HELP: I Want Work (Fresh Out Of College)

Yep. In a lot of cases it's all about who you know, though. I got my last job because the director of the department knew me and knew how to use my skill set to his advantage. He said I'd be the last person to get laid off from the department.

Once he left, the new director was far more interested in fighting fires than improving our processes so that they didn't happen in the first place. I was screwed because the people who appreciated what I did were not the ones directly in charge of me, so I became much more expendable when a big layoff occurred.

Well knowing someone just ensures your resume is on the short list and makes you a known quantity. The two things hiring managers are looking for in candidates are "can they solve a problem we are having" and "will they become a problem". Being a known quantity answers the second question, meaning you only need to demonstrate an answer to the first. Candidates coming in cold need to do both.

I try to encourage people to use personal time to enhance skills and work on themselves as a way to make answering that first question easier.

A good article on AI and today's job market:

AI Is Taking Over the Hiring Process — And It’s Weirdly Futuristic

As if the job market wasn't already grim enough.

Update: Graduated for reals. Now have luxury of time to extensively look for work.

Grats, now it begins for real.

Now you are officially unemployed

Now for the real boss: Getting past greenhouse.io

I had an interview today. Somehow passed the tech questions. Then my low-INT-elvaan brain asked about the weather at the location of employment. Probably wouldn’t be weird except I live right next to said location. Interviewer looked at me like I was a *********.

People "fresh out of college" normally arent any better than that.

It could be worse if you had asked after the technical interview what that firm does for work.

I've witnessed a wall of rain moving once where you could clearly tell one side nice and dry and 2 feet further it was pouring. So technically I guess it could be rainy on their half of the street while it's not on yours.

Don't worry too much, I doubt data scientists are expected to be great at small talk.

Everyone you interview with has done interviews before, been nervous, and said silly things. If they are the type of person you'd want to work with, then they might think the question was weird at first but in the long run probably not care and you can laugh about it later.

Most people are far more interested in the quality of your person and background than they are little things like this. I wouldn't worry about it.

Interviews are basically two people lying to each other about the role itself and your skills, counting the seconds until they run out of "important" things to talk about. Most conversations and interviews can be discussed in fifteen minutes tops. They kind of already know a newly grad without experience doesn't have much to fall back on, conversation-wise, so it's just as awkward as them asking you to "tell me about a time where you had to...". It's more about making the person like you (Charisma) and seeing if you are a fit for their team. With that being said, all you can be is yourself, and if the interviewer simply doesn't like you, there's no way to fake it, you just wont get hired. So your job should be to be as natural as possible during interviews and try to convince the interviewer to like you. That goes a lot further than using fake LinkedIn catch phrases to impress people, it doesn't work.

I used to work in HR and I would see people with the personality of a rock getting roles, and couldn't understand how. It wasn't their skills either. So either they knew someone and got the plug, or they put on their game face and aced the interview, and interviewer liked them and went with it. On the other hand, I have seen people with the best skills just not get the role because the interviewer didn't feel like the incumbent "meshed" well. They were either cocky, jerks, or just were "too" qualified and they talked themselves out of jobs. It's super political and almost insulting how many jobs are gotten just off vibes and nothing to do with actual skills.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Since I did work for a very big company, I can also tell you that at least 30% of the roles are totally made up. Like they lead to nowhere. They're either never filled, refreshed and never interviewed for (right now my company website shows 7 listings from April 2025 that will never get filled), or created to bypass the hiring process entirely. Some interviews people get are totally hoaxed to buy time until they can "hire" their internal candidate they REALLY made the role up for (for a pay bump, easy way to circumvent the off-season promotion cycle). So don't get upset if you ace an interview and get ghosted, and then hear back 8 weeks later they chose someone else. They chose someone else well before the role was posted, but in order to pretend to be "Fair" in the job search process, they posted a role and got external candidates to apply. This looks better than just giving the role to an internal candidate, because people can claim they only got the role due to favoritism. I'm not making this up, because it's exactly how I got a pay raise when the company couldn't offer me a promotion. They made up a job in the next tier of my current role, included my entire job description in it, interviewed a half dozen people (including me), then said "well, you're the best qualified for the job, you're hired!". Don't want you to get miffed if you start landing interviews but never get the job. It's really a dirty game and you just need to know how to play it. GL fam

edit - by the way, if you asked a weird or dumb question, something that will absolutely soften the mood is to smile and acknowledge "hey im nervous, that was kind of a dumb question LOL". You'll break the tension easily and the interviewer will respect how human you are and willing to own up to a silly gaffe. It says a lot about the kind of person you are (not taking yourself too seriously, willing to admit mistakes). It's way more valuable than talking like a computer and pretending to be Mr. Perfect, i'll tell you...

