem, usually easy-to-medium difficulty
Onsite (or virtual onsite) — 3–5 rounds of coding, maybe one system design if it's a more senior role, and a behavioral round

How to study

Don't just randomly grind LeetCode. That's a waste of time.

- First month: Learn the patterns. Sliding window, two pointers, BFS/DFS, basic DP. Neetcode.io has a good roadmap for this.
- Second month: Do 2–3 problems a day. Focus on mediums. If you can consistently solve a medium in 25 minutes, you're in good shape.
- Third month: Do mock interviews. Practice talking through your solution out loud — that's the part most people skip and it's the part that trips them up in the actual interview.

The job search itself

The conversion rate from application to offer is somewhere around 2–5%. That means if you apply to 50 places, you might get 1–3 offers. That's normal. Don't take rejection personally — it's a volume game.

- Apply early — Most companies do rolling admissions for new grad roles. The spots fill up. Applying in January for a role that opened in September means you're competing for fewer seats.
- Don't sleep on mid-size companies — Everyone applies to Google and Meta. Not everyone applies to Datadog, Cloudflare, or Ramp. Less competition, and honestly some of these places have better engineering cultures than Big Tech.
- LinkedIn job search is noisy — You'll see the same 200-applicant postings everyone else sees. Smaller job boards that focus on SWE roles (like this one) tend to have less noise.

Don't burn out

It's easy to go hard for two weeks and then stop. Set a small daily target — like 3 applications and 1 LeetCode problem — and actually stick to it. Consistency beats intensity. Most people who are actively searching land something within a couple months.