Struggling to Find Your First Job as a Fresher? Try This for a week.

The AI era came, and now half the freshers can’t even find their first job. Without that first job, everyone is stuck grinding DSA, just hoping to land interviews despite having no real corporate experience at all. Welcome to the deadlock loop: you need experience to get a job, and you need a job to get experience. If you’re one of the people stuck in this loop, this article might just open up a few doors.

I started my mentorship journey a couple of years back. About a year ago, I decided to simply share a calendly link on my socials, allowing anyone to reserve some time with me every day to talk about their projects, startups, GATE, jobs, mentorship, or anything else where I might be of some help. This has been such a fascinating experience for me.

I have heard so many stories of people trying their luck in all sorts of ways to find a job. Some have been blindly doing cold emails, LinkedIn outreach, using tens of job portals, applying to hundreds of jobs without even getting a single response. I have seen their struggles, felt their hopelessness, and watched them desperately try to find a way forward.

It’s always disappointing to see how so many genuinely talented people are still struggling, just to get noticed by anyone. After so many attempts to help everyone, I feel I have been able to find a couple of ways which actually works and might help you out as well. They didn’t work for everyone, but what matters is they did worked out for a few.

LinkedIn is Dead ☠️

I have heard so many people say this to me. LinkedIn jobs has probably become one of the worst platforms to try your luck on. But what I have seen from my experience is, LinkedIn still holds a special place in this entire professional ecosystem. It doesn’t matter which platform, or what way you are using to get a job, you are still sharing your LinkedIn everywhere. This basically proves how important it is.

Personally, I have received so many wonderful opportunities through LinkedIn. People have offered me jobs, partnerships in their startups, invitations for networking events, requests for speaking opportunities in various workshops, etc over the period of last 4 years. I wouldn’t have received any of this without being active and maintaining an excellent LinkedIn profile, because people would have never found me at all.

But what about an actual Job, can LinkedIn really give you one?

I am sure you have already tried LinkedIn jobs, and you are here because you are not getting any good responses. You have tried to connect with HRs and recruiters, but they rarely accept connection requests. You have tried to comment on every hiring post that you have seen, but mostly you were already too late for it. So let me suggest 2 ways which I have found LinkedIn can be of some use.

Hiring…

This one word can be useful. You want to be the first ones to respond to hiring posts, then do that. Search for word “Hiring” on LinkedIn. Select “Posts” as the entity type. Sort the results by “Latest Posts”. Now you have the latest posts where you can be the first person to reach out, and have the maximum chance of getting a reply. Don’t just comment on the post, reach out to the person, since he/she just posted it they are excited to see the responses too, so there is a high chance that they might actually respond back. Use this to find small service based companies who are actively looking for a person with specific skill. As soon as these companies get work, they send out hiring posts, and complete the hiring process within a week to get the person onboarded asap.

What if I don’t wan’t a small service based company, then lets go one step ahead, go to “All Filters”, select “Author Company”, and mention any good companies that you are targeting. Now you have a chance to directly interact with someone from those companies who have just posted about Hiring. If you play your cards right, and send a good enough message to entice a conversation, you are already ahead in this game. This might not sound like much, but this can be a game changer in the number of meaningful conversations you had.

Startups really do need you…

AI took a lot of jobs, but AI gave rise to endless counts of startups. Now each of these startups have so much potential to succeed, but one of the most important thing for all these startups is Time. They have to be first to the market. This has almost became mandatory. Now Time costs Money. Founder can be an excellent programmer, but he cannot do this alone in that limited time. These founders need people who believe in their idea. They don’t have a lot of money to spend, but they have an idea which they believe can change the world.

Your job is to find these startups and their founders. Specifically, the startups who have only received angel funds in last 3 months, not VC funding. Angel funds are provided to create a Go To Market Prototype. They are just enough to last a couple of months or max a year. Within that time frame, you have to complete the prototype, and go out in the market to get more funding.

If you join any startup during this time, you can expect a small cash component (10k — 50k at max), along with some considerable equity based on what you deliver. This might not sound much, but its really a lot. First you are getting a chance to build something from scratch, something that is unique and with challenges. Half of the people working in FAANG don’t get this opportunity. Second, you are actually learning something worthwhile. This kind of learning is hard to find. Third, you are not a person looking for job, but you are person switching jobs. Your resume is not blank after graduation, where you always have to deal with an ugly question of what were you doing since past 6 months or a year.

How to find these startups? Find events where these startups get there angel funding from. You will always find PR posts of these events on LinkedIn. Read more about the event, find the startups which presented, find the founders of these startups, and start messaging them. These people will be the ones who will actually reply to you, because they really do need help.

Both the ideas were boring for you?

Well, can’t do much for you now then. I am looking forward to hear from you, maybe we can find a better idea together, so feel free to reach out to me with anything that I can do. Help doesn’t always cost money. But if you still need some more legacy ways, then maybe these job portals could be of some help.

• https://hiringcafe.com/
• https://stillhiring.today/
• https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

That’s all for today. Thank you for reading, I hope you found what you were looking for, and good luck for what awaits. Don’t forget to follow me for some more stories like this. My LinkedIn if you ever want to connect — https://www.linkedin.com/in/anshul-sanghi/. See you next time.