The US immigration system is such that if you are an international student, the odds of securing a job are stacked against you (or so it may seem like).
Not only do you have to worry about applications, interviews, and coffee chats, but you also have to worry about getting sponsored and explaining to employers your immigration status.
This article will be geared towards undergraduate students in the USA on an F1 Visa (though I guess it also applies to graduate students).
The advice I give will likely not be applicable to all industries; specifically, I can mainly only speak about roles at companies in the technology sector, since this is what constituted the vast majority of my application process.
I will try to give you advice that isn’t generic, so we’ll skip most things related to resumes and cover letters. In fact, I am fairly certain that the advice you get in this article will be one you haven’t received before.
Finally: who am I and why should you listen to me?
I’m Shikhar. I work as a Business Analyst at a Series A tech startup in Palo Alto.
I am (1) an international student who (2) got a job in the USA. Fulfilling both these conditions, I assume, grants me the liberty to offer you some advice on how to do the same. Most recently, I graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in Philosophy and Environmental Economics & Policy.
Further, I graduated with two fairly non-technical degrees and now work in tech, which is also a popular topic and can be explored. I will only briefly expand on this during this article, and save the rest of it for another article.
Note: I also graduated with a not-too-high GPA (3.1), so if you’re in the same boat, this article should help.
Anyways, let’s get cracking:
- The Job Search Mindset
- Do Your Research
- Resumes (Mostly) Suck
- Informational Interviews
- Conclusion
I will not talk about onsite interviews because I do not think I have much advice to offer other than the generic be prepared, well-dressed, and follow-up. If you have specific questions about onsite interviews, email me.
The Job Search Mindset
Your thoughts govern your actions and your actions determine your life, so it’s very important to have the right mindset when going into your job search as an international student. I will mention three main things here.
First, you must realize that a great amount of the job application process is outside of your control. This applies to all applicants, but even more so to international applicants. You may be the best candidate for the job, but if the company doesn’t sponsor, then you won’t be selected. So be okay with this uncertainty. With that being said, the burden of convincing the employer to sponsor your H1B visa is entirely on you. Yes, there are many companies that sponsor H1B visas (especially if you are an engineer), but just because a company does not sponsor does not make life “unfair”.
To put it into perspective, I spent close to 50 days (in total) interviewing at a top tech company (I even had to prepare a 20min presentation for my onsite that took close to two weeks to craft), where I was made an offer and then revoked the offer because they found out about my immigration status and did not want to sponsor me. Yeah, that sucked. Yeah, I was very disappointed. But ultimately it’s not personal and no one really cares.
1 month later I was able to land another awesome opportunity, and this time the company did sponsor. I could have given up, but I kept working hard, and my hard work paid off (hard work always pays off).
Finally, I want you to focus on the benefits of being an International Student. Most international students (including myself at the time), during the recruiting process, only think about themselves through the lens of sponsorship and other hurdles like applying for OPT (Optional Practical Training).
But the truth is that you being an international student makes you a very appealing candidate. After all, just by choosing to study in a foreign country for 4 years, leaving behind friends and family, you’ve indicated to an employer that you are confident (confidence == ability to withstand uncertainty). You likely speak more than one language, putting you ahead of most Americans on that front. You also have experienced different cultures and environments, thereby giving you a unique perspective when solving problems. In sum, you’re a badass.
So, to summarize, here are the three principles I suggest you adopt whilst interviewing:
- A great amount of the job application process is outside of my control, so it’s best to accept that now.
- The burden of convincing the employer to sponsor me (and hire me) is entirely on me, and it is my job to make hiring myself a no-brainer.
- My immigration status is a huge benefit, even though it may not seem like it.
Adopting both these principles will serve you well much beyond your hiring journey, and can be extended to apply to many different parts of life.
Do Your Research
This is the subsection that will offer the most in terms of tactics and is very specific to international students.
As starters, you should be aware of your degree type and what type of OPT benefits it grants you. If you’re getting a Bachelor’s Degree, you are automatically entitled to 12 months of OPT.
If you’re getting a Bachelor’s Degree AND your Bachelor’s Degree is a STEM major (a list of STEM majors can be found here, and you can also ask your DSO), then you are eligible for 36 months of OPT.
This is 36 months of work authorization where you do not need an H1B visa to work.
Now, when you’re going to be applying to most jobs, you’re going to see the following field:
The difficulty that arises when answering this question is that if you answer “no,” you’re not lying. After all, you have possibly upto 3 years of OPT and that requires no sponsorship on the part of the employer.
