23-05-2025
Meet Sagar Kumar, who got rejected 500 times... got 500% salary increase, not from IIT or NIT...
Meet Sagar Kumar, who got rejected 500 times... got 500% salary increase, not from IIT or NIT...
Engineers from tier-3 colleges often have to struggle hard to get a high-paying job in a prestigious tech firm. One such person is Sagar Kumar, a young man who overcame tough challenges, limited resources and the perceived challenges of studying in a tier-3 college and finally landed his dream job at Google, which offered him a 500% salary hike. He had previously made 500 failed attempts to get a job in big IT companies. Interestingly, Sagar achieved this success despite not having a background of studying from institutes like IIT or NIT.
After graduating from a small town and a tier-3 college, Sagar Kumar started his career at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Ninja at a salary of 3.3 LPA and later after clearing the TCS Digital Competency Assessment (DCA) he got a digital role in TCS IT company where his salary package increased to 7.4 LPA.
Despite working for 3 years in TCS and winning many awards, a simple corporate job was never his real goal as he wanted to do something bigger. He started preparing for DSA while working full time in TCS.
During an interview, Sagar Kumar revealed that he had applied to more than 500 companies on platforms like LinkedIn, Wellfound and Glassdoor, but did not receive any response for any of his applications. Sagar lacked programming and DSA skills compared to his peers from IITs and other top colleges, and so he relied on his developing skills and problem solving ability to make himself more attractive for jobs in top companies.
Sagar used LinkedIn to connect with professionals from top companies, which provided him with valuable guidance and job referral opportunities. Additionally, Sagar also sought help from industry experts to improve his resume with the help of platforms like Topmate.
After trying continuously for almost 9 months, Sagar Kumar finally got a call from a recruiter at Google, but due to his poor preparation, he could not clear the screening round. Here again, without giving up, Sagar took his preparation to the next level and mastered DSA, and continued to do mock interviews, scheduled exercises and self-evaluation.
Eventually, circumstances changed due to hard work and in March, Sagar got another chance to work in Google through a friend's reference. This time he left no stone unturned, cleared the screening round, and then also cleared three rounds of tough interviews which finally landed him his dream job in the giant tech company along with a whopping 500 percent salary hike. Currently, Sagar is working as a software engineer in Google.
