Last week, ColorStack held its monthly Fam Friday event, which provides a space for ColorStack members and partners to gather together as a community and hear from one another. Ahead of the college recruiting cycle, July’s Fam Friday focused on developing the concrete skills necessary to attain a position at a tech company. From Nashville, TN to Long Beach, CA, 179 attendees called into the event, some for the first time. Program Coordinator Angie Ortiz kicked off the virtual session by polling the room with a simple question: On a scale of one to ten how prepared do you feel for the recruiting season? Members felt empowered to answer honestly, creating a safe space for others to follow suit. 

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From there, the event transitioned into a series of career development sessions. First up was, “Acing the Interview: On Your Best Behavior” with Daniel Fu, a campus recruiter at Bill.com. Fu focused on the Situation, Task, Action, and Result (STAR) framework as a means of staying on topic and clearly indicating the impact of your work when answering behavioral interview questions. The session concluded with very relatable questions from students like is it okay for me to pause during an interview before giving the recruiter an answer? Or how do I highlight my accomplishments without coming across as braggy? Fu answered these questions and more during the session.

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Next up was an interactive panel with UiPath titled, “Take Your Pick: Career Paths for CS Majors.” In this session, students had the opportunity to break out into round tables with company professionals, each with a different function within UiPath. Professional fields included, Technical Account Management, Product Management, and Marketing. Within round tables, UiPath team members answered difficult questions with honesty. At the Product Management table, for instance, Senior PM Robert Love candidly answered how students can improve their product intuition and establish opinions on good and bad product design. 

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After a short break, Haley Rosano and Jane Lalonde of Zynga rolled right into one of the hottest topics at July’s Fam Friday: skillfully crafting your resume. Rosano and Lalonde dove into the nitty gritty of how recruiters screen applicants and the dos and don’ts of putting together an effective resume. At the end of the session, they addressed questions from attendees ranging from what address. The specificity of the questions asked and the depth of the answers given revealed that when it comes to resumes, sometimes it’s the little things that make the most impact. 

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Fam Friday concluded with two sessions related to the technical interview. The first was a fun and interactive crash course on big O notation with Figma software engineer Levi Villarreal. The second was an in-depth session on how CodeSignal technical assessments are scored and how companies use these assessments to recruit applicants. With CodeSignal Solutions Engineer Slyvia Lin providing insight into the former and Ebay Recruiter Kelly Anne Cheung providing clarity on the latter, students were given an unparalleled window into an integral step in the recruiting process. As a takeaway from the session, Fam Friday attendees were given a link to a CodeSignal assessment and encouraged to complete the coding challenge to be considered in the recruiting pool for Ebay. 

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July’s recruiting-focused Fam Friday provided students with concrete next steps and direct professional contacts at some of the industry’s biggest and most innovative companies. Fam Friday will be back again this month along with ColorStack’s Stacked Up Summit on August 17th. Black and Latinx students are encouraged to register for the event here.

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