Class of 2015: You're Hired!

Dear Liz,

We have been reading your columns in class and discussing them. Thanks for the great career advice! My college graduation was last week. Right now, I'm kind of disoriented. I am back home with my parents until I find a job.

Now I have a degree in Advertising and PR and one three-month internship but no actual job prospects. The internship was great but I don't think I want to work for an ad agency, because all I really did was clerical work.

I'm not sure how to begin my job search. Can you help me get started?

Thanks Liz!

Marilena

Dear Marilena,

Congratulations on your new degree! That is a wonderful accomplishment. It is normal to be disoriented, exhausted and even sad when you finish as big an undertaking as a four-year college degree.

You are stepping out of one state and into a new one. That is jarring for all of us! 

I encourage you to take a couple of weeks and just rest, re-connect with your friends at home and think about what you want to do next.

I wouldn't be quick to rule out PR and advertising jobs.The agency you interned for may have been overwhelmed at the time of your internship or may not have had a great opportunity to give you more interesting work to do, but that doesn't mean that all ad agencies will be the same.

On every job interview, you'll ask a lot of questions about what the position entails. You could have a blast and learn a ton working for an agency, or almost any kind of organization. You learned a lot on campus and now the real learning starts!

Get out a piece of paper and draw three interlocking circles on it. In one circle, write down the things you love to do.

Do you love to talk with people, or to write, or to teach people how to do things? In the second circle write down a list of things you know you're good at. Maybe you're good at proofreading, or organizing processes or helping people on the phone. 

Now go on online and check out the job openings at Indeed.com. Just type in the geographic region you're job-hunting in and also a few keywords that relate to your job search.

You could try keywords like Marketing, Advertising or Communications. Hit Search and see which job openings pop up! In any metro area you are likely to find tons of job opportunities that could be a great fit for you. 

When you see the kinds of job openings that pop up on Indeed. com when you enter keywords, including some of the words and phrases from the first two circles on your Venn diagram (What I Love To Do and What I Do Well) you will begin zeroing in on a career direction for your post-college job search.

You are not choosing a career path for life, Marilena! You are just picking a place to begin your job search. The real world will steer you in the right direction. You'll go on some interviews and think "Ick! I would hate this job." You'll go on other interviews and say "Yes! This is going to be perfect for me!"

You may have particular employers already in mind for your job search. Open a spreadsheet and start building a list of target employers. LinkedIn is a great tool for building a target employer list.

You can use the Advanced People Search function (look for the word Advanced at the top of the page, next to the open search box, ,and click on it).

Use your zip or postal code plus keywords to find the profiles of LinkedIn users who work in the same functional or industry areas you're interested in and who are located in the same geographic region you are. Those folks' employers might be great candidates for your target employer list!

Now it's time to start applying for jobs. You'll need a Human-Voiced Resume that brings out the maximum Marilena power with lots of your great personality and stories in it.

If you're new to Human-Voiced Resume writing, check out the resources listed at the bottom of this column!

You'll also need to understand the Pain Letter concept. Since you've been reading and discussing my columns in class you may be a Pain Letter veteran by now!

Pick an organization you want to contact and find your hiring manager using LinkedIn, as you'll see described in the how-to column listed below. Now you can send a Pain Letter straight to that manager's desk. If you are a full-time job seeker you can pretty easily send out three or four Pain Letters per day.

Make a list of 100 people who should know that you've graduated and are job-hunting now. Yep, I did say 100 people! You are at least 20 years old, so you've  had plenty of time to meet 100 people who can help you in your post-college job search.

Think about the people you know in these categories:

• Your friends from high school and their parents
• Your college professors (of course, they know you've graduated, but you can check in with each of them now, or at least the ones who know and like you, and send them your Human-Voiced Resume and connect to them on LinkedIn)
• Your parents' friends
• Your old bosses from high school including people you babysat for or did any kind of work for 
• Your coaches and mentors from high school and before (athletics, music, theatre, scouting, etc.)
• People you know from your family's place of worship
• Relatives and neighbors

Make a list of 100 people to contact. Write to each of them or reach out to them on LinkedIn and bring them up to date.

Tell them you've graduated from college, and thank them for supporting you when you were younger (or even just this past semester). Let them know what sort of job you're looking for and send them your Human-Voiced Resume (or point them to your LinkedIn profile, which will look very much like your resume). 

Here's your time-and-energy-allocation chart for your job search. If you've got 30 hours per week to spend on your job search, ten hours can go to responding to posted job ad --- not by pitching applications into automated recruiting systems of course, but by finding your hiring manager's name and writing to him or her directly.

A second ten hours will to Pain Letter outreach to employers who don't have job ads posted.

You don't care if they have a published job ad or not, as long as they have some pain and a desire to relieve it! As a new grad you are among the most reasonably-priced job-seekers on the market and with your sparkling personality and brains, lots of employers will want to snap you up!

The third ten hours in your thirty-hours-per-week job search schedule will be devoted to networking.

You can get together with friends your age or with people older than you for one-on-one coffee meetings, and/or go to larger networking events to get used to starting conversations with boring old people.

Lots of people older than you love to talk with and help young people, as long as the young people are professional and respectful (and I know you are!). 

You are a super star Marilena, and I have no doubt you're going to get a terrific job and have a tremendous career. Now it's time to get your job search engine up and running. Millions of us out here in the business world are cheering you on!

All the best,

Liz 

More Resources for Job-Seekers

Here is the story How to Write your Human-Voiced Resume

Here is the story How to Write your First Pain Letter

Here is the story How to Create a Target Employer List

Here is the story How to Find Your Hiring Manager on LinkedIn 

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