Interviewing for jobs without much experience really requires you to sell yourself. So you want
to know how I got my first data science job? Then you're in luck today because that's exactly what
we're going to be talking about. So if you've been watching my videos for a while then you'd
know that I switched from aerospace engineering to data science. But if that's news to you then be
sure to watch this video as a bit of context. So after I finish my aerospace engineering degree I
was basically unemployed for about two months and that was definitely an interesting time. During
this period I was applying for data science jobs and I was also preparing for management consulting
interviews which were going to be my backup but ironically I was spending more time preparing for
those management consulting interviews than the data science jobs because consulting interviews
was something I had no experience in but for data science I had a bit of experience having
done coding before and having also graduated with a stem degree. In terms of data science jobs,
I really wanted to get into a startup so in my final sem of university I worked on the startup
since then you could say that I got the startup bug and I really wanted to work in a dynamic and
fast-paced environment with really smart people so I couldn't really imagine myself applying for
graduate programs at big corporations so I double down on looking for startup related jobs. As I
began my job search I made sure to sharpen up my resume and if there's one thing that I learned
from the consulting interview practice was the consulting resume format. The key point is to use
action-driven verbs to describe your achievements along with metrics to go with it to quantify
exactly to what extent the outcome improved as a result of your implemented solution. Let's
take a look at my resume from back then just so you can see an example of this. So when I
interned at the German space agency I used Matlab to create a quality control tool for carrying out
test sequences of rockets. Whilst I could have just said that it's better to include metrics to
go with it like I've done here and try to make your points as concise as possible while making
it as punchy as possible because the recruiter doesn't have all day to sip through your resume
as they've got piles of other resumes to look at so you really want to try your best to grab their
attention as soon as possible. Once I sorted my resume out, I jumped onto AngelList and LinkedIn
to find potential startups that were hiring and I also looked at companies like Deloitte who had an
advanced analytics team but I decided to stick with tech companies. After browsing AngelList
I realized that at the time it was extremely US-centric. So I focused on using LinkedIn as
my main job search tool. Then one day when I was browsing my LinkedIn feed I came across a hiring
post by the head of data at this SaaS company which was a customer data platform I browsed their
website and noticed that they were hiring for data analyst they also seem to have a great culture and
the website really gave off a vibe that a lot of smart people work there so to apply for the role
you have to send in a 140 character introduction it definitely seemed a bit odd to me at first but
I really wanted that job. So I did exactly what any normal person would do and spent about an hour
crafting those 140 characters and that's about 20 to 40 words and this is what I came up with
so I sent it through and within a day the CTO of the company got back to me so following that
I had around three rounds of interview where I got asked all types of culture fit questions and
technical questions based on the projects I had previously worked on there was no coding test
and as it was a junior position they weren't really expecting much experience.
So interviewing for jobs without much experience really requires you to sell yourself. The job
landscape in general requires you to sell and market yourself very effectively because you're
going to be your best advocate. So the quicker you learn the skills the easier your job search
is going to be and it's always very important to be genuine and confident but that doesn't mean
that you make anything up. Definitely try to draw upon your unique experience to set yourself apart
from the crowd because all tech companies want to hire interesting people. So after the three rounds
of interview. I was pretty excited to have gotten the offer. That job really gave me the foundations
for data science. As it was a small company of 50 people I wore many hats and worked on a wide array
of projects. I did mostly data engineering and back-end development along with data science as
I worked on lifetime value and churn risk models. I learned everything on the job especially coding
after I came to realize that Matlab is not really considered programming in the developer land. So I
learned a lot about object-oriented programming in python. So that's a summary of how I got my
first job. If you enjoyed the video then be sure to like and subscribe and I'll see you next time.