How did you GET your job(s)?

[Dave.Norton]

You're making me think...

Alas it had been a long time, it looks as though I've had 7 jobs, and looking at the sources one was a headhunter, 2 were ads, and 4 were a result of having worked with someone in the organization before, so for me the most important has been who knows what I know.

[Danny Diaz]

I got my first co-op with Georgia Tech Research Institute by applying for the position and submitting my resume. I was called in for an interview, and after about 15 minutes of asking me, "Do you understand what this code does?" showed me my office and asked me if I liked cream in my coffee in the mornings.

My job recruitment out of college was a different story, though. I applied to many places, and submitted my resume. I was flown out to Florida for one interview and the interview person grilled me for a full hour on things I had put in my resume, and acted shocked that I actually had intelligent answers for what he was throwing at me. All he could do was sit there and ask me, "So how old *are* you?!?", alluding to the fact that I had worked on a LOT of really cool stuff for several years before finally getting out of school. An outstanding resume can be good, but too outstanding can make people skeptical.

When interviewing at National Instruments, campus recruiters who had gone to Georgia Tech and knew my reputation got me an almost automatic on-site interview in Austin, Texas. When I got to my on-site interview I went through the normal interview process and afterward was told I had my choice of placement (which group). So, it was who knew me that got my foot in the door, and what I knew that sealed the deal.

Originally Posted by KathieK

Be careful what you post online in blogs, etc. It could haunt you in a job interview.

Oh yeah. I heard a rumor about a guy who recently applied for a job at Microsoft, and about halfway through the day the HR rep googled his name and found some quite racy remarks he made about Mr. Gates several years before, and they then escorted him out of the building before the interviews were over.

-Danny

[Jeremy Roberts]

Shortly before graduating from Georgia Tech in '03 I began attending every campus job fair and sending out my resume through MonsterTrak. I ended up getting a few interviews through both these avenues however this is not how I ended up getting my first engineering job out of college. In addition to taking these conventional routes I contacted the members of the Peachtree Regional committee and board and several other FIRST engineers I was working with or had worked with in the past. The recommendations that I received allowed me several final interview opportunities without having to go through the entire process.

The offer that I accepted came as a result of a fellow regional board member recommending me to the former CEO of Mapics who sits on the board of directors of the company that I now work for (Qcept Technologies). They invited me for an interview which lasted about 3 hours including lunch. A few days later I received an offer. I found out about a year later that they had decided that they wanted me not long after the interview ended, but I guess they wanted to make me sweat .

So is it who you know, what you know, or who knows what you know? In my opinion it's all three. Who you know and who knows what you know gets you in the door and what you know keeps you there.

[Richard Wallace]

I can't resist the urge to jump in here, because the previous two posters are from my alma mater, good old gatech.edu

Directly or indirectly, Georgia Tech got me every job I have held since 1977, starting as a ChE co-op at Olin Chemicals in Charleston, TN. After that I changed majors to EE, and got another co-op job at Hughes Aircraft in Fullerton, CA. After graduation I interviewed with a half-dozen companies that were recruiting at the Georgia Tech placement center, and took the offer from TRW Defense Systems, a Hughes competitor. A year later I was back on campus at Tech, recruited as a teaching and research assistant by one of my professors. That professsor (Dr. William E. Sayle, who subsequently served a long term as undergraduate director for ECE) introduced me to several of his colleagues in the power electronics research community. One of those (Dr. Richard Hoft) was instrumental in hiring me as a junior faculty member at the University of Missouri, after I completed the Ph.D. at Tech. That was 15 years ago.

Now I work for Emerson. I got this job because Emerson was sponsoring my research program and contacted me to ask if I was interested in joining a new business that they were creating in my technical area, which is electric machines and drives.

JVN told me recently that "it's not who you know or what you know, it's who knows what you know that gets you hired."

JVN is right.

[Jeff Pahl]

Well, I got out of college at a bad time ('91) for engineers. My future wife graduated a couple weeks before me (different school), went home to Atlanta, and had a job 3 days later. I lost, and the country boy from Wisconsin moved to Atlanta. I then found out that getting an engineering job in Atlanta without having gone to Georgia Tech (nothing against Tech) in a tough economy was going to be really tough. Spent 28 months doing temp work, everything from warehouse work to office work to electronics assembler and technician. I also started taking night classes at Southern Polytechnic in Marietta just to keep my brain working. We had about given up, and were going to move somewhere else when our lease was up. At a office party for my wife's company, I started talking to the husband of one of her co-workers. He mentioned he was an engineer, and said to get him a resume. I did, and about 2 months later got a call. It had ended up on the desk of the only engineer at the company that had attended the same college (Rose-Hulman) that I had. That alone made him curious enough to have me come in for an interview. Turned out we had had the same adviser for our senior projects. Anyway, two more rounds of interviews later, I had a job, and have been there building spaceflight hardware for 13 years now.

