| HappySqurriel said: It took me 8 months to get my first "real" job after graduation, and even though my university was really helpful the reason I got the job was one of my oldest brother's friends submitted my resume for me and ensured that I got an interview. Personally, if I was to give new grads one peice of advice on finding a job it would be to ask their family, and their friends' families, if they knew of anyone who was working at a company who might be looking for a new grad. Most new grad positions are not advertized, and very few use the university's career services because they get flooded with unqualified applicants and even the qualified applicants have very little to seperate them on their resume. While people may think that their high GPA makes them more qualified for a position, there are a wide variety of skills (like social skills) which are not demonstrated in a person's grades that matter far more than the information they gained in school; for example, it is often better to hire the B student with exceptional social skills rather than the A studen with decent social skills, and it is always better to hire the C student with exceptional social skills than the A student with "acceptable" social skills. Finally, one thing I have been seeing more and more of lately is "kids" who don't realize the damage they're doing to their potential chances based on what they're posting on the internet. A couple of years ago a girl I knew was talking about how her sister graduated from university and it had taken over a year for her to find a job. The first thing I asked her to do was to google her sister's name and what popped up was her sister's myspace page ... Needless to say, I don't think many companies really wanted to hire a girl who had so little sense that she posted a picture of herself in her panties and bra while smoking a joint. |
Your point about grades vs. social skills is HIGHLY situational. It might work for some business degree but for other degrees like say computer science that doesn't work. Good companies will generally worry more about how qualified the person it and if they're social, that's a perk. The bad companies that aren't successful worry so much if the person is the perfect fit that the person just sucks and you still have about the same office atmosphere that you would have anyways. My wire has worked at a few of both types of companies and the ones that look for social skills or the perfect personality fit always just plan suck (and this is going from the tech side of jobs).
And yeah, if you're looking for a job, make MySpace, Facebook, twitter, and everything else private. If you can't make it private, delete it. If a photo of you is tagged on someone else's album and they won't take it down, delete the tag. It sounds silly but yes, employers will Google you.
