#job-search

#job-search

After founding a retail phone repair company, I realized my favorite part of the job was using software to automate operations and provide better value to our customers.

LinkedIn is looking to make a bigger push on its Premium subscription packages this year, as it continues to build on its revenue options, and complement its ad business. Its latest promotion for Premium highlights the benefits of the add-on package in helping people find jobs, by highlighting some of the reasons why people might want to move on from their current role. LinkedIn's new promotional series uses humor to appeal to job seekers, and get them to consider signing up.

As college students, we have all felt the stress and confusion around the conversation of summer internships: what do I want to do? Am I qualified for anything? Where do I start, and how do I apply? These are all the questions I, as well as most students, have when thinking about potential internships. It's easy to get overwhelmed. So, let this be a guide for where to go, what to do, and how to, hopefully, find your dream internship for the summer!

Whether it's something personal like physical fitness, or something professional like finding a new job, we all get stuck from time to time. And once you do, the ability to pull out of that place and take productive steps forward can be incredibly hard. At the same time, once you get moving again (physically or otherwise) that same inertia can keep you going, even when there are lots of obstacles standing in your way.

I always expected life after college would fall seamlessly into place, that all of my involvement in campus media, internships, and good grades would pay off immediately. So, when I learned that my childhood friend was planning to move to New York City, it was the perfect opportunity to take the leap together. I'd always dreamed of moving there, and as the home of many big-name publications, it seemed like the right city to be in to kick-start my career.

When it came time to pack, I slowly deconstructed my apartment over the course of a month. I made endless trips to the thrift store, posted on Facebook Marketplace, and even hosted a move-out party where I made snacks for my friends while they raided my closet. After all that, I still found myself frantically sitting on my suitcase, trying to zip it right up until my ride to the airport arrived.

At the start of this year, I went back to contracting, and then I learned I had prostate cancer. It was stage one, and I was on active monitoring for six months. I did some more contracting up until July, when I was told I needed to have treatment. So, I had treatment, and all the signs were good. In August, I thought, 'OK, I can start looking to go back to work.'

When I got hired at Meta in 2020, it was life-changing for me as a single mom. It represented safety and stability - a place to work hard at and retire from. So, when I was let go in February in a round of layoffs aimed at "low-performers," it felt like a punch in the gut. Nine months later, my severance and savings have run dry, I'm struggling to find a tech job, and I feel that the low-performer "label" is part of the reason.

Lately, job hunting feels like shouting into a void. You send out dozens if not hundreds of resumes, tweak your LinkedIn headline for the third time this week, and maybe even buy a new blazer because someone on Reddit swore it helped their interview game. And yet-nothing. Being competitive in today's job markets requires more than you being good at what you do. According to 2024 research from LifeShack:

Karishma Mandal wanted to land an AI role at a big-name company, so she designed a job search strategy she hoped would help her stand out. Throughout her search, she'd grown confident in the merits of twotactics: being among the first to apply for roles and submitting applications directly through company websites, not job boards. "You have to be early, you have to go through the direct website, and you have to get a referral if you can," said the 29-year-old.

At the start of my job hunt, I reached out to recruiters on LinkedIn, but personalizing each message took a lot of time. I tried using ChatGPT to draft messages, but it kept making mistakes. I realized that, on ChatGPT, I'm not just chatting about my job search; I'm also chatting about recipe ideas, workout plans, budgeting, and travel itineraries. When ChatGPT would give me an answer, it would often get mixed up or provide generic answers that weren't customized to me.