In this episode, we are going to talk about my experience getting a job in the food industry as a senior in college. Everyone has a different experience, but mine might relate to yours. (Yes, the picture is photoshopped) If you would like to listen to more of our episodes, make sure to check out our itunes link. If you like them, we would love it if you could rate and review. Thanks! Key Takeaways Best techniques and resources for resume/CV writing One of the best types of advice I received is to focus on the job description Why it might be beneficial moving to a new city What we talk about Waco Texas Career Centers Carl's Jr Foodgrads' top 3 tips for landing your first job What color shirt should you wear for job interviews? Cactus Section IFT (for example) Transcript For some background information, I was very involved in my department in Cal Poly and in my junior year, I received my first internship offer in Fall quarter. So about this internship, all I can tell you is that it was a very well-known company but it was one of those well-known companies which own EVERYTHING. So lucky me, I got the internship, was super excited and then I was sent to Waco Texas for a job…at a slaughter house. As much as I like seeing turkeys getting beheaded and getting half off on deli meat, I found the work a bit unsatisfying and the town unenjoyable. I guess I did the work well enough that I got a job offer, but I had to decline due to the fact that I really didn’t like the location. I came back to college to start a new. So with this background, I thought I would get a job pretty easily. Given that I got my first internship in the Fall. I was wrong, but I didn't give up. Of course I didn’t give up, I needed a job! I started to apply to jobs seriously on January giving me a 6 month time bomb before I graduated. Getting a job before graduating is a good goal everyone should attain and my advice is to actually start at Fall. But the main reason you should start at Fall is to review and renovate your resume. Your resume is your written sales infographic that lets you convince people you are great. The best part of a resume is that you can tell in a black and white fashion if it's working or not. If you get hits, your resume is working. If you're not, then you need some help. Once I realized I wasn't getting hits in late-Fall, I went to some FREE resume seminars offered at our career center and signed up to get my resume looked at. The improvements were tremendous and I would highly suggest doing this first if you are serious about getting a job...which you should be. During this, I busted out 2 resumes: a 1 page resume which explains a quick, basic rundown on skills that show I'm a valuable person and a 2 page resume (front and back) where I listed a run down and on the back, posted project summaries if they were more interested. The career center lady justified that it was ok to have a 2 pager just because I was involved in a lot of stuff. So there are two types of resumes people look at. If you're in a supervisory role, people judge your ability to be a leader and how to be proactive. This is in general a very important skill but should be highlighted when you apply to leadership type of positions such as a supervisor The second 2 page resume was highly technical and talked about amazing projects such as product development competitions and microbiological labs. I found this resume to be very effective with product development and R and D roles. Both of these got amazing hits and next thing I knew, the next 6 months were literally traveling 4 hours each way to interview with companies of all shapes and sizes. Almost every month, I had 2 in-house interviews that caused me to travel far. This is also where I learned the magic of reaching out and sleeping at old friend's couches and catching up for the weekend from family members to old high school friends, I thank them so much for letting me stay over just for a job interview. I think phone interviews and in-house are relatively the same and you need to learn to say digestible and relate-able experiences to your manager. The only difference is that youa re in person and they visualize you as a good fit for the company don’t judge you based off of words alone. My advice is that every time you need to answer a question, you need to answer with a story of why what you did is relatable. Remember to keep it decently short and always end with a loop around in which answers the question. I think it's wise (or should I say, inevitable) that your job search is going to be very specific and if you keep on not getting jobs, your horizons will be broader and broader. I started with specifically product developer jobs and I didn't get very many hits. After a month or so, I had some anxiety about the situation and started to tenaciously apply to jobs outside of my scope, but stayed in the realm of the food industry. There were certain barriers I wanted to not touch, namely it can't be in a rural town (unless it's close to people I know like my grandparents) and it had to be food related (duh! I got my degree for a reason!). I think it's good to have some standards no matter what when applying for jobs. So you really need to ask first: what's important to you? So let's see, in the course of 6 months, I traveled a lot. From my comfy San Luis Obispo home, and traveled everywhere from San Francisco, the whole Bay Area, Los Angeles, Carpenteria, Fresno, other rural towns, and of course, Arizona. In some weekends, I had to plan an interview Friday and Monday so I slept over at a friend's house for the weekend. Fun stuff. And these companies were big and small. Off the top of my head, they ranged from all sorts of jobs in all sorts of industries. Production, Quality, Research and Development mainly and in such industries as meat, bread, cheese, spices, coffee, and other things like that. One of my favorite interviews that I really was devastated I missed was a job at Carl's Jr's headquarters near the beach at Carpenteria California. I crushed the interview and was a shoe in to become a food technologist and make fast food all day. I had a lead with a technologist to whom I sent in my resume and got an interview with the Vice President of R and D. Unfortunately, I lost out to a more experienced candidate. That set me back emotionally for a while. My least favorite interview was a noodle factory in Los Angeles where the interviewers made rude, snarky comments about my intelligence. It looked like a dump anyways. The more jobs I interviewed, the more depressed, the more irritable I became. My self-worth was crushed but I had to keep going or else my pride would be shattered, right? I cared so much about my reputation and comparing myself to my peers what I became very paranoid and looking back at it, I was stupid. Everyone who gets a job has this problem but in reality, I have to say, no one cares if you don't get a job, but people will care when you do. And that's something positive. I think the pivot happened in how things were going when I talked to my mentor/ department head about why I didn't have a job yet and he said something that I took into action: 100% of the focus in the interview needs to be tailored to them. And in hindsight, this was the reason I didn't get the job. I wasn't focused 100% on what they wanted, I focused on what I wanted and why I should be chosen. I had two more interviews next week. One in California and one in Arizona. The first one was in California for a Quality Supervisor role, the one interviewing me was a tough guy and really grilled me. He told me to memorize the 5 commandments of the company which I had to memorize on the 3 hour car ride over. I did it, and he was very impressed. The interview was very tough as well, his questions were extremely specific and his stare down was intense. After a tour of the factory, we went to the quality department and talked about how he treated his team like family. That is where I realized... I probably got the job. The next was a flight to Arizona to a granola bar factory which hadn't even been built yet. I interviewed with the Vice President of Innovation and we really got into talking with the spirit of innovation. I think my personality won him over more than anything. And maybe its because I fit the bill. The position was for a Food Processing Technologist, a type of in-house research and development position that was open to a lot of possibilities because it was a brand new plant. I got both of them. And had to choose which one to choose. By now, maybe you know which one. Or not. So now this was also really hard. I could either stay close to my friends if I lived in California, or go to a place where I knew absolutely no one. Actually, let me list out the advantages and disadvantages of each: The quality job had better pay, it was in California in between San Luis Obispo and my grandparent's place in Fresno, I could see my friends often and my family as well. However, the job wasn't what I wanted: an R&D job, it was in the middle of nowhere, and I realized if the salary I was offered was worth working 6 days a week for 10 hours in the summer. The job in Arizona was more of a gamble, because I was letting go of being comfortable to land to somewhere uncomfortable. People kept on telling me that it was super conservative and super hot, which scared me. It's tough, people are always scared of the unknown. But the job was a foot in the door for s...