“It’s been a tight market—even in this (EDA) niche.”
Once your resume gets you through the door for a job interview, it may be your soft skills that make the difference. You get to show them who you are.
You want to be confident, not arrogant, honest and focused, according to Cathy Mikami, who recruits for Synopsys, a $3 billion global company that makes tools to design smart chips and secure software. A pioneer in the electronic design automation (EDA) arena, Synopsys is the 16th largest software company in the world.
You’ll have a chance to meet with recruiters from Synopsys on Thursday, Jan. 17, at our second UCSC Extension Career Exploration Series featuring Antun Domic, the CTO of Synopsys; a panel of VLSI Engineering certificate program instructors; and Ryland Degnan, CTO and founding president of Infiniti. Domic will be talking about New Trends in EDA. Degnan, a guest speaker from the San Francisco Bay chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), will be talking about native-cloud computing.
Synopsys recruiters will launch the career series with a pizza social hour at 5:30 p.m. They’ll be accepting resumes for a wide range of positions at the global company. As of Friday, the Synopsys job site listed 1,059 open positions, including an R&D engineer in Burlington, Mass., a QA intern engineer to work on testing of EDA in Armenia, and a training specialist to manage logistics in the Mountain View office.
“We are growing and hiring like most tech companies,” Mikami says. “We haven’t seen a slowdown.”
The company had 315 jobs in the U.S. including 199 in the Mountain View/Sunnyvale and San Francisco areas—120 of which were engineering positions; 40 were intern positions. In recent years, the company has grown its internship program, especially on college campuses where the new generation of technology users go out and promote the company.
Tips for Interviewing at Your Best
Mikami offered up a few tips for job seekers who are meeting recruiters for the first time.
- Passion—Show passion for what you do.
- Confidence—Be confident, not arrogant.
- Integrity—Be honest about what you know and don’t know.
- Diligence—Do your homework on the company and the product. Know who you’re talking to. (You can look up your interviewers on LinkedIn.)
- Focus—Keep your answers to the point. Don’t go off on tangents.
- Communication—Keep communication open about any timeline you have. You may want to let them know if you are considering a proposal at another company so they can expedite the process for you.
“It’s been a tight market as far as finding the talent with the experience and background we’re looking for and it seems to be getting tighter—even in this niche,” Mikami says. “We’re always looking for people who have experience in EDA. And, like many companies, we’re looking for people with an interest in AI and machine learning.”
Upcoming UCSC Extension Career Events
- New Trends in EDA & Reactive Cloud-Native Networking (Jan. 17)
- UCSC Extension Career Fair 2019 (Feb. 28)