The College Works process for hacking the job hunt.

The most important thing you’ll do in your early twenties is start your career. While your college curriculum, extracurriculars, internships, and student jobs are all giving you the skills you need to thrive in the workforce, they aren’t teaching you the most critical thing: how to actually apply for jobs (and not lose your mind in the process).

At College Works, we’ve guided countless interns through the process of finding their first job after college graduation. Our unique approach is the result of the lessons Matthew Stewart, College Works’ CEO and Chairman, has learned over three decades of helping alumni begin their careers.

Here, we share Matt’s secrets—and our eight-step approach for nailing the job hunt. But before we do, let’s put down a couple of ground rules:

1. Your job hunt begins far before you ever look at job listings or hit “apply.” This system is designed around the concept of frontloading— the work you do before a task to make that task easier to complete.
2. With that in mind, we recommend starting this process as early as your freshman and sophomore years of college, and then ramping up your efforts as you get closer to graduation.
3. Everything is research! The earlier you start, the more time you have to understand yourself, the types of careers you’d thrive in, and the full scope of options you have available to you.
4. This system can also be used to find internships (like the College Works Student Professional Program) that will serve as resume builders and launching pads for your career.

Alright, with that out of the way, let’s get into it.

Step 1: Understand your personality

Your first job after graduation will teach you a lot—about your industry, your career path, and (perhaps most importantly) yourself. All of these are important lessons, and if you land a job that isn’t aligned with who you are, they can be painful ones. To avoid this, it’s important to understand the fundamental strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and fears intrinsic to your unique personality type. That way, you can begin your job search with a clear picture of the types of roles you’ll thrive in and the ones where you’ll struggle or become completely burnt out.

We recommend taking a DiSC personality assessment to get a better understanding of who you are and the types of professional environments you’re most likely to thrive in. To learn why—and to understand how to use your DISC personality type to choose the right career for you—check out our deep dive into the topic.

Step 2: Start wormholing to research careers

Wormholing is a term Matt coined to describe the best way to research career options: get lost on the internet. But wormholing is more than just the act of diving deep into learning about various careers, job types, and companies—it’s the philosophy that underpins our job search system. It’s strategic, methodological, and will allow you to find the exact right types of jobs to apply for when the time comes.

Here’s how to do it.

Schedule wormholing time

Think of the research phase of your career hunt as an independent study class. Set a time (we recommend wormholing in 60-minute blocks), put it in your calendar, and then allow yourself to dive into the research.

If you’re a freshman or sophomore, we recommend doing this monthly, while juniors should set aside time to wormhole weekly. As you get into your senior year, wormholing becomes even more important—during the fall semester, aim to spend about 5 hours a week researching careers, companies, and jobs so that you’re prepared to apply come spring.

Approaching the job hunt in this way will allow you to frontload a lot of the hard work (which is one of our biggest life hacks, no matter what you’re doing). By frontloading your job search, you give yourself plenty of time to do the research, learn the vocabulary and jargon of your target industries, and understand what’s new, all of which will give you a leg up on your peers—and a much better chance of landing a job.

Get lost…but take notes

The goal of wormholing is to follow what you’re interested in. Start by researching an industry that you might want to find a job in—then, if you come across another industry or job type you want to know more about, jump there and continue your research. The idea is to let yourself be surprised and open yourself up to industries, job types, and companies you’ve never heard of before. And the only way to do that is to allow things to flow naturally.

That said, wormholing is meant to be strategic. So take notes on what you’ve looked into and what you’ve learned. They’ll become invaluable to you later as you narrow down the types of roles you’d like to apply for.

Start broad, then get specific

The easiest way to begin wormholing is to start by looking at industries and paying attention to what interests you and what doesn’t. One of the best ways to do this is to search for things like “best jobs for [fill in the blank] major,” or “best jobs if I’m interested in [fill in the blank].” We recommend bouncing back and forth between Google searches, searching on YouTube or TikTok, and using AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity (more on that in a minute) to get information from as many different sources as possible. Spend a few hours reading and watching videos about the industries that you find, allow yourself to get lost in the possibilities, and take notes on anything you want to come back to later.

Once you’ve determined a few industries that spark your interest, start looking at career paths. There are thousands of different types of jobs in every industry, and it’s likely you only know the two flashiest. Look at entry, mid, and high-level jobs—read job descriptions and take notes on which mid- and high-level jobs seem like they align with your interests, personality, and skills. Then work backwards to understand the types of entry-level roles that will allow you to move into those more exciting positions.