May not be something you are interested in but if so I can generate a referral link.

https://careers-ebscoind.icims.com/jobs/1956/data-analytics-and-experimentation-intern/job

I would have never known where to apply for the academic-journal database companies. I appreciate you sharing the link. I will indeed apply to the position! <3

Month 8: applying to about 30 jobs per month. Been working on skills via self-teach websites. Had a short freelance job that fizzled out. Rejected from internships for not being ‘current student’; worked during degree to pay for degree in unrelated field to degree. Very few interviews (less than 5). Mostly don’t hear back from companies. Friends in same situation. One friend had to start taking anti depression medication out of their family’s fears of offing-self. Another friend decided to pursue a PHD after being unable to find work for 6 months.

Feel like a massive loser unable to find work.

Got rejected by local ice cream shop for being ‘over qualified’.

Lost 20 pounds, exercising more, and have been told look ‘much better’.

Obviously don't use your PhD to apply for a job at the local ice cream shop. You obviously are going to leave once you find something better and they will have to train another guy. They would be better off just getting somebody who would stay for at least a year or so.

I run a small business, things are getting rough on people these days. I sell low-end food for the mass poor and we are bring in steady income without raising prices lately. People are feeling tight in their budget. They are spending more on cheap food.

My advice is find an entry level job related to your field, eg Customer Support (Tech), NOC (Network Operations Center), Sysadmin related job, Linux Admin, Cloud Operations, something like that. Also QA analyst, probably others.

Those are all entry level jobs and don't usually require a ton of experience. You do need something related to the field, which for a graduate is your comp sci degree.

They're "foot in the door" type roles for a graduate. They will get you in a company and let you gain experience. Believe me, the stuff you were doing in your degree is hardly relevant to any role you will have in industry. The first year is all about learning and gaining industry experience.

Definitely don't apply to ice cream shops as a comp sci graduate.

My company hires roughly one graduate a year to their NOC team. My first job out of uni was as a sysadmin. Some graduates will thumb their nose at jobs like these, and likely still be out of work a year down the line.

What approx. area of the US?

See if there are any job fairs, networking events, meet ups in your area involving the sort of work you'd like to do or related to an area even somewhat relevant to the industry where you'd like to end up working. Depending on the quality of the event, this might get you access to real life people (vs. an application screen) which you can ask about opportunities with.

Other:
https://x.com/majamediaco/status/2054862216634183807

I appreciate the suggestions.

For context I got a dual degree one after the other due to funding availability, 1. Political Science [political behavior coursework focus] and 2. Data Analytics [business analytics coursework focus].

Fed jobs are cooked rn, everyone I know who was hired by the gov two years ago is telling me there are job postings but not to apply as they are not being filled due to no funding [ghost jobs].

Data Analytics. I wasn't bothering keeping track until last month, so note the true aggregate is much much higher. Initially I was spending every day applying for 8 or so. My roll has slowed due to discouragement.

Was applying to FL 'cuz I have family I can stay with near there, but also happy to go elsewhere. "Yes" just means HR called me, vs. hearing nothing. Still unemployed as of rn.

get in contact with a recruiter or two. google recruiters for your field in your area.

job market is pretty rough right now, GL.

No idea what kind of job "data analytics" leads to. People call themselves "data scientist" and can't explain what that is either.

Maybe some kind of social media analyst job, aka posting on social media on a company's behalf. Or a data entry role, which is as literal as it gets.

If you're in any way tech oriented I'd do some entry level Linux admin training and apply for a an entry level job like that. You will be asked relevant questions during any interview that you will be expected to be able to answer on the fly.

PM me if you want details on this.

Good luck, fwiw.

Data Analytics: At least the degree itself was cleaning data / pulling insights from patterns. It taught me Excel, R, PowerBi, Tableau, GA4, SQL. And a few ‘theory of business’ courses that were useless.

My understanding is data science is about ‘predicting’ future outcomes, whereas analytics is about analyzing current data/trends.

What pathway is Linux admin? I’m happy to do admin work, just not sure I have enough coding background for it.

Don't. I know a lot of good folks with good backgrounds struggling to find work, these are folks with 20+ years of experience. The hard part is just getting someone to see your resume. I'm reading folks are basically having two resume variants, one to satisfy the AI and another they hand to the hiring manager. I pretty much just leaned on people I know when I moved a few months ago.

