2022 Intern Recruiting Cycle Overview
10/29/21
After a rather interesting 2022 recruiting cycle, I decided it might be useful to post a detailed comparison between my junior (2022) and sophomore (2021) internship hunts.
To begin, let’s examine my sophomore cycle. Coming into the season, I had two prior internships, both at a no name government contractor near my hometown. Here is a copy of my resume at the time. My goal for the cycle was simple: land a SWE internship at any company which I considered a step up from my current position. In my case, that meant anything from large F500 companies to random bay area startups I had no chance of landing. One of the most important lessons I learned from my freshmen year’s cycle was that the volume of your applications is far more important than the quality. With only an exception or two, I completely neglected cover letters and instead focused on churning out applications. In general, sophomore year was tough. I have included a table below so you may view my stats for the season, but needless to say I spent a huge portion of the fall semester applying, interviewing, or prepping for interviews. However, when all was said and done, I managed to land four offers and sign two of them: one as a part-time R&D intern for The Home Depot (THD) in Atlanta working on augmented reality, the other as a back-end engineer intern developing for Uber Eats in San Francisco.
| Received | Passed | Failed | Ghosted | Declined | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apps | 133 | 25 | 31 | 77 | N/A |
| OAs/Screens | 25 | 14 | 3 | 0 | 8 |
| Interviews | 14 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 7 |
| Finals | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
One bit of advice I will highlight here is to leverage your expiring offers to simultaneously force companies to expedite your interview process and consider you more seriously now they know you are a competitive applicant. I firmly believe that carefully leveraging my THD offer was what pushed my recruiter to offer me for Uber. Now as for the results of the season, I was ecstatic. I would have been fully satisfied with most offers, but instead I managed to land one of my top reaches in Uber. For this season, I had considered any bay area tech companies to be reaches, F500s or large banks to be targets, and government contractors to be safeties. I enjoyed both of the internships immensely and awaited the next season to begin applying again.
For my junior year, my priorities shifted greatly. Now that I had interned at Uber, I had “broken into” the big tech scene and could instead focus on attempting to land particular companies rather than mass applying as I did the previous season. Before I begin, here is a copy of my resume for this cycle. At the start of the cycle, I set out a list of 10 targets. The targets were divided between prestigious (at least in my eyes) tech unicorns which worked on products I was passionate about, high tier quant firms, and autonomous vehicle (AV) companies. Out of these targets, I selected three high targets which I wanted to land above all others (listed in no particular order): Palantir, Waymo/Aurora, and Snap Inc. In Palantir’s case, I was drawn to their unique problem domain (counter terrorism), rigorous hiring bar and general mystique. I viewed Waymo and Aurora as virtually identical equals: both are leading AV companies with impactful partnerships and are well poised to begin integrating AVs into society. As for Snap, I love augmented reality and wearable tech – have ever since I was first really exposed to the tech in my sophomore year. I also thought the culture seemed super fun from the outside and they had the most unique engineering hub locations out of the three targets, with both LA and Austin as options in addition to more typical cities such as SF or NYC. In addition to these targets, I applied to a range of other tech companies which I viewed as on par or slightly superior to Uber when considering my long term career goals.
With my targets in mind, I began applying. The season started strong, with me receiving interviews from Palantir and one of my target quants. I also received my intern return offer from Uber which led me to feel much more secure compared to the previous season: my worst case was now returning to a company which I had enjoyed interning at and wouldn’t mind repeating. With Palantir, I trudged through 7 (!) hours of interviews only to be rejected after my hiring manager interview – the last interview in the process. Needless to say, this was a bit demoralizing: to come so close to landing one of my high targets and fall short was frustrating. Regardless, I had learned to deal with rejection well from the previous cycle and pushed forward. The next month or so was very uneventful. Aside from a few interviews at some series C startups which I wasn’t really passionate about, not many companies were responding to me. With my Uber deadline a few weeks away, I began to accept that I might not land anything better. However, as fate would have it, within a span of two days I received a plethora of emails and found myself interviewing with 4 companies, one being Snap! Through undoubtedly no small degree of luck, I managed to land offers from all 4, bringing my total offer count to 5 for the season (including my return). I deliberated for a few days but ultimately signed with Snap (although deep down, this probably wasn’t as serious as a debate as I had made it out to be in my head – I think I was pretty sold on Snap from the start and just had to get over my FOMO for the other three companies). Anyways, before I continue, here are my stats for this season:
| Received | Passed | Failed | Ghosted | Declined | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apps | 37 | 17 | 2 | 18 | N/A |
| OAs/Screens | 17 | 11 | 0 | 2 | 4 |
| Interviews | 11 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Finals | 5 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Compared to the 2021 cycle’s results, these are significantly better. Aside from obvious numerical improvements, I was surprised to see numbers this high considering the companies I applied to this year had, without exception, much higher hiring bars compared to the previous year. The area which I improved the most on was application to rejection/ghost ratio: from a 19% OA/Screen rate sophomore year to a 46% rate junior year. I was also only straight resume rejected by two companies this year compared to 31 last. Overall, I am very pleased with the season and am relieved at how much easier it was compared to the previous year: counting down the days until I can join Snap in LA!