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Back in March, spring break was coming up and I was just a couple of months away from finishing my second year of university. I decided that I needed to use spring break as an opportunity to start looking for a summer job – to be specific, my first job ever. I wasn’t just looking for any job however; I was adamant on finding an internship or entry-level position relevant to my field of study.
As a cross-border student traveling from Canada to the US on the daily to go to school, I preferred to find a job in my own city in Canada rather than something that would require me to continue crossing the border everyday throughout the summer. The challenge with this was that my American university’s career support resources were not able to help me with finding work in Canada. In other words, I was left on my own to embark on the journey of hunting for employment.
My first instinct to get the ball rolling was to sign up for the popular job search platforms – the ones that typically come into everyone’s minds when they’re pursuing employment opportunities. After creating my account, and applying the necessary search filters to seek the results I was looking for, I was greeted by a screen of emptiness. Even after trying to remove some filters for a more generalized search, I was unable to receive any relevant results. This cycle was repeated with each platform.
I then turned to regional job boards. While local organizations work hard to share job postings and try to help people find employment, and sometimes display opportunities that companies don’t post on the bigger platforms, their lists of postings tend to be pretty small. As with the bigger platforms, the regional boards couldn’t offer any jobs within the realm of what I sought after. I had gotten stuck, and I needed to take an alternative approach.
I decided that if companies weren’t explicitly hiring, I had to go to them myself and ask if they had room for someone who could convince them that they deserved to work for them. This process was certainly a bit more complicated. It involved researching local businesses, going onto their company LinkedIn pages, trying to determine the relevant employees, and sending out a connection request to each of them. As soon as a connection request was accepted, I’d immediately send out a message in an attempt to carefully spark a conversation.
The results were mixed. Some people never opened my message, some opened it but didn’t respond (or stopped responding after engaging for a couple of messages), and some genuinely thoughtful people were kind enough to go through an entire conversation with me and try to help. However, (through no fault of their own) those people weren’t able to help me with opportunities at their own company. They instead referred me to connections they had at other companies. Those connections would then do the same and refer me to other people, and it felt like I was stuck in a never-ending loop of fruitless referrals.
Being an optimistic person, all of the referrals that I was getting and the connection requests that were being accepted everyday kept me hopeful that I was making progress. However, time was starting to slip by. One month gone, and no leads yet. A second month gone, still no leads, and my school year had ended in April before I could find a job. I started pursuing even more aggressively in May, but that month went by in a flash, and when June was almost over, I thought I was about to go into July still unemployed.
However, my vastly expanded network and new connections proved not to be in vain, as I came across a post about the newest local tech startup, which just so happened to be a job searching platform. I was excited not only by the fact that I had a new job searching option, but also by the existence of a new local tech startup, as tech startups were the businesses I was targeting. The company was called Picsume.
I created my Picsume profile in a mere few minutes, and was then directed to the website’s job board. With every local opportunity being scraped onto the list, it was by far the most comprehensive job board that I had come across. To my surprise, however, at the very top of the list was an internship posting made by Picsume themselves. The position was exactly what I was looking for. With just the click of a single button, the platform automatically applied me to the position. I then continued looking through the list, and was able to find yet another relevant posting – I applied to that one as well.
Within the span of less than a day, I received responses to both of my applications. Both of them scheduled me for interviews. Following four months of zero leads, I earned not one, but two interviews in a matter of hours. Only one interview was necessary though. Picsume were the ones who had made this possible for me, and it was at that moment when I realized that I was witnessing an innovative revolution.
No one entering the workforce deserves to go through those four months that I did. Everyone deserves to experience the few days that I did when I signed up for, interviewed with, and then joined Picsume.
