The US Job Search Handbook

You can call me Tian. I started interning in the US my freshman year of college. Since then I’ve done four internships and two years of full-time work, and I’ve spent more than five years helping international students with their job searches. Across all that consulting and coaching, I’ve met a lot of people who spent plenty of time preparing and still never figured out where they were actually stuck.

Some send out application after application, hear nothing, and keep rewriting their resumes. Others decide their technical skills aren’t strong enough and keep taking courses, without ever finding out what the jobs they want actually require. Each of these looks like hard work. But if you’ve misread the problem, doing more of it rarely makes a real difference.

One student I worked with was getting roughly one interview for every ten applications, so her materials were clearly working to some degree. But she kept thinking her resume needed one more revision and each company needed a little more research. Over five weeks, she applied to only three jobs. More preparation was no longer what she needed most. She needed to send out the version she had and let the market tell her what to change next.

That’s why this handbook tries to lay it all out in one place: how to plan your job search ahead of time, where to find information, how to build connections with people, and how to explain your own experience clearly.

First, See the Whole System

You don’t learn resumes, then networking, then interviewing, and only then begin looking for a job. A job search works more like a loop you keep going around:

Where you’re aiming decides what information you need to look for. That information shows you what evidence you have to build. Once you’ve prepared enough for the current stage, you start applying, reaching out, and interviewing. When feedback comes back, you adjust your direction, materials, and methods, and go around again.

It isn’t a strict assembly line. You might keep building a project while you’re already applying, or realize only after talking with people in the field that the role you were aiming for doesn’t suit you. What matters is that you don’t camp out in any one stage and let “I’m still preparing” stand in for the whole search.

Elsewhere I’ve put the loop more bluntly: Show up, apply, reach out, get feedback, adjust, and do it again. The eight chapters that follow take this system apart one layer at a time.

My Background, and What This Handbook Covers

In college I interned at Deloitte and at Goldman Sachs, and I received return offers from both. Later I left Goldman, gave up my H-1B, took a year off, and went to Cambridge for my MBA. My own job searches, career changes, and decisions, plus years of working with students, have let me see this process from a number of different angles.

I’ve consulted with more than 1,000 students and formally coached more than 150 of them, each for at least two hours. My students have received more than 150 offers, from firms including Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Amazon. About 95% of the mentors on our team and 97% of our students are women, and I especially want more women to feel sure enough of themselves to go after the opportunities they want.

Most of what’s here comes from my own job searches and my teaching. It’s written for undergraduates and graduate students who plan to work in the US, and for high school students who want to understand all this early. Many of the examples come from finance, consulting, business, and data roles, because those are the areas I know best, but the underlying methods apply more broadly. A pure research track or starting a company in college calls for a different kind of plan, so I don’t cover those. Applying to schools comes up only as an analogy, when it helps explain something.

Some of the percentages in this handbook come from my teaching records and years of observation. They’re there to show how common a problem is; they can’t predict any one person’s outcome. Recruiting programs, eligibility rules, and timelines change. When I tell a story from the past, I describe things as they were then, so when you apply, check that year’s recruiting pages.

Figure Out Where You’re Stuck Right Now

If this is your first time through, I’d suggest reading at least the first two chapters. Everything later about resumes, interviews, and networking depends on what job you want and what it takes to get there. Once you know which situation you’re in, read in this order:

It’s worth keeping count of how many applications you send and how many interviews you get. But those numbers alone can’t tell you your resume is the problem. You also need to look at which roles you applied to, whether they were still hiring, whether you met the basic requirements, and which round your interviews ended in. Chapter 5 goes through how to track down the problem.

If you’re close to graduating, you don’t need to copy everything a freshman would do. Deal first with whatever is hurting your results most right now, and slot in industry research, reaching out to people in the field, and interview practice alongside it. You also don’t have to get one step completely right before you let yourself start the next.

Contents

1. A “Good Job” Isn’t a Given
2. Planning Your Job Search as a System
3. Finding and Using Information on Your Own
4. Connecting with People: Networking
5. Clarity and Confidence: Resumes and Interviews
6. Following Through: From Preparation to Internship
7. Being Yourself: Who You Are, What You Want, What You Like
8. Luck and Mindset
9. Appendix: Where to Draw the Line When Presenting Your Experience