What makes fresh grads employable?
New grads around the world spend their initial few months job hunting in what feels like the wild wild west. It’s when one truly understands what the heck Darwin meant when he said “survival of the fittest”. The fit ones (aka shining stars, straight-A students) often survive i.e land high-paying jobs, and the seemingly unfit ones (unconventional track records or skills) perish or struggle indefinitely. I recently attended a recruiting session for a major consulting firm, and I loved the candor of the Senior Partner who in his presentation unapologetically said to the new grads, “Let’s be honest, you don’t know anything”.
So what is it that makes us good enough to be employed, besides our-charming-passionate-selves?
While there is no one approach fits all in the job market, there are some fundamental factors that play a major role in the employability of any new graduate (and even experienced hires in many cases). Looking at it from an employers’ standpoint, there are two things everyone’s looking for:
a) What someone brings to the table at present, which is invariably judged based on their past achievements and experiences
b) What someone can become in the future
Regardless of the specificities, new grads need to satisfy or at least satisfice these two fundamental questions. Let’s try to break it down further and figure out actionable points.
If you can look past my rusty Photoshop skills, you’ll notice that there are four paths employers take to come to the conclusion of whether or not you’re a good candidate.
Current Proposition
In the present tense — there’s what you bring to the table (skills, GPA track record, extracurriculars, leadership skills, etc — let’s just group them as skills). It’s fairly objective and resumes do a good job of summarising.
Next, there’s the crucial element of the transferability of these skills. How would your previous actions and achievements translate to your future role? Let’s say you are applying for a research-intensive role. Naturally, consistency and meticulousness are key. How else can you do meaningful, dependable research work that includes hours of reading, editing and synthesizing, if you’re someone who has had a tumultuous track record of not doing so?
It boils down to how effectively you can communicate what you have done in the past that makes you ideal for the job. And not just on a high-level, but also the day-to-day tasks that any person would do. This, I believe, is the single most important factor, that you can control, in the entire process.
Another example would be, say if you want to work at a startup. Apart from your core on the job skills, you also need to display how you’re comfortable in uncertain situations, can multitask and fill in whenever needed, etc. Startups need people who can do that. Not necessarily something they write on a job description but is important nevertheless. A good way to know would be to chat with someone who is already doing what you hope to do.
The more you understand what you’re aiming at, the better you will be at communicating and persuading how you are the right person for the job.
Future Potential
While many jobs do require technical and leadership skills at a minimum, employers often bet on your ability to learn and grow with changing externalities. This is relevant today more than ever. Markets, industries and job roles are shifting at a rapid pace, and organizations are focusing on building agile competencies. Part of this agility is their employees’ ability to evolve with the world around them. Naturally, a good candidate would be someone who accepts change and, hopefully, drives change. But then again, there’s very little employers can do to predict that. So we go back again to your ability to effectively communicate how you are someone who evolves with time. Stressing on the ability to effectively communicate part here, because there’s not an awful lot employers can do to judge how someone would be as an employee besides extrapolating from their past achievements and of course, using their intuition. Had this been common wisdom, churn rates and dissatisfaction rates around the world would not have been as high as they are. So use your previous experiences to show how you are someone that will potentially make a VP or a Partner or a Director in that organization someday.
Finally, employers’ ability to gauge your ability. I will just leave it for another day. Only because it’s out of our locus of control, and systemic biases come into play that we’re better off skipping over. However, it is perhaps something to talk about once you’re on the other side of the table.
My philosopher and guide, Hannah Montana, once said that good things take time, but really great things happen in the blink of an eye. If you’re currently in the job hunt process or will step into it in the near future, I hope this helps in some way. I know this approach is helping me navigate this intense job search phase. I wish you luck!
