#job-search

#job-search

As college students, we have all felt the stress and confusion around the conversation of summer internships: what do I want to do? Am I qualified for anything? Where do I start, and how do I apply? These are all the questions I, as well as most students, have when thinking about potential internships. It's easy to get overwhelmed. So, let this be a guide for where to go, what to do, and how to, hopefully, find your dream internship for the summer!

Sam Wright offers free 15-minute job search sessions for job seekers. He uses application-to-interview conversion rates to measure the success of each job search. Wright says targeting one job title at a time for up to 15 days can improve interview chances. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sam Wright, a 31-year-old head of growth at Huntr, based in Seattle. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Whether it's something personal like physical fitness, or something professional like finding a new job, we all get stuck from time to time. And once you do, the ability to pull out of that place and take productive steps forward can be incredibly hard. At the same time, once you get moving again (physically or otherwise) that same inertia can keep you going, even when there are lots of obstacles standing in your way.

I always expected life after college would fall seamlessly into place, that all of my involvement in campus media, internships, and good grades would pay off immediately. So, when I learned that my childhood friend was planning to move to New York City, it was the perfect opportunity to take the leap together. I'd always dreamed of moving there, and as the home of many big-name publications, it seemed like the right city to be in to kick-start my career.

When it came time to pack, I slowly deconstructed my apartment over the course of a month. I made endless trips to the thrift store, posted on Facebook Marketplace, and even hosted a move-out party where I made snacks for my friends while they raided my closet. After all that, I still found myself frantically sitting on my suitcase, trying to zip it right up until my ride to the airport arrived.

At the start of this year, I went back to contracting, and then I learned I had prostate cancer. It was stage one, and I was on active monitoring for six months. I did some more contracting up until July, when I was told I needed to have treatment. So, I had treatment, and all the signs were good. In August, I thought, 'OK, I can start looking to go back to work.'

When I got hired at Meta in 2020, it was life-changing for me as a single mom. It represented safety and stability - a place to work hard at and retire from. So, when I was let go in February in a round of layoffs aimed at "low-performers," it felt like a punch in the gut. Nine months later, my severance and savings have run dry, I'm struggling to find a tech job, and I feel that the low-performer "label" is part of the reason.

At the start of my job hunt, I reached out to recruiters on LinkedIn, but personalizing each message took a lot of time. I tried using ChatGPT to draft messages, but it kept making mistakes. I realized that, on ChatGPT, I'm not just chatting about my job search; I'm also chatting about recipe ideas, workout plans, budgeting, and travel itineraries. When ChatGPT would give me an answer, it would often get mixed up or provide generic answers that weren't customized to me.

The whole thing works like this: exhausted job seekers upload their résumé and format their personal info. Once up and running, they're presented with various gigs one by one, which they can swipe left to reject, or right to apply - just like a dating app. When a user swipes right, Sorce's "AI agent" navigates to the company's website and applies on their behalf.

So why can't the same thing be done in reverse-where you can ask past employees to assess the company you're applying to? Sure, there's Glassdoor. But short of salty ex-employees publicly dragging old employers on social media-a relatively uncommon move, considering it's deemed unprofessional and may result in legal retaliation-there are no real formalized processes to run references on a company you're applying to.

Based on his research and conversations with friends who'd gone through the process, Kumar said he expected the background check to take no more than 15 days - but day 20 passed, then day 25, with no update. The company doing the background check told him the delay was tied to his lack of prior work experience in the US, which complicated the process.

I've been on the hunt for a new gig for a large chunk of this year, and it feels like I've seen it all. I've watched some appealing job listings be pulled down within hours, while others sit stagnantly for months. I've heard tales of scammers trying to dupe job seekers; legit employers advertising phantom roles to collect talent data and present an illusion of company growth.

The anonymous job seeker's journey turned around with a single piece of advice from a recruiter on the subreddit: companies often shortlist candidates from the first five to 10 resumes they see. Armed with the insight, they transformed their job application strategy using a variation on former Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) COO Sheryl Sandberg's advice of "done is better than perfect," and opted to be speed-centric over quality-focused.

In May 2023, I got called into a meeting with a HR representative who told me I was losing my data scientist job at the company where I'd worked since February 2022. I couldn't stop myself from crying. I was five months pregnant, so felt I couldn't immediately get back into the job market. When I started looking for jobs again a month after giving birth, joining a job-seekers' group helped me feel supported.

I joined my last company as a director of product, and within a couple of months, I had been promoted to the VP of product. Then, a couple of months later, that company almost went out of business. They had to downsize and kept me and one other person on. I was very thankful, as they laid off the rest of the company and tried to restart. We really gave it the old college try, but we weren't getting the traction we needed.