Who I knew (and networking outside of the normal "engineer network circles") got me the interview. What I knew, and how well I interviewed got me the job. What I have learned since then has kept me the job, etc. At the time I knew almost nothing about RF testing, and absolutely nothing about working in the space business, but they were willing to take a chance, mostly based on the school's reputation and my interview.

It's been a great ride, and I have been lucky to work on a lot of great projects, including Cassini, a couple of Mars missions, and a lot of stuff that's now orbiting Earth, both research and communications. However, I do have to say that working with FIRST is the most rewarding thing I do, and I'm thrilled that the company is becoming more and more supportive of FIRST each year.

-Jeff Pahl
Project Engineer
Test Development Group
Defense and Space Systems Division
EMS Technologies, Inc.
http://www.emsdss.com/

[Matt Leese]

In many ways suprising to myself, I've never gotten a job through FIRST (although it almost got me an interview one time; Delphi never got around to calling me back after they said they wanted to interview me). My current job at Boeing Space & Intelligence Systems (I start full time on December 9) I got through the career fair.

About two years ago, when I was looking for a coop, I went to the Boeing booth towards the end of the career fair and talked to one of the recruiters. I gave my little spiel about my invovlement in FIRST and I was asked why I wanted to work for Boeing. My answer was simple: I always wanted to be an astronaut, never really got over it, and now I wanted to work on space craft. Apparently, despite the fact that the poster Boeing brings has a picture of the Space Shuttle on it, very few people know Boeing makes space craft. About six months later, at 9 PM, I got a phone call asking if I wanted to do a 7 month coop in Seal Beach, CA. After some thought (they only gave me two days), I accepted and dutifully traveled west. At the end of my coop, I was offered a full time position which I accepted.

I'm currently sitting in Long Beach, CA waiting to start work on December 9. I never realized everything that has to be done to move (even if you get lots of it taken care of by your company!).

Matt

[Greg Perkins]

I'm going do delve into my current job (which hopefully will be my job for many years to come); my job came to me, actually I came to it...which came to me...if that makes any sense. I was on a "field trip" to this engineering firm in Manchester that (apparently from what I was told in class) make measurement systems...big deal, I figured I would go, and get credit for participation. We toured the facilities and we were informed about how keeping your product inexpensive will create better competition in the market, with yours ultimately being cheapest and selling the most of. Wow, still thinking to myself "big deal", until at the end of the tour John (my boss) said "we are looking to hire one of you to work here part-time while still in school doing CAD using the Inventor software" all of a sudden lights turned on and I was extremely intrigued. I rushed home from the office, immediately typed up my resume and sent it in within an hour from the end of the tour.
Sadly, I was giving up hope. After not hearing a word about the job for almost two weeks, I had assumed they had already made their choice, and I was not chosen. This all changed one day when I strolled into my lecture hall and expected to be given another lecture on the forces that are created with chain/sprockets; was I ever wrong, John was there and he was giving us materials for a class project we were going to jointly work on. After his lecture, he called out four names, luckily, I was one of those four names. He was setting up interviews and I readily eager to get mine out of the way, was the first to be interviewed.
The interview went phenomenal, I dressed up professionally, had a leather bound portfolio, an expensive pen set, multiple copies of my resume, and some samples of my Inventor work. I was not nervous at all, pitched my pitch without hesitation, and all in the back of my head was still hoping someone did not pitch a better one than me.
Two days later.......I got the call, not the dreadful one, but the best phone call I have received to date, John said that they were comfortable with my previous training in school with CAD and that training would be unnecessary.

So all in all, I got the job I wanted, doing ridiculously cool stuff and having the best co-workers in the world (a nice paycheck is nice too ).

Click here for more information about my company.

[Jay TenBrink]

While at Michigan State University I was in SAE. During my senior year in 1982-83 I was the student chapter president. Chrysler held a recruiting dinner for all of the officers of the engineering organizations on campus. I interviewed on campus and also at Chrysler Engineering in Highland Park, MI. No job offers followed.

