How I used coffee chats to secure my dream job
I graduated with a mediocre 3.0 GPA and no relevant internship experience (spent every summer doing labor work). In my last semester of school I was applying to jobs online and got zero traction from that. I moved to a new city when I graduated and formulated a job hunt plan (with the help of this forum).
In total I sent 200-300 cold emails and went on over 30 coffee chats. I tracked this all in an excel file and I added everyone I had a coffee chat with on LinkedIn, once I had a bigger LinkedIn network and the people I emailed saw mutual connections I had a much higher response rate.
2 months after graduating I secured a job in real estate development, my dream industry (I got lucky - 2 months is very quick). Real estate is extremely network based and networking is the only way I could have broken in with such a mediocre GPA.
I wrote a guide about how I did it, that includes the following:
- How to track your progress
- Writing a great cold email (with sample scripts)
- Preparing questions and conversation topics for your coffee chat
- Coffee chatting and the importance of having questions
- Writing a thank you note that leaves a good impression
The guide is almost 5000 words which is overkill but I wanted to share what I did to secure my dream job with coffee chats. Hopefully this will help people that want to use coffee chats to help break into a new industry or find a new job.
