Ways to increase your chances of getting into FAANG

Keep your LinkedIn profile updated

Recruiters hang out on LinkedIn all the time. Even before our first job at a FAANG company, we have been approached by companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon. The main reason is that we kept our LinkedIn profile updated with our latest experiences and achievements. When the time comes to updating your resume for job applications, you can summarize your LinkedIn experience without the need to scratch your head to recall what you've done since the last update years ago.

If a company's recruiter reaches out to you over LinkedIn/email, it means that you do not even need a resume to apply to that company, they have identified you as a candidate that they want to interview. Many candidates we spoke to were not job hunting and never had the intention to apply to FAANG, they only interviewed with FAANG because a FAANG recruiter reached out to them.

Get referrals

Referrals are designed for employees at a company to bring to their existing network of professional connections into the company (e.g. college schoolmate, friend, ex-coworker) and is by far the best way to get into FAANG because these candidates tend to be higher quality. The referrer is essentially vouching for the referee's abilities and saying that they will be a good fit for the company. Why would someone want to potentially work with a person again they didn't enjoy working with?

How referrals works is that the company's employee will submit the candidate's resume and a short writeup about the person they are referring. It's a win-win situation where by if the referred candidate gets hired, the referrer gets a decent cash bonus ($4000 at Google, $5000 at Meta/Facebook). Referred candidates have a higher chance of getting interviews especially more so if the referrer is someone important at the company.

Some ways to get referrals to your dream company:

• Reach out to your network who is working at the company. LinkedIn is useful for this purpose.
• Reach out to a mutual connection who probably has heard of you and your work before. They might be willing to refer you.
• Cold messaging employees of the company. This is unlikely to work and we don't recommend this but if you are really desperate and persistent enough, you might just find someone who is willing to refer.

Know when they are hiring

Hiring is a seasonal thing. For certain companies, they hire fresh grads and summer interns at specific times of the year (around September - November for a summer internship in the following year). If you miss the hiring window, your chance of landing that role is significantly lowered.

For full-time roles, hiring is less seasonal but there are possibly more opening at the start of the halves (January and July) because that is when companies do head count planning and allocate resources.

Do pay attention to news regarding hiring freezes. For example, in May 2022, Meta started canceling interviews for E3-E5 positions (that's like more than 80% of all applicants) due to a hiring freeze.

Stalk job boards and online forums such as r/cscareerquestions and r/csMajors.