Big tip! Use jobalytics (chrome extension) to match your resume to the keywords in job postings. So much of the system is totally automated now, and the first few steps in the process involve basic keyword matching. It sounds dumb, but it can dramatically increase your response rate to applications!

Best bet with LinkedIn job postings is to take the company name and go directly to their website and apply through a career’s page or get a contact for that supervisor and email them directly with resume or follow up. I like to think of LinkedIn as a middle man to get me the needed info and then i do additional searching from there. Good luck!

Get a degree, they said. It will catapult you into your dream career right out of school, they said.

Identify your target companies. Find out what temp agency they use. Take any job offered. Once you are in, you will have access to internal hiring boards not accessible to the public, and to hiring managers. Source: That is how I went from a lowly temp data entry job to a perm senior position in two years.

Master of Arts degree? Best of luck 🤞

1. Make sure your profile and resume are free of errors. Have it checked by somebody else with the right experience. Double-check again.
2. Avoid using popular templates which get used by many applicants. Try to create a light spin-off of a template you liked for your resume. Or create something from scratch.
3. Connect with as many HR representatives/Talent Acquisition specialists as possible. Reach out to those that work in a field of your interest, let them know you're open to job offers. Some HR reps may be open to give some advice (e.g. tips to improve your resume, tip what skill to gain to be hired at their company), but not all.
4. Connect to as many like-minded professionals as you are comfortable.
5. Make sure there's nothing compromising/dubious on the internet with your name+surname, or on your FB, Insta, etc. accounts.
6. Network, network, network. Online and personally. Build your reputation as a trustworthy, dedicated, curious, enthusiastic young talent who is looking for an opportunity to contribute to the team/boss/etc. Someday someone may be willing to recommend you for some job position/post about you on their profile/etc.
7. Never stop trying.

Resumé rule #1. Spell everything correctly.

Especially "GRADUATE"!!!

LinkedIn is usually behind the actual company site and many times just auto renewing roles if the company doesn't take them down. Chances are they may already have plenty of resumes to review or are weeks/month+ out of date.

Use LinkedIn as just one method to find roles that you may fit and then go to the actual company website jobs/career section and apply there instead if the position is not too old.

I reached out to all local staffing agencies in my city and got set up with initial interviews. Some agencies are better than others. The last agency placement I received opened up a career door. While I no longer work at the job I was placed in, I work for a former customer I had in that role. Best of luck!

I’ve always thought of a Bachelors of Arts degree as a stepping stone to get into another degree? What kind of jobs are out there for a B.Arts Degree? I’m also assuming that the employers are looking at your work experience to suit the job

The language in your resume must match the language in the job description. You will hate this but you need to customize a resume for each job listing. Maybe it is just a few tweaks but still a pain.

Also, one way to check this box is to have an Objective paragraph at the top of your resume. You can throw sentences there that can help the matching. For example, if a job wants 5-7 years of experience but you have 10, this could count AGAINST you. Put "7 years experience doing X" in that Objective paragraph to check the box.

Agree, it was good but now the online job application system is sooo saturated between websites and recruiting companies. Apply using a mix of everything and even through friends and family connections in person! Job fairs help too, hit them up at any local colleges even if you don't attend the school, if you can get in of course.

Many universities host job fairs. It’s a good place to meet employers, especially ones you may not have considered before. Company recruiters will be there and sometimes they have a mechanism for you to apply (like iPads on their application portal). For resume and interviewing help, go to the university’s career placement office. They have people there that can help. They may also host workshops and may include alums or people from industry.

I had better experience going directly to the company website and applying directly rather than going through an of the big online job factories. Job fairs are a better source too.

First and foremost, you need to have a decent resume. It’s tough out there but you can stand out highlighting things you’ve accomplished (work or school) and value you’ve added to projects, department or the companies you’ve worked for. Then, go to the companies LinkedIn and find out if there’s any one that you’re even second degree connected to (someone you know, is directly connected to the company). Ask your direct connection for a coffee or a quick zoom. Catch up genuinely first if you’re not close friends/connections. People who know they’re being asked for a favor are much less likely to help you both in the short term and long term and you never know when you’ll help each other out in the future (this is the backbone of networking). Once they ask you what you’re up to, this is when you mention you’re looking for work at company x. LET THEM OFFER TO HELP FIRST. If they don’t, it could be for various reasons, but the most likely reason is, it’s probably not a close or reliable connection.

