A Quick Guide To Job Hunting During COVID For New Grads
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A deep dive into “the real world”
It’s interesting being a fresh college grad.
You’ve just finished 4 (give or take) years of your life and it’s time to jump into the “real world”. It has likely been a rollercoaster of craziness, hard work, and rapid growth. Your undergraduate years are over: whether you studied hard, chugged hard, or had ten internships. It’s time to stop sending your friends edgy memes and uploading cute pictures of your Golden Retriever to Instagram. It’s time to buckle down and land that “real job”.
After graduating from college in June, I’ve been 110% into my personal job hunt. Last week, I finally landed a role that I feel very strongly about and can’t wait to start. I also had to make some very tough decisions along the way and learned how to negotiate and be firm, yet professional. The process was long, exhausting, and tedious, but I learned A LOT in a relatively short period of time. I’m not claiming to be a career coach or an expert by any means, but I’d like to think that my recent experiences and drawn conclusions can help other fellow recent grads in taking their next big step.
Obviously, COVID has drastically changed the game in many respects. The traditional processes and “norms” of networking and interviewing have been flipped on their heads. So, without further ado, here are some key takeaways from my job search that I hope are beneficial:
1. Be prepared to wait, like A LOT
This aspect surprised me quite a bit. I knew there would be a lot of delay due to COVID, but never thought it would take several months to finish a hiring process for ONE role. Even without the pandemic, though, this is commonplace at many companies. Often, hiring managers or committees require several departments and HR to give their stamp of approval before moving a candidate forward to next rounds during a hiring process. If even one essential person is out of the office, they have to wait until that person returns, which can take days or even weeks.
Combine that natural lag with COVID, and you have long swaths of hearing absolutely nothing. You should expect to wait as long as several weeks between interviews or finding out about “next steps” about…
