Online job applications are a waste of time: reality or myth?

Online job applications

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

Filling out online job applications is tedious. Have you been applying to jobs online without ever having any luck? Hear out my personal experience to decide for yourself.

I moved to the United States in 2014 and enrolled in the M.B.A program at Leavey School of BusinessSanta Clara University, a year later. The pressure of finding the right internship began much sooner than I expected. Two months in and a lot of peers already knew what kind of an internship or full-time job they were after. Peer pressure was on full swing.

Because I was an international student, getting a summer internship early on was critical in completing the necessary paperwork and meeting the university deadlines.

Unsure of what kind of role would be best for me, I started applying, nevertheless. For two weeks, I spent an hour applying to jobs every day. I received rejection through emails that sounded automated, almost within two days of each of the submissions. In the following weeks, my number of applications increased, and so did the number of rejection emails. The pressure continued to build up.

In the next quarter, I focused on what I love and my strengths. Although I got my first internship via a networking event organized at my school campus (more on this in the upcoming posts), I learned a lot in the process through all the things that I was doing wrong when applying online.

Before you lose faith in online applications, watch this 3-minutes video to know what happened next 🙂

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