Mackay’s Moral:
The closer you get, the harder they’ll look.
GET HIRED
Chapter 53
Job Search of
a Twenty-Something
In June 2009, I learned about a recent graduate from Stanford who majored in international relations. This impressive young lady prefers to remain anonymous, and I have respected her preference. Her GPA was 3.6. Born in Minnesota, her father is an executive with a large Minnesota company, and her family moved often during her earlier years. I learned of her when I met her dad at a dinner party in Minneapolis. He related an incredible saga of how hard it is for even a talented, wellcredentialed young person to find a job in today’s market—and the kind of persistence and state-of-the-art networking that’s necessary to cut the mustard.
I’ll call her Ms. S. She started out as an English major at Stanford, intending a career in marketing, advertising, or public relations. While she doesn’t have a degree in Spanish, she took courses in the language throughout her Stanford years and spent time studying in Spain.
Your first serious business experiences came through summer internships. How hard were these to come by?
After my freshman year at Stanford, I couldn’t find a marketing internship. Firms were only willing to hire marketing majors for marketing internships. (Stanford doesn’t have career majors.) That summer, I worked instead as a temp in the company where my dad works. I had contact with different divisions and did all sorts of projects. The next summer, I wanted to go to Africa and do something in the developing world. I applied to several programs Stanford offers in this area, but most of them were health care focused.
Rather than being stymied, you started to work the network you were developing.
That’s right. I had met someone who was on the board of TechnoServe, a D.C.based nongovernmental organization specializing in business planning and entrepreneurship in developing countries around the world. I mentioned that I was interested in doing international relations work in Africa. My TechnoServe contact gave me the name of another person active in developing countries. The program she represented doesn’t normally take undergraduates. It places people who have finished their first two or three years in consulting and work for free before going on for their MBA. I convinced her I could still be of help to this program, and I was able to get a grant from Stanford to underwrite my involvement. I went to Swaziland in southern Africa.
I want to point out that Swaziland is no vacation paradise. It’s one of the poorest nations in the world. More than half of the population lives on less than a $1.25 a day. The AIDS infection rate ranks #1 in the world.
Nonetheless, you worked with business consultants there, and it seems to have fueled an intense interest in consulting as a career.
What a really great experience! At the time, I had no idea of what consulting even was. The result: I became seriously interested in doing this as a career.
After my junior year, I wanted to find an internship in management consulting. This was the summer of 2008 at the beginning of the economic downturn, and internships generally were still hard to find.
I probably had twenty interviews with all sorts of companies.
I was able to land an internship with the San Francisco office of Mercer consultancy doing work related to human capital.
OK, you wanted an internship in general business consulting, but you settled for one specialized in the human resources area. So, you made an intelligent compromise. But even getting this wasn’t easy, was it?
The offer for this internship came pretty late, and I believe my persistence in calling back had a big influence in getting the offer. I learned that you had to keep a prospect fired up. A tip my dad gave me was to keep calling back and following up until someone tells you to stop. Otherwise, he said, how will someone know you’re really interested in the job?
Did Mercer like your work as an intern?
Mercer made me an offer to join it for a job after graduation, but I wanted to go into management consulting per se rather than human capital consulting.
So you were now about to enter the general interviewing stampede that happens in the fall of a Stanford student’s senior year.
In autumn 2008, I interviewed with at least fifty different firms . . . and maybe more. I applied for every single job that was consulting related. The prospects included McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, and Bain. These companies ended up not really recruiting new staff, at least not at Stanford. I also competed for investment banking jobs at the same time. As fall ended, I still didn’t have a job.
You didn’t have a job, but you were making lots of contacts, weren’t you?
That’s for sure. I got to know people at Cargill who had formerly been employed by consulting firms. And I met someone who was in marketing at General Mills.
Life throws a wrench in the works. According to your academic plan, weren’t you now supposed to leave the States to spend time in Spain as part of your international relations studies? Continuing your job search from abroad was going to be no piece of cake.
I was on a Stanford program that put me in Madrid for the winter. From Madrid, I managed to continue my follow-ups by e-mail and long distance. During the winter break and before I left for Spain, I did several “informational interviews” over lunch or coffee to continue to learn more about different careers including consulting, marketing, banking, PR, and consumer products. At the same time, I kept looking for a break. At each interview, I would ask, “Do you have any contacts who might help me find a job?”
Did these executives just shrug their shoulders?
I ended up getting tons of names. While I was in Madrid, I set up an American phone number online so I could talk with people. I talked with people in all sorts of industries. Sometimes I was talking with people in sectors like grocery marketing. I knew that I didn’t want to work in that area, but I always hoped I might learn the name of a contact in some area that interested me.
You, I can see, are a determined optimist. Did all this fieldwork pay off?
In the end, a couple of contacts helped a great deal. One of them was a guy who had worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. The former Booz Allen exec had heard I was looking for a consulting job. He put me in touch with a bunch of former coworkers at Booz & Co. and other top consulting firms. Some were a friend of a friend of this contact. Others were former employees of Booz Allen. I talked with them and actually did some job interviews in Madrid with Spanish contacts he had given me.
