Joe is just finishing his first year at the full time MBA program at a prestigious Midwest university. He plans to use the MBA to change careers from a technical scientific field to investment research. All he lacks is a summer internship at the end of April! Joe is frantic.
Joe is a great guy: smart, hardworking and pleasant. He is also very shy.
Without a good summer internship, potential employers will question the validity of everything else Joe brings to the table.
And Joe knows this. “It is my own fault”, he says. He avoided the job search because all that networking made him uncomfortable.
He only started looking in February. Some other students had job offers by the time Joe got started. Joe is so uncomfortable that he did not even start a LinkedIn profile until February when his friends practically forced it on him. He only has about 40 connections.
As I told Joe, job search and networking make almost everyone uncomfortable. It is time to take the bull by the horn to salvage some kind of summer internship in the short time ahead.
We created a two phased plan. Phase 1 starts this weekend:
- Identify all the investment research companies outside of New York City where the cost of living is prohibitive. Joe will use LinkedIn, Google and the companies’ websites to research the companies.
- Find the people who can make hiring decisions. He will collect their contact information including email, phone numbers and street addresses.
- Create a cover letter to accompany his resume laying out his credentials and his interest in securing a summer internship. He will specify that he will contact the person to follow up in three days.
- Send as many of these letters as possible by Sunday night via snail mail. It is too easy for a recipient to overlook an email or disregard a text from someone they do not know. Regular mail is unusual these days so his overture will stand out. His letter might even get read.
- Over this weekend Joe will build his LinkedIn connections, reaching out to connect with as many people as he can including every one of his MBA colleagues. After all, what does it say about an investment researcher who has almost no LinkedIn connections?
Joe will allow three days for mail delivery then he will begin Phase 2 of this plan:
- Create a script outlining what he wants to say. This will help give Joe courage to say what needs to be said and remember his 3 main points in the flurry and stress of networking.
- Call each contact person on the telephone. Introduce himself, give a very brief overview of his background and ask to arrange a short in-person meeting about a summer internship.
- Follow up until he talks to each person on his list. Arrange time for interviews and coffee networking with anyone who is interested.
- If the person he talks to is not interested in offering an internship, Joe needs to solicit the name of someone else he can talk to.
This approach is not fool proof. Probably 10% of the people on his list will talk to him at all so his list needs to be large to start with.
One girl we know used this approach to obtain a summer internship as a mechanical engineer. She sent out 200 letters, got interest from 20 companies, interviewed at 10 companies and received 5 job offers. Of course, she started this process in January.
Joe needs to identify at least 100 companies to get the response he needs. It is a question of numbers.
Joe has his work cut out for him. Most of his colleagues will be finishing up final exams while Joe is conducting an intensive job search effort. Will it work? We will follow up with Joe in a few weeks to see what he is able to create for himself.
If you are reading this and would like to talk to Joe about a summer internship (he is AWESOME!) just contact me directly!!