Last Thursday, a Room Full of CUNY Students Got a Better Map for the Tech Job Market

The City Tutors hosted a conversation with Jimmy Willis, who studied at CUNY and is the author of The Irresistible Tech Candidate, alongside mentors who gave their Thursday night to students looking for honest answers about how hiring works.

There is a character in Jimmy Willis’s new book named Alejandro. He is a first-generation college student with strong skills, a polished portfolio, and 94 job applications behind him. Still, nothing has moved. No callbacks. No interviews. Just the quiet weight of an inbox that stays empty.

Alejandro is fictional. The experience is familiar.

For many CUNY students trying to enter tech, the hardest part is making sense of a market that can feel opaque, crowded, and indifferent. Last Thursday, Jimmy came to The City Tutors to talk about why that happens and how candidates can position themselves differently inside it.

Jimmy Willis is 34, a senior manager of data engineering who studied at CUNY, and the author of the upcoming book The Irresistible Tech Candidate: How to Stand Out in a Brutally Competitive Tech Job Market. He wrote it after years of watching talented people from schools like his get screened out before anyone took a serious look at what they could do.

“I kept hearing the same questions from people who were clearly qualified but had no idea why the door was not opening,” he told the group. “That is the problem I wanted to solve.”

What followed was one of the most direct, practical conversations we have hosted this year.

One of Jimmy’s clearest points was that qualifications alone do not carry themselves. They have to be translated. Recruiters often spend only seconds on a resume. A candidate’s experience has to register immediately through recognizable titles, outcome-driven language, and a clear sense of context.

Jimmy offered a simple example. Two students complete the same project. One writes, “I built a machine learning model.” The other writes, “I reduced fraud detection latency by 40 percent using a random forest classifier deployed on AWS.” The work may be identical. The signal is very different.

He also pushed the group to think about hiring from the employer’s side. In his view, companies are often choosing the candidate who feels easiest to trust with the problem in front of them. That means applicants have to show what they have already solved, how their experience connects to the company’s needs, and why they make sense in that role now.

The same applied to networking. Jimmy encouraged mentees to think less about access as a matter of collecting names and more about visibility, specificity, and relevance.

His company had posted a summer internship the day before. By the next day, it had already drawn more than 430 applications. A small number of applicants had reached out to him directly on LinkedIn.

“That is how you stand out,” he said. “Not with a copy-paste message. With your actual work visible, with a real question about something the company is doing, with a reason for them to want to know you.”

After the fireside chat, mentees moved into smaller breakout conversations with four professionals who gave their evening to this community: Rene, a cybersecurity professional at Bloomberg; Eugene, a network engineer at Paramount; Zack, a data scientist and instructor at CUNY Tech Prep; and Ekdatha, who works across AI and finance at OneStream Software. Each brought a different lens on what it takes to build a career in and around tech.

The questions from mentees were specific and urgent. Keisha, a senior at New York City College of Technology studying business and fashion technology, took note of Zintellect, a government internship database for postgraduates seeking technical roles. Elijah of Queens College asked how to build a LinkedIn presence when you are still early in your path. Shirelle asked about job postings that list degree requirements even when someone already has relevant experience.

Jimmy’s answer was encouraging and practical: many listings describe an idealized candidate. Strong keywords, a strong interview, and a strong body of work can still carry weight.

Zack also reminded the group that CUNY Tech Prep, a free year-long program, exists to help students build skills and get hired in tech.

Near the end of the night, Jimmy shared a reflection that stayed with the room.

“When I was at JPMorgan Chase, I saw so many people from Yale, Princeton, Harvard. There were so few people from CUNY. And people from CUNY are real. We do not come from a place of privilege. We work really hard. We deserve to be in those spaces.”

That feeling carried into the close of the event. The chat filled with LinkedIn handles, resource links, and thank-yous. More cameras came on. People stayed engaged. The room had the energy of students recognizing that the path forward had become more visible.

The barriers are real. But now they know how to become irresistible anyway.

Pre-order The Irresistible Tech Candidate before March 20 to receive a signed copy, a workbook, and a bonus gift. Learn more about mentorship through The City Tutors and our self-paced program at thecitytutors.org/findamentor