If you answer “yes”, you are also being honest, because thinking long-term, you will eventually require sponsorship to be able to work in the USA. If you do indeed answer “yes”, there is also a very strong likelihood that your application may be directly tossed into the trash can, because most employers will not sponsor.
So, what do you do?
Having context here about the company helps. For example, if you know that this company sponsors, then naturally, responding yes is what you want to do. If you’re sending out applications via a platform like Handshake, then you’ll see this information the side:
If the company has outright stated that they do not sponsor, and you really want to work there, I would try the strategy I’ve outlined in the next section of this article.
Finally, if the company has not specified anything in relation to visa sponsorship, then there are a few things you can do. First, check out websites like MyVisaJobs and H1BData that will let you look up companies and their visa sponsorship history. Here, if you see that the company has sponsored many people in the past, then you’re good to go and I would answer the above question with a Yes.
On the other hand, if the company has no evidence of ever having sponsored somebody, then I would go ahead with No and answer that question honestly later in the application process.
Second, you can also go on Linkedin and just look up employees of that company who are working in your desired role (or similar roles). Are any of them international students? This can often give you a good glimpse into the company’s visa sponsorship process.
If you happened to answer no to the question above, I would however bring up the fact that you are an international student with the hiring manager before you go for your onsite interview. Your aim should be to educate the hiring manager about OPT and outline your status very simply.
And when you educate them, I think it goes without saying that you want to explain very carefully just how simply the whole sponsorship process is (because truthfully, it is!).
Resumes (mostly) Suck
Resumes suck because they make it really hard to stand out.
If your main hiring weapon consists off blasting your resume to different job portals and hoping for the best, you’re going to struggle. You’re going to struggle because you’re directly competing with the thousands of other students that are doing the exact same thing.
According to Peter Thiel, competition is for losers. Peter Thiel’s a pretty smart guy, I think, so we should probably listen to him.
Sure, if you have a high GPA and some great internships, then you might do great by just applying to jobs the good old way. But most of us don’t have both of those things.
You want to stand out. You want to be the applicant that’s impossible to ignore. So in this section, I’m going to outline a strategy that I suggest you adopt instead of just the resume blast.
Alternative Strategy: Provide Value Upfront
First, a caveat. This strategy takes effort, time, and research. It requires you to do your homework and spend time working on something that might not yield any results.
However, this strategy is the most surefire way I know of landing the job of your dreams and impressing your interviewer.
To effectively outline this strategy, we first need to talk about how most students expect to land a job. In my experience, it goes something like this:
- Have a broad idea of the industry in which they want to work.
- Blast their resume to the X companies in that industry.
- Accept the best offer they get (which might sometimes not be very good at all)
Instead, I advocate that you take the following strategy:
- Have a broad idea of the industry in which you want to work.
- Spend lots of time identifying your “dream” jobs within this industry. List them all out.
- Provide massive value to the hiring manager and send them work that you did upfront for each of these roles.
- Accept the best offer you get (likely going to be a very good offer).
Unlike the Resume Blast™, this strategy focuses on quality over quantity. In the above 4 step process, I will focus on how to execute step number 3, and I will do so through examples in my own life.
AngelList Analyst Program
This is a pretty competitive program. I knew that if I simply applied through the regular submit your resume job portal, I would never get an interview.
So, I decided to try something different.
I created a keynote presentation (I’ve included screenshots below) outlining steps I would take to improve one of AngellList’s verticals (in this case, it was their job vertical).
I sent this presentation over to the hiring manager through a quick email:
Note: As you can see in the email, I also sent over a website I made specifically for the job. This was just a quick portfolio website highlighting some of my work; this can also work well (and combined with the presentation I sent over it’s doubly effective).
And about 30min later, I got an interview for AngelList’s analyst program:
While I did not end up getting the job (I know very little about venture financing, which was what the bulk of this role consisted of), the fact that I added so much value upfront at the beginning ensured that I got an interview.
Some people may call this overkill; I call it being prepared. Through this method, I get to choose where I work and with who I work. I don’t just blast my resume and pray for the best — I am at the cause of X, not at the effect of X.
SkyLights (my first internship)
I will now give you a similar example, which helped me land my first internship in college at a YC backed startup.
Skylights is a startup that provides VR experiences aboard a plane. It’s really cool.
I had decided that I really wanted to intern here – I would get to spend my summer in Paris, I’d be mentored by some super smart people, and I always wanted to learn more about virtual reality.
So, taking the provide value upfront strategy route again, I wrote SkyLights a blog post (linked here) and I also did some market research for them. I will not lie — this was about a full day or two’s worth.