Repeat all those steps over again until something hits.

The other piece of advice is to go to networking events/conferences where people from that company would attend. A lot of these have ice breakers and opportunities to get to know companies on a deeper level and meet a lot of influential people within the industries you’re interested in.

There aren’t shortcuts here unfortunately right out of college, but it gets easier once your network increases and you can start tapping into those the longer you’ve been in your career. And if you want to change industries? You start from the LinkedIn step above again.

It’s a journey, but can be rewarding! And you end up meeting some really great mentors along the way this way too.

I found LinkedIn to be a waste of time.

I don’t have much to add that others haven’t already said, but don’t get discouraged. I just switched jobs 5 years post graduation and applied to roughly 320 positions. Out of those, I received about a dozen interviews and 2 offers. All applications submitted between September and November, and there are still more than 100 that I haven’t received a response from. It’s a numbers game. I will say, I had more success with applications made through a company website rather than LinkedIn.

Thirty jobs only? When I landed my first “adult” job a year ago, I applied to probably 100-150 jobs in a month or so. Everyone has great advice here, but also a lot of jobs are either old posts that they forgot to take down, or internal promotions they have to pretend is open to everyone. Good luck out there

I got a tip from a HR person when applying for a Internship. (That I didn't get) Works well with what everyone here says about working on your application. "You only need to be first in line for one job, doesn't matter how many second places you get. Do a few reaaally good applications to things you would fit as, rather than a lot of applications half-assed"

Worked as a charm for one of my next 3 applications. Good luck!

Make a resume, get fitted for your clothes, drop off resumes in person to local places. Many construction types of places don’t really put the word out, they don’t want to or don’t know how.

They might even see your resume and like you, so they’ll fit you in somewhere.

30 applications per week at least. My last two jobs took 400 & 700 applications. I could have found a job more quickly if i was willing to apply to any job in any city, but i wad looking within a specific field in major cities only. Regardless, you need to grind.

Applying to job openings isn’t a lost cause, but it is a lot of work and can take a while. I suggest you continue doing that but augment it with other approaches. Find a “best employers” list for your city and use LinkedIn to reach out to current employees asking for their advice. They might know of an opportunity, now or in the future. Read the feed posts on LinkedIn and follow the people you like. Ask them for connections. I just got a job because I saw “we’re hiring” on a post by a woman I respect; I went to her company’s website, applied for an opening, and ended up interviewing with her. Go down as many channels as you can think of - online and in-person - because you never know where the next opportunity might present itself.

Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips!

Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by up or downvoting this comment.

If you think that this is great advice to improve your life, please upvote. If you think this doesn't help you in any way, please downvote. If you don't care, leave it for the others to decide.

[removed]

What sort of experience do you have and what sort of jobs are you applying for?

I think it helps to know what kind of field you're in to know what kind of job volumes are out there. Less jobs, means more competition and it's largely going to be a waiting game. Myself, I work in IT, so I can apply for about a hundred jobs a week if I need to.

Do you have work experience or just education?

What helped me when I was starting out was having a functional resume. It's all about psychology. You want to put your education, certifications, skills, etc at the top of the resume. Put your work experience at the bottom. Keywords are important, as well. That will get it through the automated filtering they use. When someone gets eyes on it, the studies show that after about the first 3rd of a page, people lose interest. If you can get their attention with all the good stuff early on in the resume, they'll have already decided they want to interview you by the time they get to your sparse work history.

It's probably a little late, but if you had an internship you should have/hopefully did make some connections. Some companies will offer jobs to interns after their program is over. If not, it's time to start cashing in on those connections and reaching out to folks and offering yourself up for service.

My last two jobs came from LinkedIn job posts so it is useful if done correctly. My biggest piece of advice is to apply to companies where a person is looking at the resume not an automated system.

The way you know the difference? If you can direct send a resume versus filling out a profile with all your information on it

[removed]

30 jobs aint enough. The response rate is like 5% or less for people with art degrees.

[removed]

Career consultant here: Network through your schools (and schools in the area you want to live) LinkedIn Page specifically through the “Alumni Tool”. It helps you find people with with your degree to better understand what they are doing, and once you find the people doing what interests you, connect and introduce yourself/how you came across their profile. Build the conversation up with them if they accept, asking them questions about their org/job/experience and get to know them, then hopefully they will help you find something of interest.

