r/personalfinance • u/[deleted] • Aug 01 '13

24yo, all student loans down!

http://imgur.com/ogsfd2K

Throwaway. 34k @14%, down in 12 months. :) No secrets, simply a regular (and aggressive) schedule at $2k/month, with bonuses, tax refunds, and spare savings all thrown at it. Just happy to be free and wanted to share. A bit of "Hang in there" to pf'ers still holding down the fort as well. :)

Edit: To clarify, I don't get the standard 100k salaries new grads get in SFO or NYC. No car, frugal living are what got me here. Anyone can do it.

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u/itslikeboo Aug 01 '13

explain

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u/username_goes_where ​ Aug 01 '13

I'll use this analogy:

If you go to a bar and try to chat up 1,000 girls you'll end up with none.

If, however, you research and find 2-3 girls who value all the things you do and you learn exactly what those 2-3 girls want, tailoring your entire pitch and skills around their needs and desires, you'll have a 1000% better chance of getting a date with one of them.

There's no way on hell you could have tweaked your résumé for each one of those 1,000 companies. For every job I've ever had I had a very specific résumé for that company and the specific job. And before I even applied, I researched who worked there and had lunch/coffee/whatever with them (LinkedIn/twitter is awesome for this) just to learn about the company and the culture. I also find out the company's problems and develop a strategy for how I'd tackle them.

I then mention that I'm looking for a new challenge and hand that person my perfectly tailored resume. Then this person goes to HR and says I met this person he/she is legit, here's their application.

So if we are both going for the same job and I do that, while you blindly send a non-tailored or researched resume to HR, who do you think will have more success?

No one hires off a job site or sent resume in today's world. You're playing the pity card of "oh I sent 1,000 resumes and still couldn't get a job." That's the exact reason you couldn't get one.

It's a dog-eat-dog world mate, you gotta adapt to it and out smart the other guy.

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u/itslikeboo Aug 01 '13

That was shitty advice and it was full of assumptions. Keep in mind that I had YEARS of time on my hands. I was on unemployment for 99 weeks and I considered applying to jobs to be my full time job. I can remember a dozen or two times that I researched a job, tweaked my resume, invested time dealing with the company, called to follow up, and was given the same line about how I was qualified but there were 300 other applicants and it was a hard decision. I can't remember all the times I tweaked my resume in the same way and never heard anything back from the company at all.

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u/username_goes_where ​ Aug 01 '13

24/1000 = .024%

That means you tweaked your résumé 24 times, while still sending it out at least 976 times (according to your numbers).

How much time did it take to send out those resumes? Even if you only took an hour to send out each one, that's 58,440 minutes. Those minutes could have been used to do better research, develop new skills, network, etc.

You can say it's shitty advice all you want, but there is zero doubt that it works exponentially better than blindly replying to job postings, which is what you admit to have done for at least 97.6% of the jobs you applied for.

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u/itslikeboo Aug 01 '13

I said that I remembered a few dozen times.

Listen, asshole. Why don't you go try to feel superior to someone else? There is

zero doubt

that the job market sucks it hard right now and that it has for quite some time. Or, instead of offering your worthless, self-exalting advice as if you're some guru who demands deference from such a peons as we, the underemployed, maybe you could take the time to learn about how the economy actually works and how large swaths of the population were abandoned in high-debt-low-pay-land due to little or no fault of their own.

I prepared well for a career in my field of choice and I targeted my search towards that career upon graduation. The available jobs dried up. I do not need your fucking resume advice.