
Ask HN: How to stand out at career fairs? - MaxLeiter
I’m a sophomore undergrad currently going through the recruitment process for summer. I go to a large-ish school  (20,000 undergrad) and our career fairs are _crowded_<p>How can I stand out to the recruiter? My resume is unconventional and I’m (I think) competent at networking, but it still just feels like a numbers game. Is that all career fairs are? Or have you had different experiences where something worked for you?
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CrazyCatDog
Do your homework: find the firms you want to engage with before attending,
call them A firms, call the rest B firms.

Have two talking points based on recent news releases and one on company
culture for each A firm. When you go to the fair, learn from the B firms: what
are they pitching (they might switch to A status), and most important of all,
use B firms to master your general networking/pitching.

Then, and only then, go stand and smile next to the A firm recruiter—yes the
one talking to others. Stand patiently and smile. Once they notice andEngage
with you, start drawing your talking points from memory. If you like the way
it goes, hand then your card. Your card should not be cute, it should be
clean. Recruiters talk to a ton of people at student fairs, when you hand them
your card after speaking intelligently to them, they take notice and they
pocket your card. Given that 99% of the other students don’t have cards, the
recruiter will walk away with a dozen or two tops. And, when they receive your
thank you email in their inbox the next morning, they’ll grab a hotel pen,
find your card and put a start on it.

Congratulations, you just made great impressions on your favorite companies.

Just remember, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat. So, use that
first internship to learn tools, write down ALL the stupid things you see the
firm doing, write this down in notebooks. You will fill three this summer and
three next summer. Three years after graduation, you’ll have many notebooks
covering all the things you don’t ever want your company to do.

Congratulations, you just increased your startup’s likelihood of making it to
an A round by 100,000%

I could keep going, but I’m going to save the rest for chapters 2-10.

Final thoughts: be thoughtful, be hyper critical of everything you observe at
fairs and jobs—but keep that to your self, and rather than getting frustrated,
take that energy and ask yourself how YOU will do it differently when you’re
the boss.

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MaxLeiter
Thanks for the thoughtful response. These are some great ideas

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derrick_jensen
In what ways is your resume unconventional?

I'm pursuing a Math degree, and my strategy has been to tailor to tech
companies by getting involved in organizations and starting side projects.
I've interned at [LARGE GRAPHICS CARD COMPANY] after my sophomore year because
I did signal processing for a student organization.

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MaxLeiter
you can see a live version on [https://maxleiter.com](https://maxleiter.com)

printing it out (as in, file > print) will print my resume.

it’s not the traditional style; i’m looking to be a web/front end developer so
i went for that kind of look. I do modify it for each company (add GPA,
leadership goals, etc), but that’s the gist of it.