For the next 6 months I sent out over 60 resume’s and had many interviews on campus with no offers. On a whim, I contacted the Chrysler recruiter I had dealt with 6 months earlier. From that follow-up contact came 3 interviews and 3 job offers. I have been with Chrysler/DaimlerChrysler ever since. Over the past 22 years I have held a number of different positions in design, development, manufacturing, operations, and engineering management. It’s been pretty good.

What does this mean?
1) My MSU experience in SAE was very similar to FIRST: organize, raise funds, design, build, test, compete, promote, network, and manage our time. I would not have gotten my job without it.
2) Don’t give up. Hard work and persistence goes a long way, even if you do have good contacts.

Jay

[Ellery]

Hmm I went through a typical job prcoess pretty much.

My first job was a CO-OP at GE Appliances, KY via College Career Fair for the Summer of my Senior Year at RPI.

I had an offer to return to GE Appliance,KY and GE Aircraft Engines TLP, MA. Program but decided to take a job in the Automotive Industry working for ITT Automotive/Valeo in Rochester, NY for 3 years.

My Current job was through a head hunter that called me and asked if I was interested in an opportunity at Xerox and I've been here for the last 6 years.

One lesson I've always remind peple is "Don't let location be the factor to hold your opportunities back." I always tell people I interview all colleges to keep that in mind.

Ellery

[Andy Baker]

While a sophmore at the University of Evansville, I landed a great co-op job with GE Plastics. An HR manager from GE hired about 6 engineers from my school and we all worked there until we graduated. Getting that co-op job was easy, as I prepared a resume and showed up for the interview. Little did I know it would be nothing like landing a full-time position.

My senior year was 1991, and as Jeff Pahl mentioned above, it was a terrible time to find engineering jobs. GE had 25 co-ops graduating and they only offered positions to 3 (this is not normal). Corporate recruiters would come to campus, have 30-40 candidates for jobs with only 1 opening. Many of us sent countless resumes out. I think I sent out over 100, even 20-30 to Australia. (I did get one letter back from Down Under, insulting me for not knowing that they were even in a deeper recession than the US was at the time).

While times were not good, the placement office at UE still wanted to help and made a good suggestion: they gave me an alumni directory and told me to call alumni who work in positions similar to my degree. So, I took this book of names, occupations, and contact information and started highlighting people to call. After many, many days of calling suprised UE grads, I finally found a guy who had an opening in his department here at Delphi (Delco Electronics at the time). My boldness and good timing got me the opportunity to get an interview, while my co-op experience at GE combined with decent grades at UE helped me to land the job. I interviewed with 3 engineering managers, 2 fellow engineers, and even 2 UAW skilled tradesman (how I get along with these guys depend on how well I do my job). The guy I originally called still works in the same department, 14 years later, as do I.

Good thread, John.

Andy B.

[RoboMom]

Being excited about whatever you are trying to take on, being organized, willing to learn & take risks, and serendipity. Who you know always matters because the more people you know, the more opportunities come. Recommended reading: The Tipping Point.

Warning: life for me is often a winding path, but I have been blessed.
For 2 of these jobs, I was the first female ever hired and got to experience being "the test case." It taught me tenacity.

High school newspaper editor =>majored in journalism program in college (applied) =>internship at CBS News (applied) =>made me question a lot about school =>unhappy with college/life/took leave=>weekend hike in the White Mts in NH=> job washing dishes at Appalachian Mt. Club (one of the best jobs breaks I ever had)(recruited)=> manager at Appalachian Mountain Club (recruited)=> hired at Mount Washington Observatory(applied) =>hired as NH Park Ranger(applied) => US Forest Service Ranger (applied) (all these required training as EMT for Mountain Search & Rescue)=>decided to go to nursing school (applied)=>National Health Service Corps and Commissioned Officer in Public Health Service (branch of military (recruited))=> stationed on various Native American Indian Reservations (went where they told me to)=>interest in public health=>honorable discharge=>graduate degree at Johns Hopkins in Public Health (applied/recruited)=>many years as research coordinator at Hopkins & Agency for International Development(first job applied, all the rest I was recruited) (during this time got married, had kids) =>took part-time school nurse job (applied) to spend more time with kids, & did consulting=>went to a school fundraiser as a taste tester and discovered I have the ability to describe tastes=>descriptive panelist for McCormick (recruited, just retired this month). Back to kids: son #1 joined FIRST team=>overly involved in FIRST=>Senior Mentor gig (recommended/applied)=>having a thousand more people in my life and I’ll bet that one of those people will help me move on to the next job when the time is right.

