Finished College and Jobless

By Tommy Leung on 06/03/2010 in Marketing

I’ve noticed an increase in Google searches for one of my past posts about finishing college. The economy had began to tank at the time and most of my friends found jobs after graduating. There was no real panic yet. The increase in Google searches and the statistics tell me that there is a real job crisis at hand for recent college graduates.

The trend from 2007 show a steep decline in employment for college graduates. In 2007, 51% of college graduates who applied for a job had one in hand by graduation. That number went down to 26% in 2008 and stands at 19.7% in 2009. With another year of graduates joining the prospective workforce, I can’t imagine this number getting any better.

Unemployment for college graduates is officially determined to be 19%. That really isn’t the situation I see on the ground. When we account for those who have given up, taken part time jobs, or taken jobs that have nothing to do with their intended career, the number is much higher.

Then there’s the reports of recent college graduates seeing lower salaries for years to come. There’s really no good news anywhere. But, you didn’t need me to tell you this. You aren’t reading this because everything is rosy.

What to Do?!

The situation isn’t entirely hopeless. The pipe dream that a lot of us had has been shattered into a million pieces. We now know that a college degree isn’t going to guarantee us a job. That piece of paper is only slightly better than meaningless.

We need to change our mindset. The economic ground isn’t shifting beneath us just because of the Great Recession. It has been shifting for a while now. The economic crisis just made it more apparent.

It would be misguided to believe that all will return to what it once was if we just ride out this recession–or possibly depression. The world as we knew it is gone. That college degree won’t guarantee you’ll get the job you want making the money you want.

The great game changer isn’t the recession. It’s social media. You hear about it all the time and how it’s changing the landscape for businesses. What you haven’t heard is that you need to adapt to this landscape as well.

The traditional resume is on its last breaths.

It’s About Google-ability

For many years now, employers have Googled prospective employees and we’ve Googled prospective employers. It did not used to matter as much if we couldn’t find each other online. That has changed drastically. If you can’t be found online, you might as well not exist.

At the very least, you should have a LinkedIn profile. There’s no benefit to not having one unless you intend on being invisible.

People are networking online. MeetUp.com is used to arrange offline networking events. How would you even know about these events if you aren’t up to speed?

YourName.com

You should own it. It costs about $10 a year from GoDaddy. It’s even cheaper from some other places but, GoDaddy is a brand I trust. One of the ways to have your name come up first or within the first 10 results in a Google search is to own yourname.com.

If you’ve got nothing to put on your website, redirect it to your LinkedIn profile. The idea is just to own yourname.com. You can find real use for it later. For now, just get it before someone else does.

Ideally, you’d want to be a thought-leader in your chosen field or niche. Realistically, this isn’t going to happen overnight. But, you have to start somewhere! Set up a blog at yourname.com and start sharing your thoughts on your field.

If you don’t have anything to say, perhaps, you need to do more reading about your field?

Keeping Up With the Blogs

There is likely to be a wealth of information for your field online right now: blogs, YouTube videos, Wikipedia entries, news articles, tweets, and more. If you aren’t keeping up with any of that, you need to get started.

Blogs are easy to keep up with. Instead of reading the daily newspaper with yesterday’s news, subscribe to a bunch of blogs in your field on Google Reader. You might not be able to differentiate the good blogs from the bad ones if you are completely unfamiliar but, subscribe anyway. You can always unsubscribe once it becomes clear any particular source is no good.

Google Reader will also recommend sites to subscribe to so as long as you can pick a few on your own, Google will help you out. Make it a habit to catch up on what the blogs are reporting and talking about daily. Things happen quickly on the internet.

Ship.

This is a term that Seth Godin has been pounding in. And it is damn important. You need to ship. Being fresh out of college, you probably have no practical skills to speak of. So, what are you shipping?

Start small.

Publish a blog post. Make it a blog post about research that supports a point you want to make. Or just make it about the research. Everyone can use research. You did just graduate from college so, at the very least, you can do research. Right?

Get A Skill

Whatever it is, find one. Preferably a skill that relates to the field you want to pursue.

Get some technical skills too. You are competing for jobs with dinosaurs. Okay, not really dinosaurs but, older people. They’ve got a ton of experience. Now, they find themselves jobless too. But, they have skills. They’ve been there and done that. You haven’t.

You do–or at least can–have an advantage. You’re young. You know the technology better than older folks. You can’t compete with them on sheer experience. You just don’t have much. But, you do have a natural understanding of how technology works. You practically grew up with it and use it daily. Advantage: you. Sharpen that advantage and exploit it.

Go Do It

Now you know what to do. So, go do it. Don’t stop sending out resumes. You never know which one might stick but, that shouldn’t be your only strategy. Do the other things mentioned above. It can’t hurt and besides, what else do you have to do?

Look for internships. In this economy, there’s going to a lot more unpaid ones than paid ones. Now is no time to be picky. Internships are less likely now than before to result in a job afterwards but, you won’t gain any more experience rotting away at home.

Yes, this is a lot harder than you thought it would be. Unfortunately, you graduated alongside the worse economic crisis in modern history. It’s sad but, it is what it is. Time to get to work. :)

UPDATE: There’s a ton of job hunting sites like Monster, CareerBuilder, etc. SimplyHired has just enabled a feature that helps you find jobs at companies from within your social network. While you’re busy building or already have built a strong social network, you can use this tool to help you find that job! Welcome to the future.

By Tommy Leung