How to get in the door at top companies: a data-driven, practical guide for software engineers. Part 1.

In this post (part 1 of 2), we’ll share some data about which channels are most effective for getting into the door at great companies and why. In part 2, we get very tactical and tell you exactly what to say and do to get responses.

interviewing.io is an anonymous mock interview platform — we help engineers prepare for technical interviews by pairing them with senior FAANG and FAANG-adjacent engineers for mock interviews and feedback. In this market, many of our users are struggling with getting in the door at companies, so we ran a survey to see what’s worked well for our users and what hasn’t, in today’s difficult climate.

In our survey, we gave people the following channels for getting into companies and asked them which were the most and least effective:

• In-house recruiters contact you
• Apply online
• Warm referrals
• Cold referrals
• Cold outreach to hiring managers
• Cold outreach to recruiters
• Agency recruiters contact you

We also asked them which types of companies they got responses from:

• FAANG
• FAANG-adjacent (e.g., Stripe, Dropbox, OpenAI, Uber)
• Large startups
• Small startups

We got ~500 responses. Among survey respondents, which channels were most effective was largely consistent, regardless of company type, but there were some twists depending on who the candidates were. More on that in a bit.

Below are the channels, ranked by effectiveness.¹ When more people found a channel effective than ineffective, it ended up in the first list. When more people found a channel to be ineffective than effective, it ended up on the second list.

This data came primarily from surveying experienced engineers (4+ years), rather than juniors (we don’t have that many juniors on our platform; average years of experience is 8). If you’re a junior engineer in this market, you already know you’re in for a tough time, and we’d advise you to take your destiny into your own hands as much as possible by reaching out directly to hiring managers (the same advice we give many of our more experienced users). More on that later in the post.

Interestingly, these results were quite consistent between company types. In other words, channels that worked well for FAANGs tended to work well for startups and vice versa.

Overall, the most useful channels were in-house recruiters (when they reached out to you) and warm referrals. Unfortunately, both of these channels are somewhat out of your control. You have very little control over whether internal recruiters reach out to you. There are some things you can do to increase the chances, but they’re all tied up in your work history and identity, neither of which you can easily change. We’ll talk more about that later on.

Warm referrals (i.e., referrals from people you know), on the other hand, are very useful and are a bit more in your control, but they still depend on the quality of your network.

Below is a diagram comparing the utility of all the channels to how much control you have over them.

You might wonder why we speculatively singled out cold outreach to hiring managers as something that can be done right, versus the other channels. In our experience, that channel is both misused and underutilized and is the best bet for many candidates, provided they do it correctly. In our next post, we’ll tell you exactly what to do and what to say when you reach out to hiring managers — especially if you come from a non-traditional background and aren’t getting a lot of recruiter outreach/don’t have the network to get warm referrals, reaching out to hiring managers is your absolute best bet. Now let’s look at each channel in detail.

In-house recruiters contact you

This channel is one of the two where you have the least amount of control (the other is agency recruiters contacting you, though that one is way less useful).

So, how much control do you have over this channel? One bit of analysis we did on our survey data was to try to find patterns in the background of people who find in-house recruiters particularly useful. Not too surprisingly, some patterns did emerge.

In-house recruiters are most likely to contact you if:

• You look good on paper, i.e., you have top-tier companies and/or schools on your resume (in our experience, companies matter more)
• You belong to a group that’s been traditionally underrepresented in tech (i.e., you’re a woman or a person of color)
• To some extent, though less than the two bullets above, if you have niche skills (e.g., ML engineering)

These results aren’t unique to just this survey. We recently did a study where we asked a bunch of recruiters to look at resumes and tell us which candidates they’d want to interview. While the intent of the study was to see if recruiters are good at identifying talent (spoiler: they were barely better than a coin flip), we learned some other interesting things, including what recruiters actually look for when they read a resume.

The two most sought-after resume traits were: 1) experience at a top-tier tech company (FAANG or FAANG-adjacent) and 2) URM (underrepresented minority) status (in tech, this means being Black or Hispanic).

This mirrored what we saw in our user survey when we looked at commonalities among candidates who got value from in-house recruiters.

So how do you use this information to your advantage? You obviously can’t magic FAANG/FAANG-adjacent experience or URM status out of thin air², but if you do have either, our pragmatic advice is to highlight it and make it really easy for recruiters to spot. Of course, whether you want to lead with URM status is a personal decision. We’ve heard differing opinions on this and are not here to judge. All we can do is share the data — do with it what you will.

So, how do you make sure that, say, your FAANG experience stands out to recruiters? Take a look at the before and after screenshots of the resume below³. This resume belongs to one of our users who was kind enough to let us share it. He actually has two of the three things that recruiters look for: FAANG experience and a niche title (ML engineer). But both are buried! And the section that gets the most attention is wasted on undergraduate awards.

Before

As you can see, he spent almost 3 years at Apple, but a recruiter skimming his resume might not notice that because it was a while ago. Instead, he showcases an undergrad award and some technologies/languages that he knows. Neither of those is nearly as useful to recruiters as FAANG experience.

