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So, you’ve sat the final exam and you’re throwing your graduation cap in the air – congratulations!
Try your best to sit back and celebrate this hard-earned success. It’s often tempting to look at your peers and measure yourself up against the ones who already have a job in the bag, or an internship at a great corporation, or a contract job working for a hot new start-up. You might start to feel that you’re falling behind before you’ve even started.
Don’t worry – recent graduates are expected to have life “figured out” immediately, but this isn’t always the case. It is absolutely fine to be unsure about what you’d like to do even after graduation.
Our young recruits at Aldrich & Co have a trick up their sleeve: LinkedIn!
(Psst! If you’re further ahead in your career, we recommend reading our other article: How to Attract a Recruiter on LinkedIn)
Join LinkedIn to start your job hunt
It’s possible that you already have a profile on the world’s biggest business network. If you are already on LinkedIn, make sure to change your status from “university student” to “graduate”. Doing so will mean you appear on more searches by recruiters who are looking for bright new candidates to add to their roster.
If you haven’t yet joined LinkedIn, you can learn some tops tips for how to organise your profile here.
Get strategic about growing your list of contacts
Social media is all about growing your network, but this isn’t the appropriate moment to start sending connection requests to the CEOs of big corporations! Instead, carve out some time each week to connect with your peers. What are others on your course up to?
Don’t confine yourself to your year! Look at where people a few years above you have found jobs. Depending on the settings that people choose, LinkedIn profiles will often show their career progression over the last eight years, so look and see if any of those paths inspire you. This can be a great way of discovering companies and roles that you might not have thought about previously.
Keep a list of those companies and then find them on LinkedIn and follow them. Whenever a role is advertised on their profile, you’ll get to know about it first.
Another reason to keep your profile updated on the platform is that LinkedIn’s algorithm will start to send you profiles of people with your ideal career progression by email. So, keep the profile up to date and the email subscriptions on!
Follow recruiters who are targeted to your interests
One other great secret on LinkedIn for many top graduates is that recruiters themselves also have their own profiles. We recommend following them, too, as you’ll be at the front of the queue for the jobs they advertise. Following a boutique agency that is specific to your field will give you access to jobs for which you are both eligible and interested.
Reach out to recruiters once you’re planning to submit an application, to get an understanding of what the company is looking for in a candidate.
Contact your university’s alumni
If you’ve been doing this for a while and you feel like you’re not getting anywhere, reach out to your university’s alumni for support. Those people whose profiles inspired you early on in this LinkedIn process may have useful tips to get started. After all, LinkedIn profiles give us a curated version of events, so they might have missed something off the list that could give you the leg up you need.
We recommend in the first instance sending them a nice message saying that you are a recent graduate from their alma mater and that you noticed you share similar career ambitions. This will hopefully start a conversation to take you further.
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Have you ever used LinkedIn to find work? Has this article made you feel more confident about contacting people in your network? Let us know on our social channels [Instagram; LinkedIn], and connect with us there for more tips straight to your feed!