Posts Tagged ‘jobs’

Great news! The Gradversity.com Job Board is now online! The site is powered by Indeed, a popular and fast growing  job search engine. If you need work and have recently graduated, or are about to graduate, you have come to the right place. Click here to get closer to your rewarding career!

Also, if you are an employer, you can now post your job directly on Gradversity.com. Simply click the link at the top of the Gradversity Job Board, or follow this link to post your job!

So check it out. Your rewarding career is waiting for you!

I remember watching Dr. Strangelove when I was in school and loving it (I’m a huge Stanley Kubrick fan). There was a particular scene where everyone was in the war room planning out strategy and it occurred to me that this was a really great idea. They had a space where they thought only about the task at hand and eliminated other distractions. It was brilliant.

This principle can be applied directly to your job search. If you can dedicate a space that will be used only to look for jobs, it will help you be more successful. It could be in your own house or apartment, or it could be some place like a library or common area. Either way, it should be free from distractions. Somewhere that you can concentrate on the job search without having to be distracted by a television, telephone, or roommate.

For me, this place was my kitchen table. At the time, I needed to get away from the Internet. I was (and still am) addicted to my network connection and I can often kill a great deal of time sitting in front of my laptop (much to Mrs. Gradversity’s despair).

So, not having wireless at the time, I would print out all of the job postings I was looking at, or a list of companies I needed to contact, and I would move to the kitchen table and get to work. This gave me the best shot at getting all of my work done in the most efficient way possible.

So if you can, find yourself a space where you can focus on the task at hand and you will be more successful over the long haul.

Comments? Questions? Drop us a line!

We have now covered the six steps to finding your first ‘real’ job after school and a brief overview has been provided of each. They are:

1. Preparation
2. Networking
3. Finding an Opening
4. Application (Resume and Cover Letter)
5. Interview
6. Offer/Acceptance

So what happens now? Even though basic information has been provided about how to go about finding a job, I will drill down in each step even further over the coming months to provide information that will help you to find and compete for the jobs that you want.

On the left side of the page you will see the major categories that roughly correlate to the 6 steps that we spoke about earlier. Each post that I write will be included in one of those categories. Feel free to browse through them to find more specific information. And if you can’t find what you are looking for, feel free to suggest a topic, either through the comment section at the bottom of each individual post, or through our contact page.

In addition, please subscribe to our RSS feed. The button is in the upper right corner and will guarantee that you get the latest posts as soon as they arrive.

Finally, if you really want to get ahead, pick up a copy of my book Overcoming Gradversity: How to Break Into The Entry Level Job Market. You can buy it through the banner above this post, or through the link below. Or, feel free to suggest a Gradversity seminar/workshop to your career center manager. Customized programs can be provided. These programs help Gradversity.com stay up and running for the benefit of all new grads.

As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line either through the comment link at the bottom of each post, or through our contact page in the menu bar.

Once you have found a job that you are interested in, it’s time to start marketing yourself. For 99% of all of the jobs you will apply for, you will be expected to submit a resume and cover letter. This is the fourth step in the process of finding your first “real” job after school.

So what is a cover letter? A cover letter is an introduction to you as an applicant. It is designed to give a brief overview of who are are and what you can bring to the table. It rarely goes into detail about your actual experience or education, but will showcase some of your skills (particularly if they match the job description). This cover letter is often used to screen candidates before the employer even looks at the resume.

That leaves us with the resume itself. Your resume (or CV in some situations) is a list of your education, experience, references, extra curricular activities, skills and abilities, and so on. By this point, your resume is likely to be more heavily weighted towards the “education” side of things instead of “experience”, but employers will expect that.

One of the main focuses of this site will be to help new graduates craft effective resumes and cover letters which will stand out from the crowd. If you are interested in having either one of yours publicly reviewed on Gradversity.com, please drop us a line on our contact page and we will provide more details from there.

Once you have your cover letter and resume ready to go, the next step in is to go through the interview process. This will be covered in the next post.

Please feel free to drop us a line with any questions or comments that you may have!