Did you know on an average students do online job search for 5 to 7 months after Master’s Degree?
The one who gets the job is not always the one who can do the job best, but who knows best how to get the job!
Do you want to avoid 5 to 7 months of online job search in your OPT, then this article will give you exact tools and techniques for students to help them in online job search in U.S. When a students is planning to study in U.S. the first question that comes to his/her mind is, Can I get a job after studying in particular university? but, not many realize that online job search itself is a full time job. They realize this only after 2-3 months of their online job search. That too with fears of recession in U.S. economy, students must be well prepared for the effort in job search they would have to put in. Though above few lines might scare you, but job search tips, techniques, strategies, .. in this article will definitely ease the job search efforts.
This article is going to be lengthy one. First of all I would like give few specific scenarios on how usually students search for jobs. Following 3 example are my own observations from my friends.
Job Search : Example 1
One of my friend who didn’t really explore about online job search or didn’t apply for any jobs until after Graduation with Master’s. It took him 2 weeks after graduation to get his resume drafted and formatted. So, that’s a waste of 2 weeks OPT time. Then, it took another 2-3 weeks for him to really get into job search mode, since after 2 years of college, he relaxed for 2 more weeks visiting friends and families in different states in U.S. Since there was no preparation done before, every student had to go through the learning curve for online job search.
So, as every student begins his online job search, he went to Monster.com created an account and uploaded his resume with search key word “Software Engineer” with locations not specified. It listed 1000’s of jobs and he applied to some 10 to 15 jobs randomly to different cities where his friends were working. 2-3 weeks went by and there was no interview call, only ‘Thank you for applying’ - no-reply emails. Majority of the students during online job search are open to relocate to any locations within U.S.
Since that approach didn’t help much, he decided to get the list of Fortune 500 companies and started applying for jobs from Fortune Rank 1. So, he applied for some 400 companies and another 2-3 weeks went by and had a phone interview and there was no reply from the HR after first round of phone screen. As you can see, so far 8 weeks went by and there is no interview calls and which means 8 weeks of time is wasted in OPT period.
He got frustrated at the online job search process and decided to take a break for 1 week and went on a trip and was hoping to see some positive replies when he got back from vacation. There was none. Now, it was time to get serious about job search. He started getting up early and working late night to apply for jobs. Now online job search was not limited to Monster, but he started using Yahoo Hotjobs, CareerBuilder, Dice, local news paper ads job postings. But the key words used increased to entry level software engineer, software quality assurance, software test engineer, with location still not set. So, at end of 3 months with just 1 interview call, he decided online job search approach was not working and something has to be done to get a job. So, the desperation to get a job increased as his part time earned money got emptied and 3 months of OPT time was wasted. Let me stop here and say, he went to on to get a job after 5 months. But, how did he get the job, continue reading.
Job Search: Example 2
One other friend graduated with M.S. in Computer Science and applied for OPT and was never really into job search. He will apply for job once in 2 weeks, and will wait for the interview call, then applied for few more companies. In mean time he was working as research assistant under a professor in OPT. So, money was not a problem and it continued for about 8 months.It was August end and H1B has to be filed before Oct 1st and there was no lottery system or so much rush to apply for H1B visa couple of years back. Finally by mid September he found a consultant who filed his H1B visa and got a very low paying job with commission of 50-50. Which means, if company pay the consultant $100 per hour, my friend will get only $50 as pay. The consultant will take $50. Usually its 70/30, but if you are very desperate to get a job, that’s how consultant company will exploit the job seekers.
Job Search : Example 3
Also, a student with Electrical Engineering degree after Graduation with Master’s and without much interest in online job search joined a consultant. He didn’t even think of job search. Consultant asked him to add 3 years of experience to his resume, since he didn’t have any previous job experience. So, he made his M.S. as Part time and stated that he had 3 years of Software testing experience. Attended interviews with few companies and ended up getting a job. It’s actually illegal to do resume fraud. If he’s caught with incorrect details in resume, he will lose his job. But, thats what is happening with consultants ( majority ).
Job Search : Example 4
I was chatting on of my college junior who is currently 3 semesters into her Master’s degree. She was applying for summer internship directly through the companies website using PDF format resume. After 2 months she stopped applying for internships, and reason was, no one was calling her for interview. Mistake she did was using PDF formatted resume. Companies career web page usually has keywords filtering tool to select resume from thousands of applicants. Keyword filtering tool works very well with ASCII formatted resume and word document, but it wouldn’t parse very well in PDF file.
Questions for you:
Do you think you fall into any of the above 4 online job search examples?
Do you know anyone ( friends ) who belongs to any of above 4 examples?
Do you want to know, what is the better and much efficient ways for online job search?
Lets explore what possible ways are available, so the online job search process will be much more fun and tension free. Again, online job search techniques I’m going to list here, involves time and effort. But the amount of effort you will have to put in will be rewarded.
Introduction to Professional Networking:
According to Careerxroads’s research article on Source of hiring,
- Internal Transfers and Promotions constitute 30.0% of all the positions a company fills.
- Referrals (employee, alumni, vendor, etc.) make up 28.7% of all external hires and are arguably the number one external source. The efficiency of referrals i.e. “every third referral turns into a hire” is one of the single most important characteristics of US hiring practices…and not leveraged as well as it might be.
- Hires attributed to Job Boards (including the Company site as a job board) represent 25.7% of external hires.
- Unfortunately Hires attributed to the Company Website are half of the Job Board category and, in our opinion, suspect (we maintain that the company website is a destination not a source).
- The most visible trend in 2007 was the growth of Direct Sourcing (and a related reduction in agency hires).
As you can see any jobs applied by students directly in their website contributes to only about 12%. Now you know why my friend in example 1 and 2 as well as many you reading this article didn’t receive any phone calls from companies. So, the next question is how to find someone who will refer you to a job. Well, that’s were professional networking comes into play.
LinkedIn.com : It’s time to network and build contacts:
There are many Professional networking websites, but nothing beats Linkedin.com. I’m sure some of you will have heard about this or you might have an account at LinkedIn, because someone invited you to join. But,if you haven’t created an account with LinkedIn, go ahead and use your professional email id to setup your profile.
How to create LinkedIn Profile:
You can describe what technologies you are good at. There is no magic to get your profile 100% right the first time you log into LinkedIn. Visit other students and professionals profile and see how they have presented it. So, you can modify it accordingly. For instance, you can set the title as “Student at University of Texas” . But make sure, you try to fill in all possible information. It will be viewed by lots of professionals, employers, HR’s. Make sure you try to add all the information from your resume into the LinkedIn profile. Its not necessary to include your projects.
LinkedIn profile is set, next add contacts:
Now, you have set up your profile, next start inviting your friends to get a feel for how adding contacts works. Its simple, fill in your friends name and email address and send an invite with default message. Just let your friend know about this article and also about your invitation to join. Linkedin has very nice feature to list other friends from same college, schools or work place. So it makes easier to connect with friends.
After getting the feel for LinkedIn start searching for people from companies. For example, you want to work for Cisco, you can do a search like this
- Go to People tab
- For Company : Cisco
- Interested in : Hiring Manager
- Leave other options to default and hit search
It will list Hiring Managers who are currently working in Cisco. Next, you need to contact them, and add them to your network. But remember, you are going to contact Hiring Managers of a company, so you will have to be very professionals in your email. For more information on
- How to compose email to establish contacts
- Can I ask them in the first email, if they have job opening?
- How long should my email be?
- What should be the contents of the email?
- What if I don’t have any connections in my network to contact them, do I need to pay for the service?
- When do I need to start building my network?
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