That point about former employees is worth remembering. Many companies could care less about former employees. But the prestige consulting companies like McKinsey and Booz consider their former staffers to be almost an alumni club. This networking fact is worth knowing because it’s also true for prestige law firms, ad agencies, and other top service firms. Some offices even hold Christmas parties to which former staff members are invited along with current ones. The point is this: These networks never die because they are often such a great source for both future business and jobs.
So now you have the door open at Booz. What happened next?
I first talked with an exec in the San Francisco office, asking for an informational interview to learn more about the business. She agreed to do this. Then Booz ended up offering me an actual job interview in its Chicago office, but it said that I would need to cover the costs of transportation for the interview (normally taken care of by the interviewing company).
No doubt it wanted to see how seriously interested you were.
I flew to Chicago the day I got back from Madrid and made plans to travel to San Francisco as well, figuring it was to my benefit to talk to as many people as I could. A week or two after my job interview in Chicago, I got a job offer from Booz Allen.
Congratulations! This reminds me of one of my favorite stories about persistence: The stonemason hammers away at the granite for a hundred swings, and nothing happens. Then he delivers strike 101, and—voilà!—the perfect break. Who knows which blow will cleave the boulder?
So what was the most important single principle behind your success?
It was a drawn-out process, but the importance of networking is at the top of the list. Many of the job interviews resulted from talking with managers who were able to help me make contact with others. I turned over every stone I could just to see what was under it.
As you excavated through this stack of learning opportunities, weren’t you learning a lot about how to present yourself?
After my internship interviews, I developed a sense for what things people would pick up on from my résumé and the kinds of details and anecdotes about my life that I should share. You definitely learn what you need to say. At Stanford in the fall of 2008, I often did an interview a day. My friends and I joked that my interview time actually exceeded the time I was spending on school and classroom work.
Did you also adjust the way you presented yourself?
During 2008, I changed my résumé—adding and dropping various things—at least six times.
Give us some particulars.
For several years, I was on the Stanford rowing team. Rowing crew showed a commitment to teamwork and hard work. That participation came up in interviews sometimes, but only sometimes.
Just before the Booz interview, I had added to the very bottom that I played the harmonica in a band at Stanford. My mom had casually suggested I put it on because it showed the less serious side of my personality and that I could be fun to be around.
At the four Booz interviews, the harmonica playing was the first thing they asked me about. I found that interesting because, although interesting, I didn’t think it was a super-important fact about me.
Tons of résumés land in prestige companies like this, and it’s important to show who you are in the real world. Are you the kind of person others would want to spend time with day in, day out, or when you’re walled in at an airport? Consultants clock a lot of time in transit.
Running the gauntlet sharpened the facts you presented about yourself. Did it also affect your personal poise and how you felt about yourself?
I became both more relaxed and more assertive as the interviews went forward because I grew more comfortable and confident presenting who I was. It’s hard for kids my age to tell people older than we are, “You need someone like me. I will do X for this company. This is how I will fit in.” That’s tough to explain with confidence, but after so many interviews, I had no problem doing just that.
You did a lot of aggressive networking to land this job. What did you learn about contacting people so insistently without annoying them?
I go back to my dad’s advice to keep pushing ahead until someone says no. You can take that advice different ways. Some people can be really obnoxious when contacting people, but I discovered that, generally, people want to help you, especially if you are sincere in your questions.
Obviously, some people helped me a bit more than others, but I believe every person has a story he or she wants to tell, and I learned at least one thing from everyone I talked to. It could be a tip on how to interview or how to present yourself. If you’re honestly curious, it doesn’t come off as aggressive. People don’t realize how willing others are to help you and how much time they will take out of their day to give you some advice.
In networking, you always have to deliver a quid pro quo. Was the benefit you offered often the gratitude of being an appreciative learner? Is that payment in itself?
Being a sincere and grateful person goes a long way. Another benefit to older people in firms is that they are sincerely interested in what’s on the mind of today’s college graduates. Candid input is useful to them.
People don’t learn how to ask for help when they network until they actually
help
other people who ask them for tips.
I learned to try to help younger students who came to me and wanted help in tackling their job search. I may have helped them, but their questions also had a payoff for me. They helped me to organize my thoughts about my own experiences in better ways.
A lot of people are really busy. Put it out there that you are available in any way—via phone, e-mail, etc. Some are much less willing to help you than others. When someone says it’s easier to answer via e-mail than on the phone, you have to be willing to float along with his or her preferences.
How influential was technology in your overall search?
Incredibly. Right after you talk with someone, you need to send an e-mail to them thanking them for the experience, mentioning what you learned, and telling them you’ll keep them posted. And you have to actually do what you say you will.
I created a folder on my laptop of all the people with whom I needed to follow up later. When I was in Spain, I used the Skype phone system to make free calls over the Internet. Skype made it possible for me to talk with people thousands of miles away. Many of them didn’t even know I was in Spain because I had an American phone number.