5 things you should keep in mind while applying for an internship or job [infographic]

This year, for the first time, Nopio is organizing summer internships and, since we’ve closed the recruitment process, we thought it would be a great time to show some statistics and share our thoughts about common errors in the applications.

Recruitment Statistics

It is said that a picture tells a thousand words, so instead of presenting you with the raw facts and data, we have laid all the essential information in the infographics. Below you can see the most interesting facts, that we collected.

• 77 candidates applied to join our team. We would like to thank all of you! It was a great experience to see who was interested in such programs and the span of people’s knowledge and experience.

• Just a few candidates moved to 3rd and 4th stage of application.

•  The most common birth year among candidates was 1994.

• We had significantly more applications from men than from women.

Common Errors

Here are some thoughts and advice for the candidates, which come as a result of the recent recruitment process, as well as personal experience after a few hundred interviews and reviewing more than a thousand resumes.

1) Your knowledge should reflect your studies’ advancement

It is surprising how many people are quite advanced in their studies, yet lack very basic knowledge about programming and databases. This isn’t always sophisticated concepts, but rather basic recurrency, database relations, and joins, or some other similarly easy subjects. If you’re at the end of your studies, and you struggle with these, it’s about time to start learning. How can we expect you to learn fast if you didn’t do it in your studies?

2) Don’t send empty emails

It’s so weird to get an email with nothing but a resume attached. I know it’s easy to just attach the resume file and hit send, but it makes for far better first impression if you write a sentence or two about why you’re applying.

3) Your resume is like your baby – it needs just enough care

Just like #2, the quality of your resume is a big deal to us. It’s not essential to make your resume look professionally designed (unless you’re applying for a designer position), but one thing we noticed was that quite a few candidates submitted either very short and limited resumes. If you tell hardly anything about yourself, this can significantly lower chances to be considered for further review. On the other end of the scale are resumes that were over-designed. While these may look cool, over-design can detract from the actual resume information. Find the sweet spot, and test out your resume by showing different versions to friends and family. They can tell you which makes the best impression and is easiest to read.

4) You’re not an answering machine – talk with us

This is something that is super hard when you’re you’re doing your first few interviews but you should be conversing as well as answering questions. It makes for a way better interview to talk with someone who’s willing to partake in a conversation and is not just expecting the next question. How to do it? Have some subjects handy, for example your hobbies, the latest program you have written (even if you failed), your latest vacation, the weather – something to show you’re a good person to spend time with.

5) Have questions, they show you care

This build on the previous point; you should have questions to ask. It’s just not possible that there’s nothing that interests you about your potential internship (or job). Wouldn’t you like to know what projects we’re working on? How are we solving some issues you may have encountered while learning or programming? There must be a lot more. These not only show that you’re interested in the company and its culture, but also make for great conversation subjects.

Good luck and learn from experience when it’s offered!

We also recommend reading the article: Is software development hard?