Go to career fairs. It’s very unlikely that you will get a job through a purely online application. Talk to people face-to-face whenever possible, and hand out physical copies of your resume. If you’re lucky enough to know any people in the industry, ask them to send your resume directly to their recruiters.

Work on some personal projects and upload them to a public git repo, if you haven’t already. Recruiters like being able to see that you’ve made something that works.

I always wish I had better advice for this, papa emeritus had solid advice. I get messages from recruiters on LinkedIn when I’ve had my profile set to looking for a job or whatever.

I’d look into state and federal, if you’re American. I’ve seen them have internships that are specifically for recent grads. I’ve worked federal and found the interview much more reasonable there. Any friends from college are a great resource, if they’re in industry. I had a guy I did a project with in school message me, and because I know the hiring managers I got him an internship no problem.

I never had to have a public repo, but I may have just been lucky. If you’re into remote work, I’d expand my search and apply to rural areas. I know some programmers down here in the sticks that find it very difficult to hire. Even if not listed remote, you could ask.

For my first internship, I found a junior developer at the company and spoke with them to get a feel about what the interview would be like, blah, blah. Much better than speaking with a recruiter.

Edit just to say development and experience is a crapshoot. I’d honestly get my foot in the door somewhere. You could transfer teams or something afterwards if you find a good one you think would be good mentors.

Work on a pet project or two and put it on GitHub. Practice coding exams with something like LeetCode, HackerRank, etc.

This is actually general advice for any job seeker:

If you have any kind of cover letter, put a section like this into it, like a table with only the center line visible, or something like that:

Your requirement | My Experience

Your requirement | My Experience

Your requirement | My Experience

Your requirement | My Experience

Your requirement | My Experience

You can leave off any parts that you don’t have a good answer for.

There are three reasons for this.

• Firstly, this makes it easy to read and skim. Always good
• Secondly, you force the hiring manager to connect your experience with their requirement… It implies that your experience is a definitive qualification rather than something they have to read, stop, process, remember their own job requirements, and then connect the two (something a dumb HR person might literally be unable to do).
• Thirdly, that’s SEO baby. When they search for resumes in whatever software they’re using, they query a bunch of the same keywords they included in their job description. This way you guarantee that you don’t forget a valuable keyword, and your resume now contains various applications, frameworks and shit that you haven’t even used. Your resume is basically saying “React? Well I’ve used jQuery” and getting picked up for the word “React”, which might be a nice-to-have.

It’s a lot better than writing the keywords in white 1pt font at the bottom of your resume, which is something a techy person is more likely to catch you doing than the 70 year old looking to hire plumbers.

You probably won’t have to relocate; most decent companies will offer remote positions for developers in this day and age.

What I would recommend is try to find a company that you really want to work for that you think your skill set will match, tailor your resume specifically for them, and then apply on their website directly. That way you’re not going through useless middleman recruiters and your application will land directly in HR’s lap.

Most companies are dealing with labour shortages right now, and developers are in high demand. Your only disadvantage is that you’re a recent grad with probably not much in the world of actual work experience doing development, but that should sort itself out in due time.

Also, make your resume look memorable (and easy to digest by skimming through it). There are some resumes that I’ve seen that I remember how they look years later. Use Canva , it’s free and exceedingly effective, make sure to include a handsome profile pic.

Good luck comrade :fidel-salute: