Five Months as a Corporate Internal Recruiter

I just finished 5 months working in-house for a global insurance company. I worked on filling their open marketing positions which included digital marketing, branding, analytics, corporate communications and product marketing.

It was an enlightening experience in many ways but the reason I'm writing about it here at Collegegradjobsearch, is to say to you: there are jobs available with only a limited amount of experience--if it's the right experience. And even more to the point, this is experience that you could get during internships, working on campus, or just stuff you help people with over the summer.

The skills I'm specifically talking about are: SEO, CSS, JAVA, webtrends among others. The group that I supported did hire (and would have hired more if I could have found them), recent college grads that had these skill sets.

How could you have found them?
1. do you check corporate career sites? do you check ads on Linked In? What you should be looking for is either "Entry Level" (obviously) or 2-3 years experience.
2. have the ability to relocate for these jobs. We posted an entry level marketing position in our offices in CT and got very few applicants. How can this be when there are tons of unemployed job seekers and an open entry level marketing position? Figure out how to move for a year or two so you can be the one to get this valuable experience.

So what can you learn from this? If you have the right skill set and it says 2 years, apply for it. It means that the company is open to very junior people and they hire someone junior and  good if they can get the salary low enough that makes sense financially. And don't just apply. Find someone who knows someone and get someone to give you a positive word. Dig in and see if an ad is posted for the position. Is the internal recruiter listed? I always had my email address posted with ads but I didn't get any direct inquiries. Show me you're aggressive.

Can you move for that great entry level job? The CT office isn't in a high rent area. Could you move so you could get the experience?

I'll be coming back to my blog progression soon, but I wanted to write about these few things before I forgot about them.