Tips and tricks for finding work in your late teens and early 20s.

In My Humble Opinion
1

This may end up being a bit of a long read so I’ll be as quick and to the point as I can and elaborate on a point only when/if asked to.

I’m 20 years old, male, and I live in Toronto, Canada. For the last year I have been looking for a job and have been completely unable to find one. My resume is not amazing but I’ve always thought it was decent enough (6 month co-op at a Staples Business Depot as a sales associate, 6 month co-op as an apprentice auto mechanic, and a year as a journalist/blogger for a sports satellite radio station). I apply mainly to places I know for sure hire people in my age group and demographic in the past (all kinds of stores in malls, places like Zellers and Walmart, Blockbuster and so on, as well as fast food chains and the like - in short, exactly where you’d expect teenagers/20-somethings to be working). I have applied to roughly 200 places in the last calendar year (an estimate but I’d say give or take no more than 20 either way) and this has produced all of three job interviews, none of which have lead to work. I have, in a sentence, failed miserably.

I say none of this with heat or any trace of apathy, it’s just background for my questions. The thing is, I know people I went to school with rarely have any trouble at all finding jobs. I know a handful of people that get a job at one store in a mall, and when they quit or are fired a few months down the line, have looked for no more than a week or two before being hired at another store, even in the same mall. My own girlfriend was hired at a second place in addition to her first job at the second store she applied to, after a day of job hunting. Again, none of this is meant to paint a sad picture, it’s just how it is, but it can’t hurt to ask on here and maybe we’ll all learn some useful stuff from the responses in this thread.

Basically, I hear a lot of contradictory advice on how I should go about looking for work. I hear a lot of people saying x is a good technique when just the opposite seems smarter. I hear a lot of people saying definitely put y on your resume, and a lot saying never put y on your resume. What is the best way to attack the problem of finding a job in the places I’ve described? What similar experience do you have? What has your own experience told you is good advice to take in searching for work, and what is bad advice that should be ignored? What is the single most important factor? Is it a good first impression? A classy resume? Sheer persistence, calling back time and time again? Showing up to apply looking clean and respectable? Writing a cover letter? A combination of several things? How much of it comes down to sheer good or bad luck? What have you been told about job hunting that later turned out to be a lie, or false, or very rarely true at all? What are some of the ‘myths’ of it that you personally find to be untrue?

This is the sort of stuff I mean -

There is just three of dozens of examples of the kind of thing I’m talking about and this is the sort of contradictory stuff I’m hoping we can go some way towards killing in this thread.

I know a lot of this seems obvious, but the longer my own search drags on the more I hear contradictory advice from people and the more frustrated I get wondering why so many people I know seem to have such an easy time with it when I am (to my eyes) checking a good number of the boxes of things employers supposedly look for and haven’t found anything yet. What have you found to be the best ways to find work at this age?

I **don’t **mean this to be a ‘help me’ thread or anything, but as a way for all of us to discuss tips and tricks that will be helpful to anyone who’s in the same boat as me, techniques useful to anyone who needs all the help they can get. I can’t help but think it’s all largely luck at this stage of your life, but what are the little ways you’ve discovered that can tweak the circumstances and turn the tables in your favor? I’m putting this in GQ because that is where I think it belongs - a place for general questions on the topic, with hopefully some good general advice and tips to follow.

Cheers for any input, don’t be shy. Share your stories and advice for each other and hopefully we can help out a good few people in here.

2

I am in the process of hiring people, so I’ll just give you my advice.

Let’s do the easy part first.

Put down a few hobbies that you are truly interested in. Don’t put down anything stupid or juvenile. Don’t stretch the truth, or you’ll feel really stupid when your interviewer is really happy to have met a fellow _________ enthusiast and quickly discovers you lied.

If you don’t have any hobbies that demonstrate some skill relevant to the job you’re applying for, don’t bother listing them. If I’m hiring you to be a an auto mechanic I couldn’t care less about your comic book collection, but I might think that your hobby of flying model airplanes demonstrates mechanical aptitude.

Regarding calling potential employers - when you talk to them, ask when they will be making their decision, and call them a day or so after that if you haven’t heard anything. If I tell you on Monday I’ll let you know on Friday and you call on Tuesday, that’s obnoxious. I wouldn’t hold it against you, but it wouldn’t be a plus. This is really a personal thing, though. If the hiring manager is incompetent and scatterbrained and doesn’t really care about doing their job right, then calling more often might help because they’ll think of your name first. Use your judgement, this is really a minor thing compared to everything else.

Regarding part-time vs. full-time - if you want a full-time job, say it. If you wish, you can say that you are willing to work part-time temporarily with the understanding that the position will not be permanent (either you will be transitioned to full-time within a set timeframe or you will be allowed to leave at will after finding a full-time position). No magic to this.

