Hey everybody. Welcome back to Recruiting 101 with Camille and Kierra. Recruiting 101 is dedicated to helping candidates understand the process from a recruiter’s perspective. In this segment, we’ll be sharing tips and tricks as we experience them. Our topic for discussion today is helping soon to be and recent college graduates and just helping them to land their first job.
Really giving a lot of tips about how you can prepare for that job search. What to do throughout your college years, so you can set yourself up for success, once you start looking for your first job. And we have Vincent here today with us from the HR team. So go ahead, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about what you do at Hirewell, then we’ll get started.
Yeah, thanks. Super happy to be back. So I’m Vincent. I’m on the HR and talent acquisition recruiting team. Been at Hirewell coming up on close to a year and a couple months. Time flies. But I’ve been in recruiting for almost three years. And looking forward to this episode. I think it’s a very interesting topic, doesn’t get a lot of light. And especially needed in this job market that we’re in right now. So I’m excited for the topic today. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. So let’s start off with some college advice for any recent or upcoming graduates. Camille, do you want to kind of take it from there?
Yeah. So I think the most important thing, and like Vincent said, I don’t feel like there’s a lot of resources or advice out there on LinkedIn for college graduates. I feel like it just kinda skips to like more so the entry level and further. So I think the most important thing is about, thinking about your resume and how you’ll format that.
So I think when you’re soon to be graduated or in one to two years after graduation, you can probably keep your graduation, your college information at the top of your resume, just so that’s easy for recruiters and hiring managers to see. So just include that at the top. Like I went to Elmhurst College, so I would put that. Anticipate a graduation date or if you already graduated, list your major and your minor.
If you want to put your GPA, you can. I listed mine, but I don’t really think that matters too much. And then any extracurricular activities. So like, if you were in a sorority, put that especially, or fraternity, especially if you had a leadership position. Really just being able to showcase your organizational skills as well as like leadership, time management, anything like that is really great to show that you were in a position of leadership. As well as if you were a student athlete.
Hiring managers and recruiters love student athletes just because in college you’re juggling sports, you’re juggling the social life, as well as school. So probably really good at time management. And I played tennis in college, so I included that on my resume as well. And then anything that you have, like any internships you were able to do, any certifications, any interesting projects that you worked on in class. Maybe you went to like a fair and presented the poster.
Just make sure to include that all at the top. Just so even if you don’t have too much to show for like full-time jobs or summer jobs. At least you have just everything you had going on at college right at the top for them to see. Awesome. Well, I think we should talk a little bit about how to utilize the resources that you have in college.
So Vincent, do you want to kind of get into that? I know you had an internship and that would be really great to touch on for our people watching this video. Absolutely. So I’ll preface this with, I didn’t utilize my resources as well as I should have in college. I worked 38 plus hours a week.
I was trying to hang out with friends and do all the things. But I did join a few. I was an accounting major. Funny enough, I’m not in accounting anymore, but I joined an accounting club we had at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville, the college where I went, we had a career counselor. We had a lot of resources. Like there was resume tip classes, there was LinkedIn profile utilization, like a lot of these-
The hard thing was they were at six at night or seven. I know it’s hard sometimes to want to go back to campus or things like that, but I would highly recommend utilizing all those things. And join as many clubs as you can. Like the business clubs, the accounting clubs. If you’re in nursing, nursing clubs, like they-
And they host events, like they host career fairs. They host tons of different things where you can get experience, meeting people in person, even virtual nowadays. Take advantage of the virtual side as well. I would. But yeah, so to go into that more, I started off with an internship. I actually went to a career fair, just randomly met this guy.
We hit it off. He went to the same college as me and that’s the cool thing. They usually invite alumni and they want to help people out. It’s hard to find a job. They want to network and help someone out, because someone more than likely probably help them out the same and they kind of work that way.
