How to get interviews?

The market is absolutely brutal for interns and new-grads unfortunately. On top of all the usual advice (optimize your resume, cast a wide net, network, etc) which are relatively low-hanging fruit, I highly recommend building legitimate, in-depth, and successful side projects.

This is the common theme I've seen from interns/new-grads who are actually succeeding in this market to the point where they're regularly getting interviews from FAANG. They all built something on the side with a minimum of 1,000 users (often 10,000+).

I actually owe my career to my side projects, publishing 30+ apps with 5 million+ users combined. They got me my 1st job as an Android lead at Course Hero, which I then turned into an Android engineer position at Facebook: [Case Study] Building An App With 1,000,000+ Users To Get Into Facebook

In this market, having a clean resume and a good GPA from a top school only puts you in the Top 10% of junior candidates. But in order to succeed, you need to be in the Top 1%. The main way to do that as a junior engineer is to build side projects as it's the natural logical extension of your skill-building (you're literally just building real-life software seriously on the side).

Of course, this will take time and be hard. Nothing that's incredibly impressive is easy. Lucky for me, I started building side projects between my junior and senior year at UCLA. I did it purely for fun and wasn't even thinking about jobs - The first 3 months were pretty uneventful as I wasn't getting any app downloads. But over time, I made the apps better and better and the installs rolled in. By the time I graduated, I had a few apps with 10,000+ users. By the time I was leaving PayPal and looking for a proper Android role, I had a few apps with 25,000+ users. Now I have multiple apps with 500,000+ users that regularly get interviews from companies like Google, Block, Uber, Instacart, and many more.

There's really no huge secret when it comes to the job market for junior engineers: You need to show them you can code. Normally employers are nice for your first full-time role and let you learn to code on the job. But in this market, that isn't the case as any decent job opening will have at least a couple candidates with legit side projects. Show them you can code by writing high-impact software on your own outside of a work setting.

It may be a good idea to get some feedback on your resume. That's the first thing recruiters look at when deciding whether or not to take the next step with you, so it could be there are areas in your resume that could use improvement. Looks like Taro hosts resume review sessions which could help?