[removed]

Are you actually looking for jobs in the Art World? There tends to be a lot more people looking for jobs in the arts than there are jobs and you'll probably have a tough time if you're just sending resumes out to places you don't have a preexisting connection to. It's an industry where networking is really important and you're unlikely to get a career level position somewhere unless you have a relationship with someone there already.

If you have money to spend on getting professional help with your resume, try TopResume.com.

I don't think LinkedIn is very good that's because they're just jumping on the bandwagon late in the game because that's not what they started out being but my wife is recruiter for a major corporation and she loves and really recommends many of the common websites for job searching. It has changed and migrated a little over the years. The first big one I remember hearing about was monster.com if I'm remembering it correctly but you never hear of it today. My wife really recommends indeed.

[removed]

Write three or four resumes tailored for three or four different aspects of jobs your degree has prepared you for. Make sure to use keywords scraped from job postings to get past the automated filters. Start spamming them out to any reasonable match. I've got decades of experience and get very few responses to my resumes.

You say you've just gotten your master's degree -- what jobs have you had along the way? Can you get more of that type of job, just tilted a little bit towards using your education, and work towards stuff directly in your field?

It's really hard to step right out of school into a job in a non-STEM field, it's a tough job market. Spread your resume around to job boards, but make sure to use a different email address for each place you post it so you can start figuring out where your junk mail comes from.

For example, if my email address were Alexis.Morganza@gmail.com I might post resumes with email addresses like

alexis.morganza+indeed-2023@gmail.com

So that I could immediately see when and where someone got my resume.

(I put my resume up on monster.com for two weeks in 2012 and took it down because of low quality responses. I still get email to that address )

There are specialized job boards for all kinds of fields -- make sure you are looking everywhere relevant to your field. Go to a university library and read a bunch of professional periodicals -- they often have job ads. Even if they are advertising for a senior position you don't qualify for, you now have the name of a company hiring in your field. Check their website for open positions.

If your university has an alumni newsletter, mine that for the names of companies people are bragging about getting jobs at.

Go to a web browser and search for "my field jobs" and there are likely to be a ton of job boards and talent agencies that show up. Career counseling sites, too. (For example, I searched for "fine arts jobs" and in addition to a bunch of job boards I also found an interesting looking site in the UK titled "What jobs can I get with a fine arts degree". I don't know what your field is but I assume there are similar results for it.)

[removed]

There's a ton of great advice in this thread already! Me and my classmates have also found the same thing, getting no responses from lots of applications. I've found a great job now though, so my piece of advice to add to this great pile of advice is:

Keep at it! You'll find something! It will take time and it certainly gets depressing to put lots of effort into each application just to get ignored, but it will work out if you do your best and keep at it.

[removed]

You must network, a lot. Learn about the functional area you are interested in and meet lots of people doing that work. Get to know everything you can about the job. Eventually someone might offer to pass your resume to the right person.

Source: I’m a career coach.

Generally speaking I find applying for jobs where you have no previous connection is a fruitless cause

Do you have any slightly older friends that work in places you might want to? Ask them if their places of employment are hiring.

Is your actual degree in Art?

You have to match and tailor your resume to the job bulletin that you want and are applying for. If you don’t match it HR will just immediately throw/discard your resume. You have to remember that not all HR personnel understand every single job posting that they post nor do they have the time to scan and read every resume application.

For example: if the requirement is master of arts degree make sure that its on your resume and clearly stated in the front.

• if certain years of experience is required: make sure to have dates of employment on each position.

• Another mistake that resumes have is not highlighting what is on the job bulletin. For example: they want someone proficient in Microsoft word, good communication skills. You have to add this on your list of task in your résumé otherwise HR will overlooked your resume.

I have learned to add most of what’s listed in the job bulletin and then adding other task/skill that highlights those bulletins even though that’s not the bulked of my experience.

By tailoring your resume, you increase your chance for interview and also increase your score on hiring managers as well. This is from experience when I got hired my supervisor told me that I was immediately the first choice because I have the experience based on my resume.

If you are applying to any entry level, these employers know that you just got out of college. What they really want to know is your willingness to learn and also excel on that position. Chose and vet the companies that you are applying to also, and see if it’s the right fit for you. It’s a two way street you have to like the companies where you are applying to.

Good luck!

What types of jobs are you qualified for with a Master of Arts degree?

[removed]