4 Steps to Land an Internship(or Job)

This year has been an extremely tough time for the job market as a whole and especially for the aerospace industry. I have a lot of friends who are having a terrible time finding internships and jobs, so I wanted to post some of my personal opinions and experiences. Hopefully, this will help some of you, especially this late in the hiring season.

1.     Find your niche

The first and most important step is to figure out what you want to do. If you have previous experience, this should be fairly easy, but if not then do your best to narrow yourself down to a few companies. Personally, I focused on 6 companies in my industry. After that, choose the specific roles you want to apply to within these companies. Maybe this is something you're passionate about, or maybe it’s what your experience speaks to. It’s easy for a hiring manager to see how you fit into a role, and if you don’t have good experience or aren’t knowledgeable about the role the manager will count you out.

Only apply to specific roles at specific companies to succeed in your niche.

2.     Create a strong application

Once you’ve found your niche, it’ll be easy to brand yourself for that. The messaging throughout your resume, LinkedIn profile, cover letters, and interviews should all be the same. These things should show your hard skills, soft skills, and passion. Additionally, you have to recognize that applying to jobs is a game of numbers. Even with a fairly strong resume and experience, I was barely able to get a 3% response rate, and only ?% of my applications were turned into offers. In my experience, it’s unreasonable to expect any interviews or offers if you’ve applied to less than 50-100 positions. Luckily, once you’ve found a niche it’s easy to just check the companies’ websites for roles that apply to you.

Above is an analysis of the jobs I've applied to compared to the offers I've received. I got interviews with Collins, Lockheed, BAE, and HPE(part of misc. companies). Additionally, I got an interview with Northrop from LinkedIn messaging and an interview from Collins by cold emailing the hiring manager. My offers are from the interviews I got from the Collins career site.

The first thing that needs to be perfected is your resume. Make sure that each of your experiences are tailored to your niche and messaging. Even if you don’t have specific experience in a role, it’s easy to explain how another role you worked in applies to the role that you want. This applies to classwork and extracurriculars as well as work experience. In addition to this, your resume needs to show your messaging throughout. I recommend trying to identify two hard skills and two soft skills to showcase, as well as your passion for the role. You can imply these but it’s also great to state them explicitly in a skills section. Another important thing about your messaging is to focus on your passion for a role and not for an industry or product. For example, if you’re applying to SpaceX, emphasize your passion for designing pressure vessels, not rockets or SpaceX in particular.

Once you’ve tailored your resume to your niche, it shouldn’t be necessary to update for each job application, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ever. When looking at postings, you’ll always see a few that stand out to you in particular. When I find something that I like a lot, I make sure to do everything I can to stand out just a little bit more. I make some changes in my resume, I write a cover letter, and I try to reach out to either an HR or manager through LinkedIn or email. While these things can make you stand out, in my experience they don’t push my success rate above 5-10%.

The last thing to think about is career fairs. Having identified the list of companies you’re going for it’s extremely important to go to their booths and get on their list. While you shouldn’t expect a job, by just having a conversation with them you’ve put yourself into a database that hiring managers regularly draw from. A previous engineering manager I spoke to told me that over 75% of his interviewees were pulled from career fair databases.

Tailor your messaging to your niche to easily make yourself stand out.

3.     Stay on top of positions

The next most important thing I’ve found is to apply quickly. From speaking with HR people, I’ve found that the list of candidates sent to the hiring manager can be generated in just a few days. Applying to job postings that are weeks or months old rarely gets you anywhere. Luckily, if you’ve created a list of companies you want to work for, and tailored your resume to the roles you want, it’s incredibly easy to apply. Most companies will save all of your information, so you only have to click through the application and if not you can always keep a document with all your information to quickly copy and paste. I strongly recommend checking the career sites of every company you want to work for at most every 3 days. This will allow you to always be at the top of the applicant pool and increase your chances of being seen by HR or managers.

Check every company’s career site as often as you can.

4.     Put in the effort

Lastly, I find it extremely helpful to show that you put in extra effort. First and foremost, there are a few simple things to do once you do land an interview. Always dress to impress. Even if it’s a phone call dressing up puts you in a professional mood and helps you focus on the interview. Also, make sure that you prepare beforehand. Aside from researching the company and role (which you should have already done in the first step) make sure that you make notes of what you want to say in the interview and take notes during the interview. Nothing’s worse than hanging up after an interview and realizing that you forgot something you wanted to say. Also, make sure to always send thank you notes after every interview. It shows that you’re invested and interested.

There’s another great way to show some extra effort even if you don’t have an interview, reaching out to people directly. First and foremost, don’t pester anyone and don’t ask for a job. Simply ask for help and advice in the smallest way possible. If you have friends or family members or are already in a place where you can find people’s emails directly then do that, but if not use LinkedIn. If you can find HR people or managers, ask them about what makes an ideal candidate. If not look for people who are in the role you want to be in 5-10 years out and ask them how they got there. If not that, then reach out to interns and ask them how they got there or for their manager's information. Or better yet, do all three. When reaching out to people, make sure you’re not asking for too much. I try to follow the “Tim Ferris email template” and close a message with a call to action along the lines of, “I totally understand if you're too busy to respond, but even a one- or two-line reply would really make my day.” This usually works a lot better than asking for a phone call, or to forward along your resume. Make sure that you’re genuinely looking for advice, and try to tie the advice that you get back into your messaging.

Do everything you can to show some extra effort.