How to land a contract gig at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google
Mar 20th, 2014
Every college kids dreams of working at on these big tech companies. However it may not be easy if you didn't graduate top your class at an Ivy League college. This guide shows you how you can still find a job albeit short term contract at one of these awesome companies. All these companies or even if you are looking to get into a big tech company in your own hometown has a big secret.
For all the branding they do and all the results of surveys that show these places are rates as best place to work, there is a hidden workforce that all these companies employ and that is the temporary worker or a short-term contractor. These companies don't like to hire fulltime employees for all their open jobs because full-time employees are very expensive. These companies have some of the best and most liberal employee benefits you will ever see like health coverage for entire family, lots of paid vacation, paternity leaves, 401k, employee stock options, education reimbursement. These benefits cost a lot of money (sometimes upto $100K per employee). It is therefore not wise for them to hire a receptionist or a recruiter or an accountant and incur these high costs unless very necessary. They can hire this same person to do the same job at a lower cost and save on the benefits by hiring them through a staffing agency or an outsourced provider like a consulting company or a staffig MSP (managed service provider). These external workforce providers who only pay the base salary and minimal health insurance with high premium and if they are really generous a minimal amount of paid national holidays. There is no paid vacation, 401k matching, stock options, etc. and so these companies save a lot of money. How much? If for example a company has 10,000 contractors, they could be saving 10k x $100k = $1B. Let that sink in- $1 BILLION PER YEAR. A company like Google could use this money to fund an entire moonshot program with this kind of money. Reports from their recent lawsuit with Uber suggested the entire cost of the self driving program (Waymo) was $1B. So you can see why this program makes sense. Without these programs the employee workforce of these companies would be almost double and their costs would be much higher making it hard for them to invest in new programs. So expect this to stick around for a while.
While its a bummer your chances of getting a fulltime job at these companies are lower, on the plus side there are more jobs still available to you - where the bar is not as high- because many people would rather have a fultime job.
1. The first thing you need to do is figure out is what skills you have that these companies hire for. If you are experienced then this is simple. Software Engineer, Chef, Financial Analysts- They are all in demand. If you don't have this experience figure out what you want to do and customize your resume with experiences that will help you stand out. Looking for a sales job- add the gigs you did in college wokring at the pizza shop and how you improved sales. If you are in data science- mention projects you did that may be relevant to them.
2. Lookup oncontracting.com and find the relevant staffing agency that fills the skills for the company you are interested in. This is the only place you can find this information.
3. Search job boards like Dice, Monster, ZipRecruiter or Google jobs to find the jobs these staffing agencies posted. Don't waste your time on indeed.com as they don't deal with contract jobs. Try and find the recruiter that posted this job and connect with the recruiter on Linkedin or call them and try to build a rapport. Call them once every two weeks to stay on top of mind for them. They often get positions they don't post to job boards.
4. Once you get in update your resume and be sure to mention the client's name. Some staffing agencies might scare you into mentioning only 'confidential company' but don't fall for it . The courts have decided that you are allowed to list the client company you worked for including on your LinkedIn profile (such as Google through xyz staffing or Google (contract)) and any non-disclosures are only relevant to the confidential content of the projects like an undisclosed iphone next version. Serving food in the cafeteria or testing a self driving car is definitely not confidential and how else could you expect to find your next job if your previous employers restricted you from stating what you did.