Graduating senior feeling hopeless

Cobra392
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:53:24 +0000

Five years outta college, done temp jobs and permanent jobs, pretty knowledgeable about all this.

First off, congrats on all your hard work and motivation. In the long-run of life, you’ll be great. Getting that first “real job” is one of the hardest things that you’ll ever do in life, especially in an economy with this high of an unemployment rate. I’m sorry that your parents are expressing disappointment in you, they shouldn’t be doing that. It’s tough out there, and your biggest problem is the crappy economy and lack of full-time work experience.

Here are my thoughts on this thread, in particular the original post:

1) Connect with AS MANY recruiters as possible, in particular recruiters at staffing agencies (Robert Half/Accounttemps, Michael Page, Accounting Principals, among others). I know lots of people that got their first ‘real job’ after college from temp agencies. Nothing wrong with spending the first few months after college being a temp ‘office worker’, gaining valuable skills and references and beefing up your resume and showing that you can handle a full-time Mon-Fri gig. And many temp jobs can turn into permanent jobs … Message me privately and connect with me on LinkedIn, and you’ll see that I’m connected to hundreds of recruiters on LinkedIn in a variety of cities. I get calls from them all the time asking me if I want to interview for a new job. They have access to tons of jobs that never get posted online. … And I highly disagree with the person saying “Don’t connect with too many recruiters.” The more that you connect with, the more people that’ll have your resume and will give you a call when they see an opening that’s a good fit for you. Remember, these people WANT to find you a job. They get paid money when they place you on a job. So they are highly motivated to get you working. And yes, as others said, don’t pay any of them. If they try to intimidate you into not working with other agencies, ignore them. …

Here’s a thing about recruiters though: tons of them are only a year or two out of college, and don’t have any particularly strong relationships with companies. Their job is to bring in as many bodies as possible to a firm, so that they can have as many quality candidates as possible to send to a company when a job opening is available. Tons of these recruiters will love to tell you things like “We should be able to get you staffed right away.” That’s often not true. It’s just part of the jig.

You really should be spending hours a day using LinkedIn and connecting with recruiters internally at company & at staffing agencies. And LinkedIn should be your best friend.

2) Talk to all of your parents’ friends, your friends’ parents, etc. This is a HIGHLY effective way to job search.

3) Applying to ‘online posted job openings’ has pretty low odds of success. I’d still spend some time doing it, and learn how to master smart search indeed.com, but yea, don’t expect much from it. Any decent posting will get at least 500 applications.

4) The whole “reapply to jobs next year”. Rid yourself of that mindset. You basically get one year of “on-campus recruiting”. Once you’ve passed that and graduated, you’re fully into the real world, and employers view you that way. Jobs are posted year-round, there’s no way or reason to wait until next year. And yep, you’re right, companies that target ‘on campus recruiting’ won’t give much consideration at all when they’re targeting graduating seniors.

5) I graduated college in May 2008, when the economy was FAR worse than it is now. There were insane amounts of layoffs that year, compared to the past month (February), which saw a phenomenal amount of hiring and the fewest layoffs in 12 years. I didn’t have a job upon graduation. That summer was super-stressful to me, and I hated it. But I kept interviewing, kept grinding, and finally landed an AWESOME job in September, five months after graduating. The point is, even when things seem impossible, you never know what’s around the corner.

6) Be careful before taking your first ‘permanent job’ (i.e. non-temp job). You absolutely want to stay at your first job multiple years. It looks bad on your resume to constantly be bouncing around from ‘permanent job’ to ‘permanent job’. Employers will be less likely to hire you in the future if they think that you won’t stay too long. … So before you take your first ‘permanent job’, be sure that it’s something that you’ll be happy enough doing for at least a couple years. I know that it’s definitely hard to pass up an opportunity when you’re unemployed or working at McDonald’s, but be cautious. … I’ll also say this: try your hardest to have your first job be a great job, and/or at a great company. If you take a mediocre job at a mediocre company, it could signal to future employers that you’re not elite, that you didn’t get a job with an elite company as a college senior. … If I’m looking to hire someone with two years experience, all else equal, I’d generally prefer to hire someone who had spent the prior two years at a ‘top’ company, versus a company that I had never heard of before. My first job after college was at a pretty elite company, and every interview that I do nowadays, years later, interviewers look at my resume and say “I love hiring people from XYZ company” or “That’s really impressive that you worked at XYZ company”.



Anyways, that’s it.

tl/dr: Connect with as many recruiters as possible. That should be focus #1 of your job search.