On-campus Interviews (part 1)

Saturday, November 7, 2009

An on-campus interview is an interview that is conducted by a company at your school. Like a phone screen, it’s a first round interview that will decide whether or not you get invited to interview on-site. Companies that recruit heavily at your college usually are the ones that will offer on-campus interviews.

Applying

There are two ways that you can apply for an on-campus interview. The first way is through your schools careers web site. Companies will post their interview dates at the beginning of the semester and there will be a deadline for which you can apply for a slot (most on-campus interviews require that you be at least a junior to apply). Once the deadline passes, the company will notify you to let you know if you’ve been selected or not. If you’ve been selected, you’ll likely receive an e-mail from one of the companies recruiters which will give you some background information on the interviews and ask you to choose from a list of times to interview. Usually you’ll have between 2-5 days to prepare for the interview after you’ve been notified.

The other way that you can apply for on-campus interviews is through career fairs. On numerous occasions I handed my resume to a company at a career fair and was invited to interview on campus. Most companies won’t announce when they’re doing this so it’s always a good idea to be in your best form while attending career fairs.

The Interviews

On-campus interviews will usually be held at your schools career services department. The dress code will depend on the company that you’re interviewing with (if you’re unsure of what to wear, a suit is always a safe bet). The interviews are usually conducted by recruiters or alumni engineer employees. They could contain resume, behavioral, or technical questions and can last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. From my experience, most of the on-campus interviews I had were more resume / behavioral oriented than technical. On-campus interviews are not for specific positions and instead are used by companies as a general screening tool. If you pass the interview, your resume will be forwarded to groups around the company and it’s likely that you’ll be invited to interview on-site.

Conclusion

On-campus interviews are excellent opportunities that you should always take advantage of since the pool of applicants competing for interviews is much smaller than it would normally be had you applied using other means. As I’ve stated previously in Choosing a School for Computer Science, this is why it’s important to take into account what companies recruit at a school that you’re thinking of attending.

Click here for On-campus Interviews (part 2)

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