Finally, the autumn recruitment is over, after more than two months of interviews and waiting.
Because I was still interning during the summer vacation, I missed the best time. I started to submit applications in early September, but not many. From what I can remember, I applied to the following companies:
- Xiaohongshu (mid-August, also the earliest application) (received an offer in November)
- ByteDance Early Batch - E-commerce (late August) (failed the second round)
- Tencent Music (late August) (failed the first round, not deep enough)
- ByteDance WebInfra (mid-September) (failed the second round)
- Tencent PCG NBase (mid-September) (received an offer at the end of October)
- iQiyi (mid-September) (resume rejected, received a thank-you email on the same day)
- Bilibili (late August) (failed the written test despite getting all A's, received a thank-you email after raising fish for a month)
- Meituan (early September) (gave up on the written test)
- miHoYo (mid-September) (failed the written test)
- NetEase (mid-September) (gave up on the written test)
- Several small companies in Hangzhou (passed, but not considering them for now)
- Companies that work on open source projects (considered, but planning to give up later)
- ByteDance E-commerce (early October, got another chance) (passed the interview, offer rejected during approval)
- Youzan (mid-September) (resume rejected)
I applied to about a dozen companies, which is relatively few compared to mass applications. I only applied to companies that I had some understanding of, but in the end, most of them didn't respond, and I received very few interview invitations. The interviews were mainly concentrated in September, and the whole month of October was spent waiting for HR interviews or notifications.
I feel like I failed in my first campus recruitment. I received less than 5 offers in the end, and the more well-known ones were Tencent and Xiaohongshu. Tencent was the first to announce the results and the first to give me an offer. This year, the campus recruitment circle was all about choosing Tencent or delaying graduation. Tencent did offer better benefits than previous years, and with the quadrupled housing subsidy, Tencent's employee benefits are quite good. However, due to the workload of the department I applied to and other considerations, I ultimately declined the offer. After receiving an offer from Xiaohongshu, I finally chose Xiaohongshu. Although Xiaohongshu couldn't match Tencent's high salary (although it still exceeds Tencent in the first year), and it doesn't have the same endorsement as a big company like Tencent, it feels like I'm going against the trend. But no matter what I choose in the end, I will probably have regrets. For this one decision, I have been wavering for a long time, with an unsettled mind. I hope the final decision leads me to the right path.