In my day job, I am occasionally involved in hiring, and rarely even of those fresh out of school. Here are a few bits of advice that may improve your prospects with someone like I.

• If you’re passionate about the technology area you’re trying to work in, show some indication that you have gone beyond school work. It can be some job, or (even better) some personal project of some magnitude.

• A resume is not suitable for showing samples of your work, but it can certainly list URLs where such may be found. Someone who wants a programming job ought to have some code of hers out in the wild, someplace where an interviewer can look at it. It can be code, it can be papers, email, blog articles, design diagrams, whatever. Be googlable.

• When listing coursework assignments, as relevant as they may be, keep in mind that every classmate of yours applying to the same job will describe that very same assignment too. So if you want to stand out, identify something unique about your experience with it: something extra you did; some extra difficulty you overcame; whether you compared your assignment to existing code in the wild.

• Avoid acronyms that only specialists in your ex-job would likely understand. Even expanding the acronym may not be helpful, so instead or in addition, place the technology in context. Is it software or hardware or along the boundary? How high up the software stack is it?

• An extra helping of charisma is not necessary, though humour is nice to see. There is no need to list personal trivia like sports played or honor societies/clubs.

• If there’s some reason that a productive telephone interview is unlikely, please advise about alternative means such as IRC or email.

• If the software that the proposed position is to focus on is already in the public, prepare for the interview by trying it out. Figure out where it fits in the technology spectrum, find out what other people think about it, think of some good questions for us about it.

• Relax! It’s just a job interview, one of dozens or hundreds you’re likely to go through. If something went wrong during the interview, chances are that you can make amends afterward by contacting your interviewers to clarify or correct something. An interview need not (in my view) be just a one-time meeting, but simply the opening salvo for a conversation. That’s true even if you don’t get hired this time.