Originally posted on Medium on July 21, 2020
Life was simple. It was January 1st, 2020, and I had just graduated from UCLA a couple of weeks ago. I had officially made the transition from student to recent graduate. The words “social distancing” had no meaning, and no one gave a second thought to greeting a friend with a high five or a handshake.
After a few months of job hunting, it was March 2020, and I was finishing up the final rounds of interviews for a marketing analyst position at a fintech startup and a data analyst role at a major streaming service. You can guess what happens next.
Hello, global pandemic and hiring freezes. Goodbye, potential job offers, my future hopes and dreams, and the national supply of toilet paper.
I was devastated. All my hard work in college and in my job search was supposed to have paid off, and suddenly I was back to square one.
Now that my plans had been completely uprooted by COVID-19, I put my head down and got to work. In the toughest job market since the 2008 recession, I stepped outside my comfort zone and leveraged my network to find new opportunities, ultimately leading me to three final round interviews and an accepted job offer as a marketing analyst in June 2020.
I was ecstatic. All my hard work paid off and my strategy for finding a job proved successful.
After telling a few friends about my experience and learning more about the challenges that they were facing in their own job searches, I began to share some strategies that I had picked up during my job hunting.
After receiving positive feedback, I realized that if my job search strategy was useful for them, it had the potential to help other recent college grads and young professionals beyond my close friends.
Thinking back to when I started my job search, I would have loved a guide like this one or someone to talk to who was a few months ahead of me in their journey. I hope that this article can serve as a helpful guide for those along a similar path.
My job search strategy combines advice I received along my journey with insights I collected from firsthand experience and a healthy dose of failure and rejection.
My strategy involved four main components:1. Finding the right jobs to apply for2. LinkedIn, networking and informational interviews3. Interview prep4. Skill development and self-improvement
The first step in my path to getting hired was narrowing down the jobs that I wanted to apply for and to avoid wasting time on positions that had a lower probability of working out.
Initially, it’s important to ensure you’re using the right job sites. LinkedIn is the holy grail of job listings, given its wide use and number of daily active users. In addition to LinkedIn, I used two sites geared toward tech and startup jobs, AngelList and BuiltIn. Regardless of what job you’re looking for, make sure you’re looking in the right places.
When it came to finding the right jobs to apply for, I spent most of my energy reading through job descriptions and looking for a handful of jobs where 1) I wanted to work, and 2) I met the qualifications. While time-consuming, this initial investment meant that going forward, any effort I put in was focused on well-researched roles with a higher likelihood of resulting in an interview.
When you read through job descriptions, I suggest taking note of the required skills. Compare these to your current skill set. The skills you do not have but are commonly listed in job descriptions are the ones you should focus on to make yourself a more marketable candidate (more on this later in the article).
Alternatively, others prefer the “shotgun spray” approach, which entails applying to a plethora of jobs with the goal of putting your name and resume in as many application pools as possible.