All right, I’m assuming if you clicked on this article that means that you are looking for a job in the United States. Let me just put it out there that the job market is extremely brutal for international students. Now, I will say that it is better than 2024, but it’s still very, very bad. If you’re someone who’s watching from India, this might be something that you should also consider, and hopefully, this will help you.
The Importance of a Strategy
At this point, you’re like, “Okay, Yuri, I really need your help. I need to figure out what should be my strategy. Just someone tell me what I need to do and how do I get a job or an internship,” and my hope is that I provide you with a strategy. This is what I teach in my job hunting course, and I’m giving it to you for free because I know that you are hurting and you’re in the midst of finding a job. So hopefully, this strategy will help you. I teach many other strategies in networking, resume building, LinkedIn, and all of it in my job hunting course. I’ll put the link in the description, go check it out.
If you are completely new to my channel, my name is Yuri. I’m a senior product manager at a fintech startup, and I have been a hiring manager for the last six years, so I understand how hiring works. Hopefully, this is a strategy that will help you understand maybe a different approach than what you have been doing.
Avoid the Blind Approach
A lot of people just do the blind approach where you are mass applying and hoping that something will stick out. So I’m giving you a different approach. Try it out. Maybe split your time; instead of spending three hours blindly applying, spend one hour doing what I’m teaching you today. Maybe it will work out, I don’t know, but I know a lot of my students are doing this, so hopefully, you do it as well. Let me know if it works out or not.
Introducing F1 Hire
I’m going to show you a tool that is a mind-blowing tool. It’s called F1 Hire, and yes, this is a sponsored article, but I would have made this article even if they were not sponsoring because I teach this tool extensively in my job hunting course as well. Everyone gets one month of access to this tool. You also will get 14 days of premium access to this tool. I’ll put the code and link in the description.
How F1 Hire Works
Why am I talking about this tool? How is this tool going to help you in your job hunt strategy? Let me show you. So, this is what the tool looks like. If you go and click on the Research dropdown, click on Data Tool. Once again, you will have to get the premium code, etc.
Using the Dashboard
Now, this is a dashboard that they have built. You can put any university that you want. I’m going to put my own university so I can give you a good example. Let’s see… do I see Chico? There we go. Okay, so I put this. You can also put a major. Let’s say I did computer science. I’m going to do that. You can do a master’s. Citizenship is very interesting, so if you want to connect, if you are from Nepal, Bangladesh, India, or wherever your citizenship is, you can put it. If you want a relatability factor, I’m going to do India just because I know the majority of you might be from there. That’s about it. You can even filter it down further if you want, but let’s click on search.
Exploring the Data
You can see this is the data. It’s telling you what this means. In 2024, you can see this is the year, and in 2024, 16 green cards were filed for students who are at Chico State. That’s not it. You can also go back 10 years to find all that. They have data for the past 10 years, so you can find what happened in 2024, 2024, and all of that. Let’s stick to 2023 for now. You can see the companies these 16 people are working in: EXL (this is my previous company), Confluent, Apple, Chime (interesting), Deloitte, DocuSign, and Form Factor.
Building Your Target List
These are the companies who have already trusted Chico State students. So if you are going to Chico State or California State University, these are the companies you should start with. These 16 companies should probably be your base, and then you start reaching out to them. Chico State seems a little smaller in numbers, but we’ll look at another example. Let’s look at another like… there are so many of them: Adobe, Airbnb, DocuSign.
Deep Dive into Chime
Chime seems very interesting. I want to see Chime’s data, so I’m going to click on that. It tells me this person attended California State University, Chico. Their master’s was in computer science, and their role is backend engineer. Their salary as well—yes, you get to know because all of this data is publicly available on USCIS.
Connecting with Key Contacts
Now you click on the company and boom, this is the magic sauce. You get to see every single HR person who was involved in this process, including the CTO. You can see the HR person, the people manager, and operations. These are the HR team members. You have direct access to them, and you can reach out to them. By sending the cold email—for that, you need to buy my course where I teach you how to send cold emails—but you get the point, right? Now you get this.
Leveraging Strategic Networking
One is this, but that’s not it. You also want to do strategic networking. What I mean by that is if you go to LinkedIn. Let’s go to LinkedIn real quick.
Using LinkedIn
Here is LinkedIn. Obviously, this is my profile. We can quickly look at the search option. I’m going to click on search. I am going to click on people, then I’m going to filter it on Chime because that is the company we are interested in. Right, so Chime. Click on show results. Now we know that these are the people working at Chime, but we specifically want to know that their school was California State University. So we’re going to go into school and type Chico, then click on show results.
Reaching Out
Now there are nine people. You should be able to figure out who the person is by looking at the job title and all of it. You have narrowed it down to who this person is going to be. Assuming in this case, maybe it’s Dana or whoever that person is. It might not be Dana, but you get my point. You know exactly who that person is.
You have to do outreach to that person saying, “Hey, I am also a Chico State student. I see that you’re working there. I see there’s a position available. I’m a good fit. Here’s why. I would love to get on a call if the position is open.” Again, if you’re doing a normal outreach, then there’s a different approach.
A New Direction for Job Hunting
My point is that now you have a starting point, and every single day, if you just spend one hour going through this data, this is going to drastically change where you’re shooting your arrows. Instead of blindly applying to 50 jobs a day, now you know there’s a lot more strategic thought into who you apply to, cold outreach, cold email, and why you’re applying to that person.
Exploring Other Universities
There’s a common thread. Let’s look at some famous universities like USC or San Jose State University. Right, so let’s look at San Jose State University, keeping the major as computer science, and keeping everything else the same. Now there are 46 green cards. Which are the companies hiring? You can see Amazon, Cisco, VMware, Salesforce, Adobe, Roku.
Example: Roku
For example, if you click on Roku, you can see this person did this. Their role is senior data scientist. You can click on Roku and oh wow, look at the salary: $183K to $229K. Again, you’re not doing it for the salary, but now you also have the email address of the HR person.
Final Thoughts
I hope that this gives you a little bit of a different direction in your job hunting strategy. See you in the next one. Keep smiling and hustling!
