Here’s everything you need to know, summarized.

First, create a one-page resume that gets a "sheet yes” in 10 seconds or less from a human screener. Anchor them on an impressive or relevant current position, your bread-and-butter responsibilities, greatest accomplishments, and job-description- relevant skills right up front in your first 3 lines (which should almost always be Company -> Role -> First Bullet Point). For early-career candidates, you need to anchor them on an amazing university/GPA/other academic accomplishments, or a relevant project or certification (or two).

To kick off a proper job search, apply for about 20 jobs a week for a few weeks until you have 10+ interviews lined up. This will hopefully whittle down into 2-3 simultaneous offers that you can bounce off each other to increase salary and create urgency in the competing companies.

Large corporate / every job in the world will be on LinkedIn, but that means you’ll have a ton of competition for applications and may get lost in the shuffle. If you’re applying to jobs on LinkedIn, make sure your profile is easy to read (streamlined / clear) and matches your resume (weird if they don’t match). You can also search jobs on thousands of other job boards. For startup jobs, try AngelList (now called "Wellfound” – make a terrific, full profile before applying). Other boards we recommend are Glassdoor / Indeed, and an additional good software engineering job board is StackOverflow. While these are our top recommended job boards, for a full list of job boards to take a look at, check out our post here. You could also try our smart job search tool.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is spruced up and filled out with your skills so you get poached by recruiters looking for specific Boolean string keyword searches.

We also recommend applying to jobs directly on a company’s website vs job boards – it’s more likely you’ll get noticed. Alternatively / in addition, you can find a recruiting agency in the industry you want to be in and reach out to them, and/or apply to jobs on a recruiting agency’s website vs directly on a company's website (it’s not weird if you do both, don’t worry). It's in a recruiter's best interest to get you hired, so it's always nice to have a direct path to the hiring manager and a financially motivated advocate on your side.

Also apply for jobs on your college's job board. I know it may seem weird, but the companies advertising there are already looking for [your school's] grads. There will likely be senior roles listed alongside entry-level roles.

In any application email or cover letter, make sure it's not cookie-cutter. Write them all from scratch. Templated cover letters are a bad look. They only have to be a paragraph, and should match the tone of the company's culture.

When you get down to the nitty gritty, make the hiring manager's life as easy as possible. You want them to say "yes." E.g., "When can you start?" should be answered with, "When do you need me to start? ...Sounds good." (Unless there's a huge problem.)

"How much money do you want?" -> "Well salary is important to me because I'm looking at owning a home and setting up roots here, so it'll definitely be a component of wherever I decide to go, but first and foremost I'm looking for a job that I'll be happy in and that I think advances my career to where I want to be in the long term." Make them give you the first number; they should be able to tell you the job's range.

If they push on salary, it's very easy to say, "Well, I wouldn't consider the job for less than X, and I'd likely make the move for Y, and I'd be thrilled to come to work every day for Z." You want them to give you a number in between Y and Z. Don't give them only X because it's the bare minimum you'd work for. Give them multiple choices and make them choose. We’ll be writing more on that in another longer post on negotiation.

Use Glassdoor and Blind to learn about the company and prep for interviews – most jobs at big companies have all the interview questions on there already. Make sure you know 95% of the questions coming at you before they're asked! The more you practice, the less rehearsed you’ll sound – counterintuitive, we know.