From there, you can begin looking into specific companies. Research what they do, what their values are, what is going on in the news about them, and what jobs they seem to regularly hire for or currently have open.

Step 3: Take stock of your resources

It can be easy to feel like the job hunt exists entirely online, but what you have access to extends far beyond LinkedIn or Indeed. By starting your job hunt early, you can make the most of the resources available to you—and even strategically cultivate resources that could make all the difference down the line.

Here’s just a short list of the types of career resources you might have access to:

• Your university’s career center. Make use of this early and often! Start going to the career center as a junior, and visit early in your senior year.
• Job fairs. Look into job fairs hosted on campus, in your area, or even virtually, and go to as many as you can. Even if you’re not a senior actively applying for roles, going to career fairs can be a great place to discover new industries, companies, and even job types that you can research later.
• Alumni networks. If you’re a senior, we highly recommend joining your university’s alumni networks. There’s typically a fee to join (usually about $100), but it is a worthwhile investment— you’ll be able to go to events in your area and meet with alumni who may be the bridge you need to your dream job, or who can simply shed some light on a career you’re interested in.  If you’re a College Works employee or intern, we also highly recommend leveraging the College Works alumni network
• Personal networks. Don’t be afraid to lean on your friends and family as you’re searching for your career! These connections are hugely important, and you’ll find that most of the people you know will be more than happy to talk about their careers with you, provide recommendations, and support you however they can.
• Job listings and job boards. As you get ready to begin applying for jobs, identify the job boards and listing sites that the companies you’d like to work for use to post jobs.

Step 4: Set up informational interviews

Now that you’ve taken stock of the people you already have access to with careers you’re interested in, it’s time to start putting those connections to work. Reach out and ask if they’d be willing to do an informational interview with you, where you can learn more about what they do. If you’re a senior, we recommend aiming to do one informational interview a week.

These interviews are a great way to hear what it’s really like to work in a specific career, and, if you pull them off well, are a great way to deepen relationships with people who may be able to help you find a job down the road.

Tips for nailing informational interviews

• Be prepared. Research the person you’ll be interviewing in advance and have a list of questions you’d like to ask them on hand (or memorized).
• Build rapport. Informational interviews—while extremely useful–are meant to be casual. Be respectful, but keep the tone light, and focus on creating a genuine connection with the person you’re speaking with.
• Take notes. Don’t be afraid to jot down a few notes while you’re chatting with your interviewee! It can be easy to get swept up in the moment and feel like a conversation was extremely helpful—only to not remember key details or advice later.
• Say thank you. Sending a quick follow-up email thanking the person you interviewed for their time and asking to continue to stay in touch can go a long way. You’ll look professional, organized, and leave a lasting positive impression.

Step 5: Dial in your resume and cover letter template

By now, you should have a pretty good idea of the types of jobs you’d like to apply for when the time comes—that means you’re to create a resume and cover letter template that will give you the best chance at landing an interview. We’re about to dive into some tips for how to do just that, but remember: Use your resources! Setting up an appointment with a counselor at your college’s career center is a great way to polish up your resume and cover letter even further.

Resume writing tips

Good resumes contain more than just great work experience and extracurriculars. They’re also written strategically, formatted cleanly, and optimized for AI recruiting and screening tools. Here are our dos and don’ts for perfecting your resume.

Do:

• Use specific, active language and demonstrate results wherever possible.
• Prioritize including keywords that match those present in the job descriptions you’ve seen for the role you’re applying for (this will help your resume get picked up by AI tools!).
• Use organized, easy-to-scan formatting.
• Use consistent fonts, spacing, and colors.
• Highlight important information by bolding, underlining, or italicizing portions of the text (your notes from your wormholing exercises should help you determine what type of information is going to be most important to call out).
• List your experience in reverse chronological order (most recent first).
• If you have a lot of experience, prioritize including only the most relevant to your target role.
• Include your name, phone number, email address, and any specific contact information requested in the job posting.
• Include a one-sentence summary statement that hints at your personality to demonstrate culture fit.
• Double-check all spelling and grammar before submitting.
• Export your resume to a Word document, Google document, and PDF to ensure the formatting translates properly, no matter how your resume is opened.

Don’t:

• Use personal pronouns like “I” or “we,” which can eat space.
• Use narrative style.
• Abbreviate words or use slang.
• Rely on AI to write your resume*.
• Include a photo, your gender, or age.
• List your references.

