Looking for your first job as a graduate
Most millenials will be able to relate to the situation I found myself in a couple of years ago. You get your degree, maybe you’ve done 3 or 4 good internships and you’re ready to rock.
If you’re lucky enough, you stumble across a lot of job offers which are a potential match. You customize every cover letter and send your resumes out. After 20 or so you think to yourself “ok now I can lean back for a little while, there’s no way I won’t get at least one of those.”
Unfortunately, you’re very likely to experience the experience paradox though, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, I’ve experienced it myself. Most of the time, it goes like this:
“Dear xxx,
Thank you for applying to the open position and showing interest in our Company. We’re sorry to inform you that the position has already been filled with another candidate. You have a very interesting profile but we’re looking for a more experienced candidate for this position.
However we’ll keep your resume in our files and we’ll get back to you when a position which fits your profile opens. We wish you all the best for your job search.
Kind regards,
The HR Department”
Sounds familiar? I’ve had a lot of those. I wasn’t very regarding in terms of salary, location or even regarding the industry because you have to start somewhere, right? But that didn’t change anything.
The more I discovered those job offers — which were either actually just internships or part-time student jobs — the more I got frustrated. I had too much time on my hands (and too little money) and it was killing me! So I decided to show publicly that I actually knew my stuff.
Have you ever heard of inbound marketing?
In case you haven’t: inbound marketing is a marketing strategy which consists in adopting another approach to promote one’s product and services. Rather than interrupting consumers with annoying ads, you just make yourself visible by providing what they actually care about in terms of content and little by little this interest becomes regular until you end up buying from this company because they’re content is so outstanding that you trust them.
What does it have to do with your job search? Well quite a lot actually. Do you know that 9 out of 10 recruiters perform an online search before even considering candidates? If not, this fact should get you thinking…
Jobhunting the inbound way
At the beginning I started exploring social networks and blogging because I had too much of said time but I quickly realized that it could do a lot for my job hunt!
You can actually do your own inbound marketing. Maybe you’ve heard of personal branding. It consists in thinking of yourself as a brand, with values, expertise and a competitive advantage.
The elements of your “inbound” strategy
- The first thing you want to do is to check what people actually find when they type your name in Google (or any other search engine) and on social networks. Pu yourself in their position: does it look good? Sometimes you have a lot of homonyms but the first impression is what counts. So don’t risk it… What do want to do is to appear on that first page yourself!
- Create public social profiles: These will be your “branded” profiles, the ones on which you want to appear professional and on which you want to show expertise in your field.
- Create a blog: There are many blogging platforms which you can use but I’d recommend the leader: wordpress. You might find it tricky to understand at first but there are many resources to learn from. Setting up a blog doesn’t take much expertise with wordpress, no big deal!
- Write valuable content: That’s probably the hardest part of the job. In some industries, there is so much content on the web that you may think “everybody’s already written about everything.” Don’t let that stop you. You have your own opinions about particular aspects of the job, your own way of saying it. The key is to be different. And you can be different in the content you write in many ways: by being funny, helpful (providing tip & tricks) and so on…
- Don’t be autistic on social media: Social Media is meant to be social. That may sound obvious but I see so many people who use social media professionally just to promote their own stuff… And that actually is the main reason why I don’t want to follow them anymore. Use social media to share other people’s work, mention them, start a dialogue… And once in a while you can promote yourself.
Continue to be proactive though! Continue applying to positions you are interested in, you can’t just hope that recruiters are going to find you by chance. However what will change is the impression you’ll make on them.
What inbound Job Hunting did for me
The advice I gave above come from my personal experience so as a matter of fact, I know that it works (at least it did for me).
As I wrote at the beginning, I started the whole process a couple of years ago. I quickly got a job which wasn’t that great, it was just enough to pay my rent and bills at the end of the month, but I remained active on social platforms.
6 months later I got two job offers from people I actually connected with on social media for the first time. These guys who are now “members of my network” which I very much value and I know they know who I am and they know I’m good at what I do because I write about it. I have also met quite a lot of them in “real life”, which strenghthens the connection.
Within two years I achieved more than I thought possible in such a short period of time in terms of image, network, enriching connections and exchanges with tought leaders… That’s all part of my personal brand I guess.
So go out there and connect with people, enjoy the cocktail party and share your thoughts and experiences. I’ll leave you with a thought:
Recruiters are not looking for people who need the job for the money. They look for passionate, skilled personalities. And the wonderful of the web 2.0 allows you to do just that quite easily!