Getting past keywords has always been hard, it just seems worse now. I recently moved jobs and the tough part for me was trying to get past this but also keep my resume short enough someone actually would look at it


If you meet qualifications for a security clearance then I'd consider looking for roles that will get it for you and ignore your friends. There are always gov't contractors hiring and there are a lot always hiring for cleared roles. You will be limited in where you live, but it's work and it's steady.

You are going to run into ghost jobs all the time, I wouldn't ignore one of the largest employers of tech folks purely due to that.

It's an entry level admin job. Change control on Linux systems, some scripting work (not really development, lots of tools use here), some SQL, change management and orchestration, cloud management etc.

It leads to whatever you want it to lead. More data focused work, more SQL development, actual development, Linux specialisation, cloud specialisation, management etc.

Entry level jobs cover a lot of areas and have no specific paths. What you move into depends on you, your skills, how you develop and what you want to do.

By that definition most development work is "data analytics" too. Large scale data processing is part of most high skilled development - think processing of things like stock market tick data, device data, cloud data, things like that. Some specialise in SQL, some in non-relational DBs, some in backend development, combination of multiple things, it varies again.

Finance in tech is another good field, and they hire straight out of uni, and you also have a relevant degree. The work hours can be brutal, but for someone in their 20s that might be exactly what they need.

IME there are no jobs specific to "data analytics" that only do SQL or only Excel. That's part of a wider scope of work, which what exactly that is will vary.

Basically you will have to find a wider reaching entry level job until you gain enough experience to get a more specific role in the area you want to work in. That's normal.

Data analytics is sorta broad and usually depending on your background but I thought this field was pretty hot recently. Probably due to the death of consulting companies which hire the most data people.

Then again, only medium and large companies have the need for data analysis. In medium companies, you probably have to do everything yourself since these guys focus more on making the sales now rather than rebuilding their ancient database since 1985 or something.

Have you considered branching out to nearby field of study even if it's not strictly data analytics?

Just tossing this out there but 30 applications a month is very low. When I was looking for my first job years ago the market was very bad like now. I was doing 5-10 applications per day for anything in a 60-70 mile radius of me until I ran out of postings. I'd say my hit rate was 1 interview (counting phone screenings) a month and it took a months to land a job.

Not hearing back from companies is totally normal, they're getting blasted with applications constantly.

The way I managed the application load was picking the companies I care about and doing a cover letter or tweaking my resume for them. The rest I didn't care about just got generic whatever.

5 interviews without landing a job makes me ask how far you got in those interviews. Remember you're selling yourself. Never lie but sounding confident is good. Saying "I don't know" is good, following it up with how you'd approach it is better.

If you're only applying to jobs that pay x or have y then you're screwing yourself imo.

If you can't land a big company right away, take anything. Use anything to solidify experience+resume to land the next step up and keep going till you're happy.

I know I asked before long ago in this thread, but sharing your resume after stripping out all the personal details would go a long way. Your resume might just suck, I know mine did before I learned what people actually care about and look for

Also post your CV online where recruiters can find it.

A lot of jobs just aren't advertised, they seek specific profiles and need to be able to find you.

It's not always (read, never) great talking to recruiters, but comes with trying to find a job.

It's a hard time to move into a technical field because business majors think AI can do your job, and for entry level positions they are probably right. You don't get senior employees without a stable of juniors, but the shorttermism that has been rewarded by wall street since the 80s doesn't penalize them for making bad decisions today as long as the consequences aren't felt in the next year.

Anyway, good luck and I have no real suggestions. My LinkedIn got no traffic and I got no calls back for months before I got my first job, which I got by being in the right place at the right time and having what I thought was a low stakes conversation with a near-stranger. Now I get probably 1 email/LinkedIn message/spam text a day about jobs and I'm still dreading the next job hunt because I doubt the offers are real.

Decision-makers are usually screening for behavioral red flags. At least in decent organizations. Be nice, well-dressed, well-groomed, with good hygiene, and a can do/willing to learn, appreciative mindset and you will land something. The truth is people are humans, basic creatures, and they want to work with people they like. Be likable. Everyone's looking to add-value and enrich their own lives. they might not articulate it that well because they've never really thought about it, but it's the fundemental truth.
If you're a superstar at what you do but can't play well with others, you're not getting through the process. If you're competent enough that you won't get your supervisor or manager in trouble, can be depended on to show up and be productive, but extremely likeable, you will get a job and go far.
If you want to come off as highly likeable, fake this one thing until it becomes an intrensic part of your character "you're a supporting role in THEIR story" If you make every person you meet in life feel that way, it won't be long before you're being pushed up by others to lead them.
Good luck.

Tried this. Got sooo many spam calls and texts and emails. Once I deleted it from the online page it stopped. Lots of requests for my social security # via text lol.