Gen Z grad landed a job at LinkedIn by waitressing at a conference full of recruiters and handing out her résumé during breaks—now she works at Google

Summary

Basant Shenouda spent six months after graduating from one of Germany’s top universities sliding into recruiters’ DMs on LinkedIn and applying for jobs online—and getting ghosted. So she volunteered to waitress at a conference six hours away, where she handed her résumé to 40 recruiters and landed a job at LinkedIn. Now she’s at Google . “It is becoming harder and harder to reach the hiring manager, even virtually—which used to be a more nontraditional method,” the Egyptian-born Gen Zer who graduated from the University of Bonn in 2019 tells Fortune . “It’s incredibly hard to spotlight yourself.” It’s a feeling many graduates know well. With more than a billion users on LinkedIn, overloaded recruiters are increasingly ignoring messages from strangers—so Shenouda switched tactics, using the platform not to cold-message hiring managers, but to track which conferences they were posting about. Not only did she draw up a hit list of conferences that hiring managers at her dream employers were going to be at, but she also went face-to-face with those who had rejected her advances online—LinkedIn’s recruiter being one of those. “I gained feedback from all the companies that rejected me, which allowed me to reapply and get job offers,” Shenouda says. “It really brought me a lot of insight into how I can better distinguish my applications and what gaps I needed to fill to ensure that I made it past the final interview rounds. “Traditionally, people don’t reapply; people don’t keep trying and keep reaching out to people and keep maintaining a relationship. “They [the recruiter] thought those were really good transferable skills for sales, and that’s what I ended up doing.” Even if you’ve made every effort to ensure that you’re showing up at all the places hiring managers are, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually get any leads. Here are some tips she learned along the way to convert networking from just chitchat into something more tangible, like a job interview or offer: Don’t worry if promoting yourself to strangers doesn’t come naturally. “I was really bad at networking before,” Shenouda recalls. Talk metrics. “Now I know how to get someone’s attention,” she says, adding that that looks like “talking about impact instead of just saying, ‘I want a job.’” Looking back at the elevator pitch that landed her her current role, the Gen Zer says she talked about her wins during a previous internship at Intel . Likewise, don’t be afraid to outline what you want following a conversation with a recruiter. “I’d always ask the specific question: if they can refer me (for a job), or if they have feedback based on my résumé, or my past interview experience with the company,” Shenouda adds. Want to know which metrics will stand out to the hiring manager at your dream job? Even those with hiring powers are people at the end of the day, with lives outside work.