Hi, I am Yuanyuan Tian from IBM Almaden research center. I have been working for iBM since 2008. My primary research area is large scale data analytics, especial large scale machine learning and graph mining. If you interested in my research, please come to talk in tomorrow industrial session 1 or stop by my poster. Since I was on the job market 4 years ago. My memory is still fresh. So, I will share with you my view on how to be competitive for industrial research jobs. This is based my the experiences of myself and some friends and colleagues.
The first step to start application.
For engineering jobs, once you have offer, you are only given a week or 2 to make a decision. On the other hand, research offers are usually flexible for the decision time. There are usually 2 chanels to send your application. I highly recommend directly sending your application to the researchers who work in the lab, instead applying online. Because online applications easily get lost in the flood sometimes. So, what gets you an interview? First is your publication record. Because publications are the hard facts of your research achievement. If you have interned or collaborated with researcher in the lab you are applying, it is extremely helpful for you to get an interview. Lastly, recommendation letters are also helpful. For example, based on my experience in IBM, some professors or researchers have established very good reputation in referencing candidats, so we value their opinions a lot.
When an emploer is interested in your application, you will first get an phone interview. ,,,, if the phone interview goes well, you will get on site inteview. Almaden has reputatin of asking deep and hard questions, so we call it grill time. The rest of the interview will be one-on-ones with eisuviual researchers.
In order to be successful in the inteview, you need to know what the interviewers are looking for. Phone interview is filtering step to make sure that candidate is the same as what it says on the resume and communication is reasonable. As long as there is no suprises, you will get an onsite interview. For the onsite inteview, interviewers are trying to find out whether
How what the inteviewers are looking for, here are tips on how you can prepare the inteview. The most important thing is to know you stuff well. Because the whole interview will be about your work. Make sure to practice your job talk. Since the job talk is first impression and foundation for your whole interview. Think about what questions people may ask. When answering questions, be honest. If you don’t know the answer of a question, say so. Never make up an answer. Another home work you can do is to some research on the lab.
Finally, I want to emphasize that interview is bi-directional process. Here are questions of which you want to find out the answers. How to find out the answers. You can observe the people’s behavior and interactions during your interview and ask questions. If you know people working there. Talk to them before or after the interview.