His current title is also ML engineer, and one at the Principal level at that. But it wasn’t always: He went from back-end to SRE to a little bit of everything to ML, and because of that, it’s possible a recruiter would miss it as well.

We edited this candidate’s resume to put all the things recruiters look for at the very top of the resume and moved the buzzword soup to the bottom. This candidate is obviously well-positioned because he has FAANG experience, several top schools, and niche skills — but before, many recruiters didn’t spot them. After he made these changes, the number of interviews he got increased by 8X.

Apply online

If you’ve ever applied to jobs online, then you know it’s kind of like screaming into a black hole. Though, according to our survey, some candidates (specifically people applying to FAANG/FAANG-adjacent companies and small startups) get some value out of this channel, it’s still a numbers game. And for large startups, it’s a losing proposition.

According to recruiting tool Gem, applicants that come from recruiter outreach (called “outbound” in recruiter lingo) are 6 - 10X more likely to get hired than applicants who apply online (called “inbound”).

As Lyft recruiting manager Nate Wylie put it:

Our data… showed higher pass-through rates for candidates [we reached out to] at each stage of the interview process vs. applicants via the careers page. It’s not that we want to ignore applicants; it’s just that historically we don’t get what we’re looking for — and with speed — through that channel.

Having been a recruiter myself, I can confirm that many companies do indeed ignore their online careers page. Many years ago, when I first joined the recruiting team at a top-tier startup, I spent my first few days going through the resumes of people who had applied online. I found a treasure trove of candidates, including very experienced applicants from top-tier companies.⁴ But no one had seen these applicants because no one had been monitoring inbound activity for months!

The silver lining here is that when you don’t hear back from a company (or even when you get an automatic rejection email wishing you "the best in your future endeavors"), it’s not because a human looked at your resume and made a deliberate, thoughtful decision about you. It’s tempting to think that way because it plays so well into our insecurities. The reality is that a human probably never saw your resume in the first place.

So why do people apply online, despite knowing in their gut that it’s not an effective strategy? Simply put, it’s predictable and easy. You get into a routine, you upload your resume, you connect your LinkedIn, and you can knock out hundreds of applications in a matter of hours.

The other encouraging thing about this channel is that, when we analyzed specifically which types of candidates had success with it, we couldn’t find any patterns — the channel worked equally well (poorly?) for people who looked good on paper vs. not, and there was no preferential treatment for traditionally underrepresented groups in tech (e.g., women and people of color).

TL;DR Applying online doesn’t hurt… provided that you don’t take rejection personally. If you do, it’ll wear you down over time.

Warm referrals

Warm referrals are, of course, excellent. That is, assuming it's a real referral — someone who can actually vouch for you, and ideally your work.

Per capita, referrals are most companies’ best source of candidates, and they were a great channel for our users across all company types (they were the best channel for FAANGs/FAANG-adjacents, as well as large startups, and second best for small startups, behind in-house recruiters reaching out).

If you have the network, you should absolutely use it. Of course, it’s unlikely that you’ll have meaningful connections at every company you want to work at. What do you do then?

Cold referrals

Should you ask people you don't know to refer you? Our survey data says probably not. Cold referrals were net negative for both FAANG and small startups and neutral for large startups.

Years ago, trying to collect cold referrals was a decent strategy. You could track down someone at the company and ask them to toss your proverbial hat into the ring

Engineers were often happy to refer someone — even someone they didn't know — either to be kind, to avoid the awkwardness of declining, or to collect the potential referral bonus. They couldn't vouch for you, but the referral would ensure that a human looked at your resume.

This became so common that Blind actually spun out an entire referral marketplace called Rooftop Slushie (the link is to some press because the actual site is now defunct), where applicants would pay a small sum for a referral.

Then, companies wised up and realized that these referrals weren't all that different from normal in-bound applicants. So why treat them differently? Many companies nowadays separate referrals into "true referrals" and "leads." It’s great for maintaining the delicate dance of social dynamics, but it’s completely useless for getting hired — dropping someone’s resume into the “leads” pile is basically the same as throwing it into the inbound black hole.

Given that cold referrals aren’t zero effort, our advice is to expend that energy elsewhere. More on that shortly.

Agency recruiters

Agency recruiters were the worst channel overall, according to our survey, and were net negative for all company types.

FAANGs and FAANG-adjacent companies tend to rely less on agencies than startups, and when they do, it’s to fill some very specific need (rather than “Hey we need more SWEs”), so it’s not surprising that our users didn’t get much value from this channel when applying to FAANGs.

While both large and small startups use agencies liberally, clearly the value to candidates is limited.⁵ Out of all of our survey respondents, only a handful of our users said that agencies were useful to them, and of those who mentioned agencies, the majority said that they were the worst channel.

We won’t belabor the point, but it’s probably not in your best interest to spend much time on working with agency recruiters. It has opportunity cost and not much upside. And you can routinely get screwed in salary negotiations when you work with an agency recruiter, if you even get that far.

