Job Search

Get busy, but don’t get worried

We’ve all heard the phrase “don’t judge another person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”.  For college seniors engaged in a job search I’d add a career corollary to that: don’t put on your friend’s shoes and judge yourself when they don’t fit.

At this time of year, as spring break approaches, I see a lot of anxious seniors. The most common complaint is that they feel like their job search is behind schedule because “all their friends” already have jobs.

First, never compare yourself to your friends when it comes to something like your career. You are not them, and they are not you. Every search is different. This is especially true when you don’t share similar backgrounds. The greatest amount of anxiety I see is among liberal arts students comparing themselves to finance or accounting students.

The finance and accounting sectors, especially the bigger firms, are pretty predictable in their hiring timelines and practices. They recruit early in the fall and are pretty much done for the year before Thanksgiving. That’s normal for them. Meanwhile, many other sectors hire at completely different times. Some hire in the fall, others don’t even think about it until April.

If you are an accounting student (who wants to work in accounting–not always a given) and are still looking for a job in mid-March you will likely still find a good full-time job, but it will take some extra effort because a lot of doors have already been closed. If you are an English major without a job in mid-March…many of the places where you might want to work are just starting to figure out how many positions they might have open this year. Especially for many smaller firms, hiring is just starting to pick up.

In recent years, only about 20% of college graduates have had a job lined up before graduation. For most of my career, on average, about 98% of the students I have worked with have found employment within six months of graduation. The majority find their jobs between May and August.

Don’t compare yourself to others; worry about you and your process.

Can The Traditional Cover Letter Survive?

Letter

I’m frequently in contact with recruiters and when the topic of cover letters comes up, something interesting happens. Half of them declare that the cover letter is the most important part of any application. The other half tell me they never read cover letters at all.

In a world where we often hear of recruiters being bombarded with resumes for open positions, and where they openly admit to taking only 6-10 seconds on an initial scan of a resume, it makes sense that many might ignore cover letters entirely.

To be fair, in my experience with thousands of students and recent grads (and even seasoned professionals) most cover letters are overly generic and poorly written, so recruiters can’t be blamed for pre-judging and ignoring them as a strategic way to lighten their load.

At the same time, many recruiters, hiring managers, career coaches, and certainly most job seekers, would tell you the entire hiring process is broken. Most online applications result in resumes never being read (at least not by an actual person) and more than 80% of jobs are said to be found outside these systems, through networking. Recruiters are increasingly using tools like LinkedIn to find candidates precisely because the online systems most companies use result in overloads and bad matches.

Once you move “outside the system”, a recruiter receiving your resume will have no need for a cover letter. Once they review a resume received by email through networking, or found online, complete with a well written Professional Summary–or LinkedIn Summary section instead–they will have seen if there is a basic match, and make their decision to contact you, or not. The additional detail that used to come from the cover letter will come from an actual one-to-one discussion between real people. Your sales pitch matching you to the job, and telling the stories that illustrate why you are a fit, will happen in that conversation, not a cover letter.

And that is a huge advantage for job seekers as it is always easier to explain gaps in your experience, or other weaknesses, in a live conversation than it is on paper.

Every person and every search is different, and there will probably always be some time and place where a cover letter can be a valuable part of the process. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see the formal written cover letter become less and less necessary with each passing day. For 80% of job seekers, they already are.