Graduating from college is such a refreshing moment. It is the first day of the rest of your life and most want to start it off with a bang. Well what could be better than leaving academia for that dream job that kept you going on those all night study sessions. Unfortunately, leaving academia was the easy part and finding that dream job will prove to be the fight of your life. I know this from first hand experience.

If you graduated in the top 1% of your class, you are the exclusion to the rule and you can skip this post, come back tomorrow for another more relevant one. For the rest of you, finding your perfect job will not fall into your lap. You most likely will not receive an email from some Fortune 500 company asking you to come work for them. This means that you need to launch up those web browsers and hit the ground running. Where to start? When you are initially applying for developer positions, I would focus primarily on corporate websites. It is the easiest way to get into the companies that you want to work for. Hit up the big guys like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Adobe, and whereever else you can think of working (that would be ‘cool’ of course). Go to their career sections and fill out a electronic resume. Once you have that done, apply to any job that seems remotely relevant to what you want to do. Creating these electronic resumes on each companies sites means that you are in their system and by applying to multiple positions it shows them that you are interested in not only those positions but working for their company in general. These corporate systems are searchable and it greatly improves your odds of being contacted for an interview. Trust me, it is the best way to get your foot in the door. Now if you do all this and in the next couple months you do not hear anything? Well, maybe it is time to try another approach like going after a larger variety of companies. I find that mixing this approach with applications through internet sites is the most effective.

After applying at the companies that I had always wanted to work at. I spent the rest of my senior year combing sites like Monster, CareerBuilder, and Dice for that perfect position. Feeling that being exclusive with my resume would save me time, I only sent my resume to places that seemed to post a perfect fit for my skill set. This went pretty well until I realized that out of the 12 job requirements the posting was asking for, I only met about half of them. After seeing this I would close down the page and head to the next one in hopes of being a little more qualified. This approach appears to be the main strategy of not only myself, but the majority of new gradautes. It was not until I was told by one of my interviewers that most of those posted “requirements” are not really required to get the position. In fact, the job poster is posting for their “dream candidate” just like the user is searching for their “dream job”. They do not expect to find someone meeting all 12 posted requirements, but rather they post a broad range in order to attract the largest field of applicants. Interestingly enough, if there was a perfect applicant that applied they most likely would not be hired due to the salary they were demanding. A company would much rather higher someone who was slightly under qualified but is willing to work for a lower wage.

So what does this mean to you? If your graduating soon from college, apply to any job you meet slightly over half the requirements. Being exclusive with your resume is not a good or a bad choice, but don’t be shy to send your resume to a place that you feel is “out of your league.” Who knows? You may end up being their prefect fit!