In English: Job hunting is a learning journey

JOB HUNTING IS A LEARNING JOURNEY

COLUMN | Our columnist Moustafa Khairi encourages students to network and seek jobs under the table.

Landing the first position in nowadays competitive job markets is a challenging milestone for everyone in their early careers, no matter what the position is. Many talents have an impressive technical background and the required skills that qualify them for the jobs they dream about but they lack the right mindset of pursuing them.

People with higher university degrees such as master’s or P.h.D degrees may assume that the years they spent in research or academic studies qualify them for positions in the industry. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While having a couple of years of experience in research or academic studies should be an edge, it is not enough given the fast pace of the industry.

Networking is crucial when attempting to enter the job markets as a ‘freshly out of the oven’ graduate. Even though it sounds pretty intuitive, most people do not know how to network properly and how to expand their professional circles so that they keep being updated about the job market and especially, the hidden opportunities. Internal or hidden positions represent about 70% of the job market according to an Australian career change coach Jo Green as well as career advisor Rich Grant.

Know how to pitch or sell your skills. Having an informative, short yet to the point pitch is a skill that everyone, whatever their background, should aim to improve. Screening of job applications takes a couple of seconds each as stated by indeed and this should be enough to get the attention of the recruiters or hiring managers.

According to Statista’s 2021 statistics, 35.5% of people graduate each year holding a university degree in Finland. The question is, how many people graduate with the same academic degree in the same class and how many job opportunities are there in the industry? Numbers are not in favor of talents. That is why they need to distinguish themselves from others. Personally, I went through many interviews for different companies and various positions and was never asked about my GPA or even the courses I studied during my master’s degree.

Working on developing and promoting your personal brand is one of the best investments that we should all start working on from day one. If a hiring manager who knows you has an open position that matches your skills in their company, would you be the first one he considers? Would your name come across his mind? If you are building your personal brand and establishing network connections with the right professional circles, the answer should be yes to at least one of the two questions.

There are mainly three types of job opportunities. The public or open ones, the hidden or internal ones, and the ones that actually do not exist, yet! The open or public job opportunities are the ones that are publicly available on companies’ websites or social media channels in addition to the known job portals. Having the required skill set, polished CV and a decent cover letter is the way to tackle these types of opportunities, most of the time! Almost half of the positions I landed during my career so far represent these types of opportunities and it takes an active search in addition to the previously highlighted points.

Hidden or internal job opportunities are the dominant percentage of the job market positions. Referrals are generally a win-win situation for both parties. Job seekers get the opportunity if they are qualified! Yes, referrals do not guarantee to land the job by any means. The person who wants to refer you sends you a private application link that is unique to you through which you can apply for the position. If you get the job, the person who referred you get a reward. This referral system is very common for tech and software engineering jobs.

People tend to trust the people they already know. In most cases, companies open the needed positions internally and ask whether any of their employees know someone who would make a good fit in order to accelerate the hiring process. Depending on the need, they might open these positions publicly later on but opening them internally first is the most common case and that is why this type of positions represent 70% of positions. Again, now the question is how many people in your network would be willing to refer you for a position at their company? Personally, I have experience landing 2 positions of this type and the processes were quite fast given that I had the required skill set.

The 3rd type of opportunities actually is not open whether internally or publicly. They do not exist, yet! Being highly skilled in your area of expertise with niche technical or non-technical skills, excellent networking, and pitching skills, and most importantly, persuasion skills is the way to create these opportunities. You need to be highly motivated and know exactly what you want in order to be able to persuade the company that they actually have a need for this position.

Choosing the right time is a key factor as well. Targeting very small startups with limited budget resources at their early stages would not most probably work. Opening a new position at a company requires some hassle of legalities and financial matters and the process takes some time whatever the company size and situation. So, it requires some patience as well but it is definitely worth it, is not it? I have experience landing one position of this type but as I mentioned it requires patience as I needed to establish the trust of the employer for over one year! I was interested in a specific business domain, so, I did my research and created a filtered list of companies working in that domain. Then, I started reaching out to the people with the managerial positions on LinkedIn. A couple of them responded but most of them didn’t. That’s how it works! After having a couple of calls with one of the hiring managers, he saw the potential of opening such a position at his company but didn’t have the resources at that time. When the situation got better at the company, we had a conversation and started a proper interviewing process. Finally, got the job.

A countless number of sessions, workshops, events, talks, etc are conducted tackling the topic of job hunting which proves how severe it is for most people. It is a learning journey and we learn by making mistakes. The most important thing is not to repeat the same mistakes, otherwise, we should not expect a different result. •

Moustafa is a Data Scientist at Dentsu Finland and a Google DSC mentor in Europe.