[Peter Matteson]

My co-op at Pratt & Whitney was through WPI's career development center. I interviewed and didn't really have a clue what I was doing then.

The next summer I got my job at Eaton's Naval Controls Division through a career fair on campus talking to the Eaton rep who set me up for an interview.

The summer after that my cousin had started working at International Fuel Cells and said I should send in my resume for an internship. I interviewed and they brought me in for the summer.

I went back to school for one more quarter that fall of 2001. I graduated that October after 9/11 and when I started interviewing I used the "shotgun method" take as many interview as I could and hoped one worked out because no one knew if they could hire because the economy was in the toilet, but they still wanted to interview just in case. I ended up having 5 job offers to mull over by the first week of December. 3 were defense contractors hiring on speculation one is a commercial sponser of FIRST and the job I ended up taking at International Fuel Cells which has since changed its name to UTC Fuel Cells.

To speed up getting an interview I called the connections made during my internship at IFC because I had a limited time on the other offers and I knew that this was the environment I wanted to work in. They brought me in, interviewed me and then a couple weeks later gave me an offer in a different department. I took the job and have now been here full time for 4 years.

Pete

[petek]

[Uh oh - another one of my long-winded rambles down memory lane ahead. If you want the short answer, skip to the bottom, but you'll miss what I think is a rather unusual story]

I got my current job despite having absolutely no intention of taking it. Did someone say "huh?" A little background: as I described in another thread I had a good job but the company was downsizing, so I thought it prudent to refresh my interviewing skills and see what jobs were out there "just in case". Since they were trying to shed employees, my employer set up an online bulletin board for other companies to post openings on. I saw one for a startup company in Princeton, NJ, which sounded intriguing, but there was no way I was going to work in central NJ!

At the time I was living in PA (near Newark, DE), almost two hours from Princeton, and liked where we were. Besides, NJ is outrageously expensive to live in, the traffic is awful, etc. Still, since I needed practice, I went ahead and called them and eventually got a phone interview, which led to an invitation to come see them.

The head guy I was interviewing with (Greg Kirk, PhD in physics, brilliant and way too much energy - imagine Kressly with an IQ of 180) put me in a project meeting where they were brainstorming a problem they were battling. I dove right in an we had a great hour-long discussion where I was able to offer some insights. I also scored points later when, while I was waiting to talk to another scientist, I helped a biologist troubleshoot a piece of recalcitrant lab equipment. It helped a lot that I had done my due dilligence on the company beforehand so I could ask good questions.

By the end of the day I had interviewed with probably half of the company (this was a startup, remember) and was facinated by the challenges they were facing. On my drive home I knew I had a big problem - this job was just the kind of change I needed, and I was pretty sure they would make me an offer, but it was in New Jersey! I spent the time waiting for their call checking on housing prices and neighborhoods in the area - realizing that the position paid just enough more than my then-current salary to almost make up the difference in cost of living.

Sure enough, they did offer me the job. I made one last stab at getting my soon-to-be-former employer to transfer me from the engineering group which was downsizing to the science group I was supporting, but when that fell through I took the plunge. I went from being a minor player at a major multinational corporation to the 24th person hired by my new employer!

That was 12 years ago, and I've had a great ride at Pharmacopeia. And I never did move to NJ, opting instead for the long commute from Upper Black Eddy. Besides being a great career move, moving to upper Bucks County put us in the Palisades school district which happens to have a pretty good high school robotics team...

So, that was the long answer to your question, John. The short answer is:

I did my homework (researched the company and their key technology before the interview);
I asked a lot of questions;
I took interest in their problems;
I was in the right place at the right time; and
I took a chance.

[KathieK]

Originally Posted by petek

I did my homework (researched the company and their key technology before the interview).

That's very important for most job interviews. When I was interviewing for my present job (maintaining a college web site) I went through each and every page of the web site that was current at the time of my interview. I came to the interview with a laundry list of typos, suggestions for improvements, questions about why things were designed the way they were, etc. Unbeknownst to me they were in the middle of a website redesign project and were already implementing many of the things I had pointed out. You should always do your homework before an interview.

[Pat Chen]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

Interesting. How would they know that anything they find online was you, or someone else with the same name?

If I google my name lots of stuff comes up for other Ken Wittlief's

Ken:
Many people may have the same names.....but quite often ....when people post....they may include information like where they live.....this is one way ...potential employer may know that you are that person....but as Kathie K wrote.....just be careful of what you post....especially the younger members of our FIRST community.

Pat Chen