Life After College – Getting a Job

People go to college in order to be more marketable in the job market. College is a step toward obtaining a well-paying, satisfying job. Studies show college grads more money over their lifetime than non-college graduates. Has anyone told Bill Gates or Steve Jobs this interesting statistic?

Now that you’ve sent out your graduation announcements and have celebrated getting your degree, it’s time to begin the search for a job. There are three strong barriers to getting a descent job: your resume, the company’s hiring process, and the competition. There are three strong barriers to getting a descent job: your resume, the company’s hiring process, and the competition. These barriers could be unscalable unless a job-seeker understands the landscape.

What is a resume? Some would say it’s revealing your life’s blood. Others would say it’s baring your soul to strangers. And others would say it’s a flight of fancy. Have you ever walked down the sidewalk and someone handed you a flier? That’s a type of advertising and a resume is advertising, a sales pitch, your sales pitch about you. A resume depicts your skills, experience, and abilities. That white sheet of paper can show your dreams, but also shows your accomplishments. Have you actually done anything with your life besides surfing the Net, playing video games, and attending boring college lectures? How do these activities relate or translate into your success on the job? In many cases, they may mean nothing. Your resume is the means to open the job door. You are selling yourself so develop your sales brochure with the idea of selling your product – you!

To develop a successful resume, there are many sources that range from the Internet to books in your college library explaining how to develop a strong and effective resume. Use them.

The highest mountain to climb and the biggest obstacle to overcome in getting a job is a company’s hiring process. You are great and you’ve accomplished so much but how will a company know you? You may fail because the company has the dreaded Human Resources Department (inhuman, some would say). One founder of a successful Internet company said he only had an HR Department to keep him out of legal trouble with the government.

The HR Department exists to “weed out” applicants, not find the best possible candidate. Who are these HR people? Most are clerks with a high school educations who are trained not to think, but to follow company rules and procedures. These are low paying jobs. Remember, they are not looking for the best possible candidate, they are looking for reasons “NOT TO HIRE YOU””

Your resume has to fit predetermined criteria established for the position. If one of the criteria is missing, you are out of the running. Then, you will receive a pleasant form letter or e-mail saying someone else got the job, even though you were well-qualified. Worse, the communication might say your resume has been put in a file for future consideration, which means your resume has been put in the round file, otherwise known as the trash bin.

The final barrier is the competition. Every day, thousands upon thousands of e-mails are sent by job seekers, with resume attachments, through cyberspace. If Human Resources kept all the resumes, their computers would run out of file space. Now, with the economy tanking, even more resumes are competing against each other. But fear not, companies are always looking for new employees, particularly new college graduates. Why? Because you work cheaper than experienced, older candidates. Job seekers always face obstacles, but knowing about them makes it easier to overcome them. No matter what, there are ways to be successful in your job hunt.

If you found the previous article informative, you should check out more goodies in our college life section, or read some of these articles below:

• Back to School Savings (The Underground Way)
• Affordable Textbooks
• Scholarships, Your Ticket to College
• Finding the Right College or Univeristy
• Save Your money (or your parents money, you lazy bum)
• Choosing a Major
• Study Tips
• College-Housing
• College Social Life
• Dealing With Professors
• Deceptive Practices by Credit Card Companies on Campus
• 18 of the Weirdest Scholarships for College
• Bullshit Your Way to an “A”

You can also submit your articles for fame and fortune (without the fame or fortune) by contacting us..