Getting an interview in tech after a PhD

Created on February 23, 2026

2026

This post is the first of a two post series summarizing the advice I have found myself giving to graduating PhD students searching for a job in the private sector. When listenting to them, two recurring frustrations are: not getting an interview, and failing at the “past project” stage of the process. This first post is about getting an interview. The second will be about presenting a past project. This advice is mostly meant for PhD students in the French system interested in tech jobs, but it much of it is widely applicable.

The main reason you are not getting an interview is that there are hundreds of applicants for the position.

Interviews are time consuming and no one is interviewing hundreds of candidates. To get an interview, there are two important conditions:

  1. Have a clear CV that meets the offer’s expectations
  2. Have an insider vouch for you.

Reworking your CV

Most job applications will require a CV. Once you get an interview, the outcome of the recruitment process is independent of how you presented your CV. It is critical at the very first stage: filtering.

Understand the setup. A recruiter is screening applicants through their CV and with a first call. Their goal is to fill the position as quickly as possible, and to minimize the number of interviews the team they are hiring needs to hold. Their interest is not in favor of taking big risks on an applicant. You need to meet the job offer’s expectations, and your CV is the only chance you get to convince the recruiter this is the case.

Any candidate needs to prove they meet the job offer’s requirements. For a graduating PhD it is an uphill battle because organizations are scared of hiring you. Every single prospective employer I met awkwardly told me “But you know, we don’t do research here!”. They all had scar tissue of past employees coming out of a PhD or even of a research Masters, and not fitting into their team’s objectives and way of working. The question that is going through their head is “what are we going to do with them?”.

Even while conciously trying to be as industry-oriented as possible, during my own post-PhD job search, I had crafted a CV that a mentor described as “intimidating” and another described as “nerdy”. Here is the advice I received:

  1. Present your PhD as professionnal experience not education or research.
  2. Back up your claims with concrete and understandable achievements.
  3. Make clear what you are looking for currently.

Presenting your PhD as professional experience

The role you are applying to is not open to students, not to researchers. So, don’t apply as one.

What transferrable skills did you gain? Design, analysis, development, benchmarking, …

Many companies have a competency matrix. For instance, there may be three parts to being an ML Engineer: modelling, solutions and product-sense. As a graduating PhD, you are very strong in modelling. But you probably are not that great a setting up prediction pipelines in products in production, handling user feedback and monitoring performance. That wasn’t your job.

But can you code? Are yhou

I spent much of the first half of 2025 looking for a job after my PhD. Two things held me back at the beginning of this journey: 1) my CV and 2) past project interviews. Here are my learnings… a few months later.

If you read Hacker News or speak with anyone in tech, you hear about the interviewing culture in software companies. You’ll hear about (several) coding interviews, with topics uncorrelated with the underlying subject of the position. You’ll hear about recruiters ghosting you or about the need to have someone vouch for you internally. If you did a PhD, this is not necessarily hard. Coding interviews are not hard. They are cliche, repetitive and … tricky. But if you have experience in a research Masters or PhD, this is no different to being grilled at the whiteboard. In case you need to hear it though: do Leetcode for a few weeks, try to finish all the top 100 problems (or whatever they are called) and you’ll be fine. Take your time, there is no point trying to get an interview as long as you can’t pass the first round.

For a graduating PhD student, the hurdles are elsewhere. There are two: getting an interview, and passing the past project.

I am fortuanate to be able to count on some mentors who are used to recruiting and generous with their time. They helped me figure out was I was looking for and where I could find it, sell my skills and improve my CV. This helped me unblock my job search, and be fortuanate to choose where I wanted to work.

But I only just really got it.

Networking

I was in contact with around 30 companies before choosing to join my current employer. Only a handful of these interactions came after I applied on their job site. In tech, any job posting gets tens if not hundreds of applications. Sifting through them is time consuming and most people don’t have the time for that. A friend in a startup recently confided a manager their had been forced to filter by alma maters, PhD labs and past employers to be able to get to managable number of applicants. The corollary to this is that the any misunderstanding about your fit for the role is fatal.