6 Tips On How To Stand Out From The Graduate Crowd

6 Tips On How To Stand Out From The Graduate Crowd Graduating can be extremely daunting, from being an undergraduate to unemployed. As the weight of finishing your dissertation is finally lifted, the pressure of competing against thousands of other graduates suddenly settles in. But no need to panic! Yes some of you may have little experience or predicted a low grade, but the beauty of competing against other graduates is that everyone is different! So before you go into breakdown mode, check out some of our handy tips to make sure you stand out for all the right reasons. Take advantage of your degree After 3 years (or for some students even more) you slowly begin to forget what you actually did in the early days of your degree. Completely forgetting about the small group presentation you did in first year and that website project in second year, sometimes these small factors of your degree can set you apart from the rest. Look back at your degree and all the modules you did and pair them up with relevant key skills and job attributions that could be relevant to what you’re applying for. You are basically getting experience and not even having to leave your house, so why not utilise it! Extra-curricular Activities Volunteering, work placements or awards are all great examples that will most definitely set you apart from other candidates. Whether it was volunteering at a charity for a week or a month’s work experience at a PR firm you did 2 years ago, these are all key attributes that you really need to show off when applying for jobs. Employers want to see individuality in applications and something different to all the other hundreds of CVs they receive, so Key skills you’ve gained You may think that Photoshop course you had to take in college was useless, or having to learn Adobe software in school was pointless, but you never know when these skills might actually be worth some value (for your CV not actual money I’m afraid). When reading a job description it’s always important to identify the skills needed and relating them back to what experience you have, but more importantly if you have gained any skills always write about them. It could be working WordPress to creating content on Illustrator; you never know when you may need them but more importantly you never know when your future employer may need them to. Look beyond the stereotypical job boards It can sometimes be too obvious just to look at jobs on Milkround or other big graduate scheme companies. What? Why? Outcome? Don’t opt for the typical phrases candidates use in job applications like “Responsible for looking after ……… social media.” Use the What, Why, Outcome questions, where you explain what you did, why you did it and what the outcome of it was in a punchy sentence. So in this scenario you could say, “Created social media campaigns in a bid to drive a larger audience to ………… website, as a result ……..…. website received a 30% increase in traffic that month.” Not only does this read better it demonstrates that you found a problem, you created a solution and it worked! Show your personality It can be extremely difficult to show your personality through a job application rather than an interview, but don’t be afraid to try. You can relate this back to the extracurricular activities that we mentioned earlier, it all adds to finding out what you’re like as a person. You could have an unusual hob