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.
One event in particular stood out: Online Marketing Rockstars in Hamburg. “It’s a really well-known marketing and sales conference in Germany,” Shenouda recalls.
“I graduated in marketing and was looking to get into sales, so it was just the perfect place where the decision-makers I was looking to target were going to be,” she explains. “People were even flying in from the U.S., so it was a good networking opportunity.”
With that in mind, Shenouda volunteered to clean up glasses at the conference to gain free entry, and traveled over six hours from Cologne to Hamburg by train with a stack of résumés in hand.
During her breaks at the conference, Shenouda put her CV in front of 30 to 40 faces, with the premise that she was looking for feedback on it—while secretly hoping her bold approach would impress just one recruitment manager. And after a six-month hiring process, it paid off.
“I was one of the only graduates at the conference, and so it was full of opportunities for me,” the 29-year-old adds. “I got insight into my résumé, developed a lot of relationships face-to-face (and that was far more effective than networking online) and got my application kick-started for a couple of positions.”
One of those positions was in the sales graduate scheme at LinkedIn, where Shenouda worked until 2014, climbing to the role of implementation consultant in Dublin. Now, she’s got a coveted spot at Google—and it’s all thanks to volunteering to waitress where the recruiters were at, instead of waiting for a callback.
“When you’re a graduate you think everyone’s going to say yes to you and things are going work out. But it’s a matter of building up resilience,” she advises unemployed grads.
“You need to keep reassessing your process so that every no gets you closer to that next yes.”
Target the employers that rejected you
There’s a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time, but Shenouda took a more targeted approach than just hoping to bump into her future employer.
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.”
How to convert networking into a job offer
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.
Shenouda says she showed her CV to around 200 recruiters across a handful of conferences before having any luck.
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:
1. Talk impact
Don’t worry if promoting yourself to strangers doesn’t come naturally. “I was really bad at networking before,” Shenouda recalls. Her biggest tip? 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.
2. Listen
Want to know which metrics will stand out to the hiring manager at your dream job? Ask them.
“Always focusing your elevator pitch on the other person,” Shenouda says.
It may sound counterintuitive to use the few minutes you have to pitch yourself to turn the attention on the recruiter’s needs—but it’s a surefire way to closely align your message with what they’re looking for.
“If they say they’re looking for people who can achieve something like a particular project, make sure you’re speaking that language,” Shenouda advises.
3. Foster friendships
Even those with hiring powers are people at the end of the day, with lives outside work.
While getting straight down to business may be beneficial in the short term, for long-term alliances, it’s better to forge meaningful connections.
“It’s not just about networking,” Shenouda notes. “It’s about making friends, because that’s how you get people to support you.”
It’s why she recommends connecting with the people you’ve met on social media, while your face and name are still fresh in their minds—but don’t be a stranger.
Shenouda is still in touch with a Facebook recruiter that she met at a careers event seven years ago and bonded with over their mutual affinity for weightlifting.
“The key to any career success is always the relationships you have—that is why I have always prioritized networking outside of the traditional job-hunting method.”
A version of this story originally published on April 13, 2024.
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