employment pt.1

The inspiration to write has hit me again,

I'm going to commit to writing down most of the stories I tell people during bar conversations.

This one is about how I ended up at Google and maybe everyone can take away some learnings from this blog post too.

I've had a lot of friends finishing their first or second degrees and feeling very discouraged by the job market and not being able to secure their dream jobs.

I guess this prompted me to review what I went through when I was grad 3 years ago.

Expectations:

I had already done a 6 month internship working with some great clients in Shanghai (Dior, Givenchy, Avene, Georg Jensen), I thought I would be invincible and would land a dream marketing job as soon as I graduated.

Reality:

Silly me

It took me 9 months to land a job.

I applied for over 80 jobs over that 9 month period, just to give an idea of what that looks like:

Those are just some of the cover letters I sent out, I got about 5 offers for interviews. (About 6% response rate). Of course for those students with super high HDs and president of every club at university, the response rate will probably be higher. But for the average uni student like me with a mid-high credit average, this is probably what you should expect.

I actually ended up 2 more internships after I got back. One of which was at Haystac PR in Melbourne, the other one was Calibre Menswear. During this time I was still working at a dead end job at Roy Morgan Research to actually have some money to live.

Meanwhile I had my parents on my back pressuring me to find a job instead of taking a 3 month holiday somewhere overseas, I strongly regret not taking this holiday and really advise people against stressing out about finding their first job.

Even though I eventually had no emotional attachment to any of my applications or the rejection letters I would receive, I started getting pretty depressed. Especially when friends around me were securing great grad positions with big companies and making lots of money, I was still a call center monkey grad looking for his first job.

As mentioned before, out of the 80+ applications I sent out, I got about 5 interviews. I'll document exactly who they were for and what I learnt from them in the next part :)