He said the company was HCA, a large healthcare corporation. Just happened to sit by him at the same table. Talked the whole night. That ended up me getting invited to an internship, which was right after I graduated. And luckily that turned into a full-time job. So I would highly recommend network as much as you can. Utilize your career counselors, professors, like they’re there to help, right?
Use the resources. That’s probably my biggest advice. And internships are a great way to get into that. And you can do internships your sophomore year. You can do it as early as you want, right? You can do multiple, you can try different places. And those can turn into full-time offers.
Not always, but you could even ask at the bigger company, like, “Hey, is there other departments that are hiring?” If there’s only a certain amount of interns that they take. So more of the story, I would utilize resources. I didn’t. But coming from someone who wishes they would’ve, I’d go back and do that if I could.
Yeah, you’re paying a lot of money to be there, so I think you should take advantage of the resources that are available while you’re there. I would also start, getting ready, your resume ready ahead of time. This process is going to feel a lot less overwhelming if you start right away. I would start applying at least three months before your graduation.
Some job postings will say for grads of this time, so you’ll know if they’re ready to hire new grads after you’re done with your semester. But I think if you get your resume ready ahead of time and start looking at those job posts, and getting on handshake, that kind of thing, that will help you be way more prepared when the job process actually starts.
But I also think it’s important to get your LinkedIn up and running. If you start this, your sophomore year of college, you’re going to have that networking piece and those connections ahead of time before you start applying. Not only can you start following people in the industry you want to work with, but you can start finding out if it’s going to be the right fit and what companies might be a good fit as well.
So I think this is all just being proactive ahead of the actual job search itself. Yeah, and I wanted to add, I know Vincent, he mentioned he had an internship. I don’t know if Kiara did or not, but I didn’t during college and I was involved in a lot of things, but I think I went to a few career fairs, but I always felt like a little awkward.
It wasn’t like the cool thing to do in college. So I would say to just swallow your pride. Don’t be embarrassed. If you don’t know what you want to do, if you don’t have an internship, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I think it all just takes time. So just make sure you’re being proactive, reaching out to those guidance counselors like Vincent said, and taking those resume classes, like those career prep classes, and really just putting yourself out there.
It’ll give you a really good headstart to figure out what you’re doing and just don’t be discouraged if you don’t have an internship lined up. And there’s other things that you can do as well. But you’ll be able to find a regular, full-time job without having an internship experience.
Yeah, those internships will tell you if you like, what you’re going to be doing and it’ll kind of give you some clarity before you actually get a full-time job, if it’s going to be the right fit. So definitely take advantage of that. Definitely. Yeah. Highly recommend. I switched basically almost three times, like turned up nursing school, did clinicals, switched to accounting, did an accounting internship, and then shortly after that, switched to recruiting.
You might think you know what you want to do until you get into it. And I think that’s why it’s crucial. Like here I mentioned earlier, building the LinkedIn network, reach out to people before you graduate, try to get on the phone with people at companies you want to work with. Ask them what it’s really like.
Right? I mean, internships can be a good idea, but sometimes even the real full-time job can be totally different. So just talk to as many people as you can. And it’s okay if, like you said, if you don’t know what you want to do yet, that’s fine. I mean, You’re young, you shouldn’t. Yeah. And I think it’s helpful if you don’t know what you want to do, maybe making a list of things you enjoy, like maybe you enjoy working on computers, maybe you want to be on your feet all day around people socializing. And like, just little maybe like systems that you have experience with. Any soft or hard skills you enjoy. And then you could start putting that into Google and just finding what jobs do that all day. So there are ways that you can find a job that you’ll love just by thinking of things that you have enjoyed, like throughout high school and throughout college.
Yeah, and just because you go to school for something doesn’t mean you have to stick with it. I went for education, no longer in education. So don’t feel like you’re stuck if you go to school for one thing because there are a lot of opportunities in other fields and doing other types of jobs.
Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Check out all of our content on talentinsights.hirewell.com and follow us on LinkedIn for more content. Thank you for joining us Vincent. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Bye bye.
