Hey folks, I'm Swati.
Welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
This newsletter is those conversations: what I'm seeing, thinking, and what I'd tell you if we were grabbing coffee.
This week's edition is about getting hired in an era where graduates are unemployable.
But before that:
When you imagine landing your first job, what do you picture?
Last week, Brian Armstrong sent an email to the entire Coinbase team:
He said that the new Coinbase would have five layers max below the CEO, leaders with as many as 15 direct reports, and "no pure managers" anywhere in the company.
Every leader would have to also do the work.
And most importantly: “We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including ‘one person teams’ with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.”
If you are a fresher reading that, notice the shape of the company that comes out the other side, rather than the layoffs.
The early-career roles you were going to walk into are being collapsed into one role, and it expects you to ship.
This is happening across orgs:
TCS announced 12,000 layoffs in July last year, and the IT services hiring funnel that absorbed Tier-2 grads for two decades has collapsed from around 6 lakh in FY22 to 1.55 lakh in FY24.
The seat that used to guarantee a job has now stopped guaranteeing one.
And while going through 100s of applications every week at Masters’ Union, I think I know why.
In our recent hiring for our Director’s office role, we shortlisted forty resumes, I saw that most had the same internships and a line about being "passionate about leveraging technology."
Only two of them had GitHub links. Of which, only one had something deployed I could click on and see for myself.
That's who got the call.
When I told this to a friend who runs hiring at a Series B startup, he said the same thing.
He said his shortlist is mostly people whose work he’s seen on the internet and scouted intentionally, or referrals.
There are hardly any shortlisted candidates coming from the hiring form.
Many students still don't realise even today.
The shortlist is being made before the application is even read.
So here’s how I’d play this.
Firstly stop chasing stamps
It didn't.
Surveys of MOOC completers say the certificate helped them.
Surveys of hiring managers say they don't trust it.
Instead:
Apply for the role you don't think you'll get.
Most students rule themselves out before the company gets a chance to.
You see a job description with eight bullet points, you tick six of them, and you assume the other two disqualify you, so you don't apply.
You tell yourself you'll come back to the bigger one later, when you're more ready.
Tara Sophia Mohr surveyed over a thousand professionals for Harvard Business Review on why they didn't apply for jobs they were under-qualified for and over 2 in 5 said the qualifications mentioned are non-negotiable. But most of the time, the qualifications are a wishlist.
The same thing happens at a scale with Indian students and international roles. You see "based in San Francisco" or "must be eligible to work in the US" and you assume that's the end of the conversation.
You don't write to them, because nobody around you has done it.
So nobody around you ever does it.
The companies hiring now, especially in AI, are sponsoring visas, hiring remote-first, and writing to people who write to them.
Just apply and see how it unfolds.
Pick one very specific thing you can deploy in 30 days.
Like deploying an agent that scrapes job postings by industry and writes daily summaries, or a RAG system on your college's last five years of question papers.
Ship it to GitHub with a working demo URL, and write a README that explains what it does and what you learned.
If you’re not technical, vibe code it with tools like claude / lovable and deploy the artifact on a domain that you own.
Post it on LinkedIn / Twitter the day it ships.
The algorithm could potentially show it to your next manager. The ability to build something shows intent, passion and most importantly skill when you’re entering the workforce.
Most students apply to 200 companies and hardly hear back from three, instead, flip it.
Pick ten companies you really want to work for.
For three of them, build a small AI tool that solves a problem you can see from outside the company.
Then send the person who owns the problem (could be a founder or the engineering manager), a working link.
Or just make a public pitch on why a company should hire you.
I witnessed Divyanshi, one of our own students, do exactly this for Vedantu recently.
She made a mock ad for Vedantu last month that showed a parent worried about their kid's marks, and pitched a refund-if-grades-don't-improve guarantee from Vedantu.
Vedantu saw that she understood the target audience, positioning and that she had ability to create appeal for their brand which led them to offer her an internship.
The link to her video is here, in case you want to check it out.
Hit reply: what's the one thing you could ship in the next 30 days?
I read every email.
Swati