What looks stronger on a resume – higher position or a well known company? [closed]

Question

A little bit of background – I'm an industrial engineering student and currently have a perm job with logistics at a startup. While it isn't aligned to my career goals, it gives me a lot of growth potential – I have been promoted and got a raise on my first two months of work.

I recently got contacted for an internship at a major, well-known international company. The position is perfect for my career expectations, and it would be an excellent way of achieving my main goal: moving abroad. The first company isn't known at all at my destination country. On the other hand, it's an internship and I'm afraid of this immediate change, and whether my potential employers would question my choice of picking a lower position.

So my question really is, what is more eye-popping to recruiters: a lower position at a big name company, or a higher position at a less known place?

TL;DR, is POSITION > COMPANY or COMPANY > POSITION when looking at past experiences?

Answer 1

TL;DR, is POSITION > COMPANY or COMPANY > POSITION when looking at past experiences?

... neither?

It's what you actually do that matters the most. Sure, a recognizable company name helps, but at the end of the day if you work for Google doing busywork that's a lot less important than if you worked for NoNameCorp with a list of actual accomplishments.

Now, for recruiters specifically it's more likely a combination of keywords, including title. Make sure your skills are actually on your resume somewhere for keyword searches.

But keep in mind, the less the recruiter cares about your actual accomplishments the less likely they are to be a good recruiter.

A bad recruiter does a mass search for "industrial engineer" and spams out 1000 messages hoping to get a few that hit. A good recruiter searches for the specific skills and experiences and targets messages to people that actually might fit the criteria.

It is possible depending on what country you want to move abroad to that the name will be more important. Different cultures value this sort of thing differently.