6-Month Retrospective on Job Search Prep as a 3rd-Year Engineer (From Application to Final Round)
I’m roughly writing up my job search process as a backend developer with 3 years of experience. Posting in case it helps.
I applied to 23 places in total, passed document screening at 7, and made it to the final round at 2. The document cutoff was tougher than I expected. The deciding factor was rewriting my career statement not around “what I did,” but around “what problems I solved and how.” Before that, my pass rate was much lower.
Coding tests seem to be getting harder these days. Last year they were around Silver level, but this time I even got mid-Gold problems. I studied about an hour a day for two months.
The question I got asked most in interviews was “Why do you want to change jobs?” It’s better to be honest. Everyone knows anyway.
Right now, I’ve received a final offer from one place and am negotiating compensation. To those preparing, don’t rush too much—I recommend starting by rewriting your career statement.
4 answers
Turning the work experience statement into a problem-solution structure seems like the real key. I did the same in my third year and my pass rate went way up. But honestly, 7 out of 23 is pretty good lol. Mine was 5 out of 40...
Any source? I doubt the resume screening pass rate would rise so dramatically just because you changed the wording in your career description. Of course, since it's your own case, it could happen, but there were probably many other variables at play.
Agreed—rewriting your work history is half the battle.
If you're mid-Gold, isn't that pretty average by today's standards? There's a lot of variation between companies, but these days even Platinum shows up among top candidates... Since the trend is to reduce the weight of coding tests, it might be better to prepare for system design instead. Anyway, congrats on the final offer, and I hope the compensation negotiation goes well. Last year, I prepared similarly and then it fell apart at the negotiation stage over a 5 million won salary difference, which was a bit disappointing. I recommend setting an upper limit for your desired salary in advance.