Now - were you actually any good at any of these jobs you did? Can you list anything on your resume that you accomplished? (#1 salesman at Staples for three months in a row! Customer satisfaction award at Joe’s Auto World! Increased views at Sirius Wiffleball blog by 500%! - anything like that?) Can you get a quote from your manager and include in your resume?

The world is full of apathetic teenagers who frankly don’t deserve a job. Not to be insulting, but your resume as described gives that impression. You’ve done 3 different things, all unrelated, and apparently did none of them well enough to be asked to stay on.

I would suggest:

A) Improve your resume if possible so that it includes something that will make you stand out as a potentially valuable employee. If you can provide some explanation of what happened in your last few jobs, that would be ideal. Don’t put any excuses, but if the Staples closed, say that.
B) Fuck the mall, everyone your age is applying at the mall, and the ones who are getting jobs probably just know the hiring manager from their last job.
C) Figure out something that you are actually interested in and would like doing, find a small company in your area that does it, and go in person and ask for a job. Tell them you’re willing to work at a reduced rate for 1-2 weeks in order to prove your willingness to learn, hard work, dedication, etc. This will only work about 1% of the time, but that’s all you need.

The simple truth is that most people are lazy workers who don’t care about their job. Most small business owners would be literally overjoyed to find someone who is a dedicated, hard worker.

If you’re not willing to put in the effort, and all you want is a job flipping burgers at the mall, you’re out of luck. And if you’ve never developed any skills in twenty years that differentiate you from every other twenty-year-old, you’re also out of luck.

By the way - the fact that you’re posting on the SDMB and your ability to write coherently suggests that the last sentence doesn’t apply to you. You will be a valuable employee for someone. Your challenge is to find out who. But my guess is, it’s not the Gap or Chik-Fil-A (do you have those in Toronto?)

3

Excellent, that is exactly the sort of reply I was hoping for, clean and precise and thankfully no sugarcoating whatsoever. I will take a while to digest that, very much appreciated. I had included contact info of my superiors on previous iterations of my own resume but getting a quote from them had never occurred to me and that does seem a smart course of action. For the record, co-op (‘co-operative education’) is where you leave school for a semester and work at a business instead. The business doesn’t have to pay you a salary and you’re compensated with school credits, and if you’re doing a co-op program it’s not so much that you’re let go as when the semester ends you return to school - simply completing the semester co-oping at a store is confirmation of your usefulness as they are quite free to kick you out at any point during the semester and suffer no repercussions. That said, not being offered a ‘real’ job upon completion could be seen negatively and there’s always the possibility someone reading your resume doesn’t even know what co-op is so I guess that’s something I should try to explain in more detail on a resume.

Thanks for the response, as I said I should take a while to digest all of that and write up a response later.

4

Since the OP is looking for advice, this is better suited for IMHO than GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

5

I only have a couple bits of advice.

I would refer to your co-operative education experience in other terms such as work based training or on the job education. I work in a training program where such things are called work-based learning, a term I’m not really hip on but it does describe what is happening better.

Because you are young and have a long employment history ahead of you I will also offer this; in the future when/if you lose a job through no apparent fault of your own, ask your boss if he would be willing to write a Letter of Recommendation for you. Most will write you something if you have been of any value to the company at all. May be pretty generic, if they like you but still have to get rid of you it could be quite glowing. But if you don’t ask, you aren’t going to get one. Do a search on the term Letter of Recommendation to see what I mean. If you are still on good terms with any of your former supervisors they may still write you one if you ask.

The value of even a generic letter of recommendation is that it may cause your prospective employer to actually pick up the phone and ask your previous boss if you are worth a shit to hire. Getting that phone call to a previous employer made is very important.

Good luck.

6

Have you tried talking to your supervisors at Staples , the auto shop, etc? If you were a conscientious worker who left a good impression,they may go out of their way to put your name forward if a job opens up. Also ask your friends to let you know when jobs open up in their places of employment, and ask if they’ll put in a good word for you. The recommendation thing only applies for those friends you know are diligent and hard workers. If you know they’re slackers, you don’t want them telling the boss about you, because you might be mentally branded a slacker, too.

If you’re not going to college, this is the time to try to find a real job, not a mall job. You don’t want to be working retail 30 years from now. Even an entry-level job doing customer service or data entry for a well-respected corporation can lead you into better things a year or two down the road, or at least pay a semi-living wage. Go to the websites of companies that have a local office and check their open jobs. and apply for those jobs specifically. That’s better than firing off a bunch of resumes.

Speaking of resumes, your limited work history doesn’t really lend itself to a conventional resume. Most companies would be happy for a completed on-line application and (if you have them) your letters of recommendation.

If you are going for something like order entry, make sure you list as skills things like your typing rate and error rate, and any skills in Excel, Access, and Word. Things like that mean a lot more than your hobby of building houses from playing cards. If you don’t have those skills, learn them. They’ll hold you in good stead.

Good luck!

StG