Cold outreach (to hiring managers vs. recruiters)

Not all cold outreach is created equal, for two reasons. First, there’s your audience: hiring managers vs. recruiters. And then there’s the quality of the outreach itself. We’ll come back to how to write the kinds of messages that will get you responses. First, let’s talk about the audience.

You can see in our survey results that cold outreach to hiring managers was net positive for FAANG/FAANG-adjacent companies and neutral for the other company types. Cold outreach to recruiters, on the other hand, was net negative for both FAANG/FAANG-adjacents and small startups and neutral for large startups.

Ignoring the quality of the outreach for a moment, which we expect is probably comparable for both types, why does this difference exist?

If you had to answer the question of who’s the right person to reach out to about jobs, your gut instinct might be to say it’s recruiters. After all, hiring is officially their job! However, that’s not strictly true. Recruiters are not incentivized to make hires, at least not directly. Just like everyone else, recruiters’ main priority is to keep their jobs.

Cold outreach to recruiters doesn’t work

How does a recruiter keep their job?⁶ By bringing in the types of candidates that their manager tasked them with. How is that different from hiring? Hiring implies that you’re evaluated on whether the people you bring in actually get hired, but most in-house recruiters aren’t evaluated this way… because it takes too long.

Instead, recruiters are sometimes evaluated on what portion of their candidates get offers or get to onsite. However, because of drop-off and latency (getting an offer can still take months), your organization has to be pretty good at tracking. Many are not.

As such, many recruiting orgs prefer simpler, faster metrics:

• Of the candidates you reached out to, how many responded?
• Of those who responded, how many resulted in a first conversation?

The downside of measuring success in a single part of the funnel is that you don’t incentivize people to care about what happens downstream (that is, how many are hired). This would be like if marketers only paid attention to ad clicks, rather than actual purchases. But that’s how recruiting operates: individuals aren’t really incentivized to care what happens downstream.

So, if you are typically just measuring the response rates of your reports, as a recruiting manager, you have to set some guardrails for the types of candidates that you want your team to reach out to. If you don’t, they’ll end up just reaching out to people who are likely to respond instead of people who are a good fit for the job.

Unfortunately, you don’t know who is a good fit for the job. You can’t just say, “Go on LinkedIn, and find me good engineers.”

That doesn’t exist. So instead, you come up with some rules that look like this:

• Senior engineers
  • Juniors and intermediate engineers would answer outreach a lot, but they already apply online in droves, so we don’t need to pay people to go out and find them. Moreover, we have a whole university department that deals with college hires once a year in September.
• Went to a top school (in the absence of a better filter, this works OK)
• Worked at a top company

There may be a few other items on the list if the role requires specific skills (e.g., Android development), but by and large, that’s what recruiters are tasked with, and that’s what they’re focused on.

It seems counterintuitive, but if you’re either fairly junior (fewer than 4 years of experience) or you don’t have fancy brands and schools on your resume, recruiters are not incentivized to help you because you don’t meet their criteria, and they’re not incentivized to take risks on candidates because they’re not getting rewarded when the company makes hires (or punished when the company doesn’t).

What does this mean for you? If you’re not the type of candidate that recruiters are reaching out to already (senior, well-pedigreed), they will not help you.

With that sad reality in mind, here’s the good news: there is someone who’s actually incentivized to make hires and is much more open-minded: the hiring manager⁷!

Cold outreach to hiring managers is effective

At this point, you might be skeptical. After all, according to the graph comparing all channels, hiring manager outreach is the worst of the best. Sure, it’s net positive for FAANG/FAANG-adjacent companies, but it lags behind in-house recruiters, warm referrals, and online applications with respect to effectiveness.

Here’s the thing. Hiring manager outreach is the channel with the most untapped potential for effectiveness, while also being the one where you have the most control. Because companies often ignore them, online applications can’t come close to the same level of control, and warm referrals have a low ceiling. In-house recruiter outreach is largely out of your control (except for maybe making some limited profile tweaks, as we saw above).

Why is this the right channel?

Unlike recruiters, hiring managers are actually incentivized to make hires and tend to be more open-minded about candidate backgrounds, all because hiring managers are judged on results. Specifically, they’re judged on how quickly and effectively they’re able to build stuff, and are — directly or indirectly — incentivized to grow headcount. For hiring managers, it’s not about the appearance of doing the work. It’s about the cold, hard reality of whether the work got done. And because they’re judged on actually getting stuff done, hiring managers are also much more incentivized than recruiters to take risks.

Outside of needing more people to build things, hiring managers are also incentivized to hire for their teams because the better they are at recruiting and filling headcount, the more likely they are to get promoted.

As such, in our minds, when people say that hiring manager outreach hasn’t worked for them, it’s because they’re not doing it right. So, how do you do it?

In our next post, we’ll get very practical about outreach, provide a bunch of examples of good and bad outreach, and share two templates that you can steal.

Footnotes: