I’ve seen it here on CC and have also talked to some of my co-workers with college age kids and keep hearing it again and again that some kids are able to get a commitment from a future employer and an actual job offer.
I haven’t gone to college here in the States so have no personal experience with this.
My son is a college junior, doing really well academically and does have a part time job in his field. Job is entry-level with compensation that reflects that but he is learning a lot and is able to put the experience on his resume. Any and all jobs he had interviewed for though had an immediate need to fill the position so I am curious how it’s possible to obtain a job offer so far in advance of graduation.
Tell your son to contact his college’s Career Center and ask about on-campus recruiting. Many of the jobs that are filled way in advance are filled through the on-campus recruiting system.
A lot of entry level hiring goes through the university career services. In the fall of Junior year students can secure internships for the next summer and in the fall of Senior year they may be able to secure job offers for the next summer.
At many colleges this activity is not public (on the password protected portion of their web sites) so you cannot see all available opportunities and information about job fairs but your son should be aware of these options. There may be resume services, mock up interviews, networking events, etc. You are actually paying for all these services as part of your tuition. Ask your son if he is using them.
The way it worked at my school was that in your senior year you signed up for interviews through the career center. If that initial interview went well, you were flown out to the company’s site for additional interviews. Hopefully you’d receive a written job offer by the end of the process (typically a month or two), and the offer would specify a start date following graduation.
Some companies required me to pay travel expenses then submit them for reimbursement, so your student will need a couple thousand dollars or at least a credit card to help with the process. This was pre-Skype days, so probably a lot more is done remotely now though.
Great advice here already, but I would add that it does help to branch out from the college career center during a search.
Our son secured a summer internship between junior and senior year that was outside of his major AFTER exhausting the career center’s resources. He literally cold called until he received an interview --this particular group at an Investment bank was late to the game and needed to fill 2 spots quickly. They ended up offering him a FT spot at the end of the summer, but he didn’t want to relocate to NY.
The job he ultimately took upon graduating was through a recruiter who found him through LinkedIn. He secured an offer at the end of March and started the job one week after graduation. So he never actually found any job through the career center although he tried.
In other words, just like in an adult job-search, a student should do it all.
Our S applied for and received internship offers each summer, soph and JR years. The recruiters cane to campus job fairs and sometimes S sought them out and applied. SR year, he applied to several again at campus job fairs and went for interviews – one when he was in HI over the holidays and one he drove to site near his U and I believe he was flown to the location for another. He did receive several full-time job offers by Feb of SR year and chose among them. They would all begin after he had completed his degree. The one he accepted in 2/2010 began 6/2011.
He had time to enjoy his college town, spend with us, and travel before relocating and starting his new job 5000 miles from us and 2500 miles from his U
Thanks everyone. He actually got his current job through the college’s job board and is checking it regularly but I guess it was just unusual to me that employers would wait months to fill any given position, that’s not something we’ve come across. Do you think that happens more frequently IF it’s done through college recruitment center?
For some jobs at larger firms, they want to have orientation for the “class of new hires” at the same time instead of taking one or two new hires here and there. That was the way the fed govt, Cisco and Boeing were handling their new hires.
My son is a junior. He already has an internship for the summer in his college town, and the company wants him to work part-time the rest of this school year. In the summer it will be full time. If they subsequently offer him a full time job for after college he’ll get a $3,000 bonus. STEM major.
On campus recruiting is great but it’s also important to leverage any connection you (parent) might have. No, not in the sense of nepotism (sigh) but in the sense of - friends might know of job openings, be willing to pass on a resume, etc.
My H comes in contact with many people every day in the course of his job and he told every single one about our kids in hopes of leads! They got some. That’s how it’s done. I would not JUST rely on on-campus.
Internships seem to be the key to the job offer before graduation. Get them any way you can, through listings on websites, career centers and any contacts available.
At my current company, we have summer internship for juniors then offers of permanent position upon graduation are offered at the end of summer. They are trainees for the first 2 years and then placed within department of interest. D1 got her internship through her school and it ultimately resulted in a job offer. D2 is graduating this May. She got her job through her own networking from her summer job.
When you go through your college’s career center for job search, they usually have very strict guideline for how applicants and employers are to interact with each other. The guideline gives protections to all parties involved. Failure to adhere to their guideline may result in not able to access their service in the future.
In some fields, such as investment banking, this seems to be true. But it is not true in all fields, and students who do not get a desirable internship in their last college summer or who do not get a job offer at the end of the internship should not feel that the situation is hopeless (although they may have to consider a wider range of job types or locations than they might have preferred).
I know many engineering/CS and consulting jobs are recruited through summer internship as well. That being said, there are still a lot of jobs available for seniors.
DS did not have an internship during college. He did work the same job all three summers with move responsibility each summer and many hours of physical work (putting up large tents for events). I was concerned about his ability to find a job but he was able to talk about working on a team, being a leader, troubleshooting, etc. during his interviews. The job he ended up accepting came from a discussion I had with a neighbor at book club. When she found out he what he was looking for in a job (math major) she asked to have him send his resume to her. She knows him very well as our boys are close friends and she was happy to send his resume along. But it was his academic record and interview which sealed the deal for the company.
At my son’s college, one of the parents of a current senior said his child secured a job offer from Microsoft before the kid started senior year. The child was an intern there and had built a relationship with the company.
My younger son had two internships at NGOs after graduating. He found his college career office was no helpf for the sorts of jobs he was interested in. The second one offered him a job when they realized he was one of the more senior people in that office and was running all the logistics for a conference for them. By then he was pretty jaded about the outfit, and quit after finishing up that project. He’s gone in a new direction. Older son got a job offer from his junior year internship. Which he got through networking with friends who were there.
I think it depends somewhat on the major. D2 majored in economics and math. She worked for an economic consulting firm (which interviewed on campus) the summer after junior year and received an offer for a permanent position but decided not to take it because she felt another job fit better with her current plans (going on for a Ph.D. in economics). Both organizations have programs in which summer-after-junior-year students who do well are offered permanent positions, during senior year, for post-graduation, but need to interview for and fill, during senior year, spots that interns decline.