But if you’re willing to put in at least that much to craft a great application — do you really want to work there in the first place?
Here’s a screenshot of the email that I ended up sending:
And here’s the response I got (from their CEO):
Whatever role you’re applying for, I can guarantee you that there is something you can send to the hiring manager that will show how much value you can bring to the company. And if you can’t, you probably should not be working there anyway.
I’m going to be writing a bigger article on how to do interview projects, so if you want to be notified about that article when it comes out, sign up to my email list here.
Informational Interviews
An informational interview is an informal conversation you can have with someone working in an area of interest to you. Your goal is to find out more about the company, the industry, and to make it known that you are interested in a position there.
You can later leverage this relationship to get a referral at the company.
Note: the earlier you start to do this the better, but honestly this could work even if you’re a senior or you have already graduated.
There are three steps to this:
- Finding people to reach out to in your industry / role
- Reaching out to them effectively
- Making a great impression and keeping in touch
Let’s dig into each of these three steps.
Finding people to reach out to
Linkedin.
Search up people in your industry using Linkedin, and look for people who went to your university, who studied the same thing, who might be from the same country you are from.
With that being said, you should never feel constrained to reach out to someone even if they have no obvious relation to you. I have emailed plenty of people that were complete strangers and I’ve built some awesome relationships with them.
Once you’ve found a Linkedin profile, my recommendation is to not use the message tool on Linkedin (at least as your first go) — instead, find their email and use that.
How do you find their email? Use free tools like RocketReach or Hunter.io. You can even guess their company email address – normally not that hard.
This was the easy part — let’s now find out how to craft the perfect reachout email.
Reaching out to them effectively
Ah, the art of the cold email. I love cold emailing; I think it forces you to be clear, succinct, and when done right, it can be an outrageously effective method to achieve your goal.
The basics of a great cold email are (1) keep it short and (2) do your research.
Both are very important — if your email is too long, most people will just not respond, because it is likely that you don’t have a clear call to action and you’ve just vomited all your thoughts.
If you haven’t done your research, then people will assume that you sent the same email to 50 other people, and they won’t respond.
Here are some cold email examples from my own inbox that have worked well:
All these emails are short, specific, and they show that I’ve done my research.
Finally, remember that you have incredible upside and very little downside by sending a cold email. Your upside is landing the job of your dreams or meeting an awesome person who could really point you in the right direction. Your downside is..wasting your time crafting an email that never gets a response and nothing in your life changes. Those are odds I will take.
Note: this does not mean that you should just aim to shoot hundreds of cold emails – take your time, do you research, and remember to be genuinely interested.
Don’t do this just for the sake of “networking” (I hate that word) — if this is an industry that you are genuinely motivated to find out more about, then reaching out to successful people in that industry should feel exciting and not like some monotonous task that you just have to complete.
Making a great impression and keeping in touch
Once you’ve sent out a bunch of these emails, you will likely have some individuals that you can meet with for coffee chats or even simply have a phone call with.
Congrats — this is really fun! Prepare questions, do your research about the person’s background, and take notes. As long as you are genuinely curious about this person and the industry that they are in, you will be fine.
Do not ask for a job or referral right away. There are exceptions, but for the most part, you want to wait a while before doing this. This is because if you straight away ask for a job, it shows that your only purpose for meeting with person was to get the job — it connotes that you didn’t really care about the person.
Instead, your goal should be to find out about the person’s role, about the trends in your industry, and about helpful pointers you yourself can apply in your job search.
On some occasions, you will meet with someone who will themselves suggest referring you – this is not the norm, but when it does happen, take them up on it. After all, they have suggested it.
Once your coffee chat is over, send a thank you email, and make sure to send in periodic updates about how your job search is going. I use to do this about every month or so; I would not recommend more frequently than that, but much longer and you risk being forgotten.
Ultimately, keep meeting with people and keep being prepared. Your effort will pay off down the line.
Conclusion
My middle school english teacher told me that conclusions should not be used to repeat what one outlined earlier, so I will abide by what she said. I will instead leave you with a parting thought:
For many students, the goal of getting a job in the USA starts to override the more important goal of getting a job they really want.
You should not settle for a mediocre job just because it enables you to stay in the USA. I do realize that I was in a fortunate position during my application process given that I also had employment options in Europe to consider and that most people probably do not have this privilege, but I think the point still holds.
Always think about the opportunity first, and the location second. I would move back to my hometown in a heartbeat if it meant getting an opportunity that was my dream job.
Ultimately, I hope that my advice has been helpful. And even if it doesn’t end up working out, remember: hard work never goes wasted.