*A note about AI: AI tools can absolutely be helpful when it comes to crafting your resume, but you should never rely on them to create a resume for you. Instead, we suggest plugging the description of the job you’re applying for into an AI tool and prompting it to call out the keywords most likely to be flagged by AI resume screeners. This list can then help you create versions of your resume that target specific jobs, roles, and companies, which can increase your chances of getting in front of a (human) hiring manager.

Cover letter writing tips

If your resume is where you list your experience and accomplishments, your cover letter is where you get to tell the story of your work experience so far. It’s a place where you can speak about your passions, interests, and show off why you’d be a good culture fit at the company you’re applying to work for.

Because of that, the best cover letters tend to be slightly more personalized than resumes—we recommend creating a few templates (for certain job types, certain types of companies, etc.) that you can quickly adapt when submitting applications.

Do:

• Include a header with your contact information (name, phone number, email).
• Address your cover letter to a specific person at the company you’re applying to.
• Include a personalized greeting.
• Use your opening paragraph to express your interest in the specific company and role you’re applying for.
• Use the body to demonstrate how your experience applies to this specific position (it is okay if you need two short paragraphs to do this) — this is where your notes from all of the hours you spent wormholing will come in handy!
• Use a final paragraph to highlight a key achievement, a transferable skill, or an anecdote that demonstrates why you’re right for the role.
• Format your cover letter consistently with your resume (use the same fonts, colors, etc.).
• Use language that shows off your personality, without being overly casual.
• Proofread before you submit.

Don’t:

• Address your letter using “To whom it may concern.”
• Create a cover letter that includes no specific information about the company you’re applying to work for.
• Write so much that your letter runs on two pages.
• Use overly generic language.
• Rely on AI to write your cover letter for you.

Step 6: Bundle job applications

After all of that work (we told you we were frontloading this process!), it’s finally time to start applying to jobs. Instead of sending applications in ad-hoc as you see roles you’re interested in, we recommend using an application system we call bundling.

Bundling consists of finding 10 well-researched job opportunities and applying to them all at once. This achieves a few things…

• It allows you to apply to similar roles at the same time, so you can minimize the amount of time you need to spend adapting your resume and cover letter for each application.
• It ideally means you’ll begin the hiring process for a few different opportunities at the same time, which will allow you to weigh offers against each other and avoid asking hiring managers to wait while you’re hoping to hear back from a different company.

If you’re a senior, we recommend preparing your first bundle of applications to time with the fall career fair hosted on your campus. Your university should share a list of companies attending the career fair in advance, so set aside some time to spend wormholing into the companies that will be there. Once you identify companies that you’re interested in working for, begin looking into job opportunities, tweaking your resume and cover letters to appeal specifically to those roles, and researching if you have any connections with people who are already employed there.

On the day of the fair, come prepared with those cover letters and resumes, and be prepared to drop them off with the representatives who are there to meet with students. We also recommend showing up with a few more general cover letters and resumes to drop off at companies you discover at the fair that may not have been on your initial list.

We recommend repeating this exercise again in the winter and the spring, as well as aiming to send out a bundle of applications to positions you’ve seen on online job boards at least once a month during the run-up to graduation.

Step 7: Practice interviewing

Don’t let your first interview be one for your dream job! Get used to the interviewing process—which can be nerve-wracking at the best of times—by conducting as many practice interviews as you can. Lean on family, friends, peers at your current job or internships, mentors, and even professionals in the industry you’d like to work in to help you sharpen your interviewing skills. If you can do this in a mix of virtual and in-person practice sessions, that’s even better.

It’s likely that your department or career center will also host practice interview days where students can get feedback from HR professionals and hiring managers about their interviews in real time. Do your best to sign up for at least a few of these early in your senior year so you can be confident and prepared when the time comes to interview for post-grad roles.

Step 8: Stay accountable

There’s no way around it: the job application process is a grind. Having a group of people helping you stay accountable every step of the way can be hugely helpful to keeping your eye on the prize—and your spirits up when rejections happen (because they inevitably will).

Find a few friends or peers who are as committed to hacking the job hunt as you are. Then, set up monthly accountability meetings where you can share what’s working, what’s not working, and help each other stay on track. Doing so can be the difference between graduating with your dream job offer in hand and struggling for months after getting your diploma to land a job.

Success is in session.

At College Works, we do more than just provide students with the internship opportunity of a lifetime. We’re dedicated to ensuring every one of our alumni leaves our program with the skills, knowledge, and confidence they need to succeed in whatever career path they choose.

If you’re a freshman, sophomore, or junior, now is the time to set yourself up for long-term career success. Learn more about how the College Works Student Professional Program can help you do just that here.