A Guide to Landing Your First Job Successfully!

Challenges and Expectations for a First Job

First, let’s define how it feels like landing a first job so that we are on the same page.

Our definition of first job applies to students trying to get a first job in their field of study or to an experienced professional looking to change jobs at some point in their career after learning or acquiring a new skill through a course or other means. 

For example, consider a nurse looking to become a paralegal or a teacher looking to become a quality assurance professional.

Most organizations allocate a percentage of hiring to students coming out of college for their first job and to folks from other industries. The main reason for this strategy is to bring diversity of thinking in the workplace, which leads to innovation and higher efficiency, which are very good for an organization.

Hiring managers, on the other hand, have high anxiety and uncertainty while hiring people for their first jobs for two main reasons.

• Do they have foundational skills to learn additional skills on the job to be fully productive?
• Do they have the soft skills to be productive in a corporate environment?
• How have they performed in an environment similar to this job? For example, as an intern, trainee, or in a different role in another company?

Landing a Job - Your critical element to overcome the challenges

Most candidates looking for a first job have challenges in demonstrating the above even though they may have the skills. To simplify things, the number of candidates applying for a first job is significantly higher than candidates looking for lateral jobs like their current role.

The most crucial element is to establish your “Credibility. 

Everyone you talk to will say Credibility is very important. However, they may not give a direct and simple answer on establishing your credentials.

Establishing your credentials has been complex and time-consuming because it depends on the opinion of the people who understand your skills or interact with you. People take time to develop an opinion; consistency is key to developing a stronger opinion.

Establishing your Credibility

You may be a little confused or concerned by now that it may be hard to establish your Credibility. It is, however, relatively simple and easy to follow these steps. 

To get started, you need to identify the following two. 

• Skills (foundation and actual skills) that are important for the first job you are looking for
• Identify people whose endorsement will be valuable. In most cases, it will be the following.
  • Working professionals – Manager, 2nd level manager, peers, customers, partners, employees reporting to you
  • Students – Professors, Mentors, Peer students, colleagues at an internship in a corporate, and so on

The next step is to engage with them continuously (biweekly or monthly, depending on your job role) to get their feedback and document it for use in your first job.

Now, the other critical challenge that you will run into is the ability to present this information in a user-friendly way to a hiring manager. The technologies that can be adopted to make this task very simple are discussed in the next section.

Technologies you can adopt to land your first job. 

There are two options available, described in the table below.

getCREDIBLE platform

getCREDIBLE is a ready platform designed to establish professional capability that allows you to do the following;

• Build your professional ecosystem
• Post milestone on a biweekly or monthly basis
• Get feedback from your professional ecosystem
• Present credibility information in a digital format

getCREDIBLE platform uses an ML and AI engine behind the scenes and integrations with popular email servers, which make the above task easy. In most cases, you can get started in minutes to build your Credibility. It is free to use and can start immediately without any downsides.

Sign up on getCREDIBLE now and see the magic for yourself. 

Excel

Performing the above tasks in Excel is possible. However, most of the activities will be manual and require good knowledge of using Excel macros to collate the information coming from different sources.

Time required to establish your Credibility

The time required to establish your Credibility will fall under categories.

• Initial time (one time) – In general, establishing Credibility takes time as human beings will take some time to analyze the quality of deliverables and consistency to form an opinion. Typically, it is three months.
• Periodic time – On an ongoing basis, candidates must spend some time posting accomplishments and getting feedback. On a platform like getCREDIBLE, since most of these tasks are simplified and automated, they can be completed within 1 hour. So, periodic time will be around 15 mins per week or 1 hour per month. 

getCREDIBLE platform provides a feature to cut down the initial downtime by allowing every candidate to get backdated feedback once to build the initial provisional credibility rating. This will help first job seekers to establish their Credibility quickly.

We will not cover the features of Slate in this article as there is a separate blog for that. 

Create a resume that stands apart, give getCREDIBLE a try, and good luck in your job hunt! 

Build a professional network, like an ecosystem you want to be in, and drive growth.