Start Looking for a Job When You Don’t Need a Job

It was a rite of passage that happened every year about a month or two before graduation. Students would come in to the Career Center to look for a job. In turn, I would invariably ask them the following questions:

• What job are you looking for?”
• What have you done so far in looking for a job?”
• When are you expecting to get a job by?”
• What does your job search timeline look like?”

Many of these soon-to-be-graduates and current job seekers were off to great starts. They had well-crafted resumes with meaningful content that related to their career objectives. They knew to build experience, especially career-related experience, before graduating.

Some were quite advanced with their job search knowledge. In addition their solid resumes, they knew about:

• maximizing opportunities at job fairs
• researching – and practicing their answers to – the commonly asked interview questions based on their field

These students came in looking for support and motivation, as well as any job searching tips they hadn’t considered.

And then there were the students who came in and apparently thought that they were going to get a job right then and there; if not right then and there, then within a month would do thank you very much. It’s like they expected that I would hand them a business card with a phone number that they could call to receive job offers.

Such students were sometimes in for a rude awakening. Quite the opposite of what they were expecting, their job search was most likely going to take longer, as well as more time and effort, than they had anticipated. Thankfully, most of the students handled the reality check well, and they were eager to learn about job search strategies they could get started with.

I often told students who were not yet actively seeking jobs or internships that at some point they were going to pursue them, and that they were better off the sooner they started preparing for this endeavor.

I often said over and over how the best time to look for that job or internship is when you don’t need one. That way, you can learn about the ins and outs of job searching and take advantage of those insights when the time came for your actual search.

Because so much of landing a job offer is about why YOU are the one that an employer will pick among all others, you can learn about the ways to market yourself that can help you stand out from your peers and increase your chances of being successful with your job or internship search.