The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-11-16)

© 2020 Dow Jones & Company. All Rights Reserved. ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, November 16, 2020 |A

R

eed Crowson was in the final

round of job interviews with a

financial-technology firm in

Denver this spring when he got

the call that is now familiar to the

Class of 2020: The company was

freezing hiring as it braced for the

economic impact of Covid-19.

“Your whole job search is just

set back to square one,” says Mr.

Crowson, who studied finance and

international business at the Uni-

versity of Colorado Boulder.

In May, as this year’s college

grads confronted a job market in

tatters, many schools turned to a

particular group for help: alumni.

The stakes are stark. Fifteen years

after graduation, college graduates

who entered the job market during

the early 1980s recession were

earning wages that were 2.5%

lower than graduates who didn’t

start out in a slowdown, according

to research by Lisa Kahn, a Univer-

sity of Rochester economist.

Colby College, a private liberal-

arts school in Waterville, Maine,

pledged to find a job, internship or

fellowship for every senior within

90 days of graduation by asking

alumni to hire them through its

Pay It Northward initiative, begun

this spring. University of Colorado

Boulder’s Leeds School of Business

joined with alumni and local busi-

ness leaders on a mentorship pro-

gram designed to help graduating

seniors find work. Over the past

six months, alums have stepped up

to make connections and offer ad-

vice on résumés, insight into in-

dustries, and encouragement to

network—a skill where many grad-

uates feel shaky.

While alumni networks have

sometimes been assailed for rein-

forcing sameness in hiring at a time

when many companies are striving

to diversify, alums often facilitate

new connections, rather than mak-

ing actual hires themselves. Not all

colleges are soliciting alumni help

in job-searches, and efforts vary

among schools that do tap such

networks.

After that disappointing phone

call, Mr. Crowson decided to rethink

his job search, focusing more on

reaching out to people on LinkedIn

and less on submitting applications

online. When he learned about CU

Boulder’s alumni-mentorship initia-

tive, which launched in May, he ap-

plied and was matched with Jeremy

Frenkel, a 2012 graduate of the

school who now works in invest-

ment management.

Together they brainstormed a

list of companies where Mr. Crow-

son was interested in working—and

where Mr. Frenkel might be able to

connect him with an employee.

Through the process Mr. Crowson

landed an interview for a financial

analyst role at HomeAdvisor, a site

that connects homeowners and

service providers. The company

hired him in August.

GETTY IMAGES Mr. Frenkel urges recent grads

Many members of the Class of 2020 have faced challenging job searches.

PERSONAL JOURNAL.

CAREERS&LEADERSHIP

Job Seekers

Tap Alumni

During the

Pandemic

BYKATHRYNDILL

he temporarily moved back home

from his college fraternity house

amid the pandemic. “It was like,

well, I guess I’m gonna get opti-

mized,” he says.

When the coronavirus dashed

Diana C. Nearhos’s original plans

for a 200-person July wedding at a

resort on Cape Cod, it was her sis-

ter, Steph Nearhos, who kicked

into high gear, taking the reins in

planning a last-minute backyard

soiree for immediate family. A con-

sultant for PwC in Boston, Steph

assigned “deliverables,” like the

cocktail-hour charcuterie board, to

Diana’s future in-laws, and cri-

tiqued the pace of Diana’s walk

down the aisle during the re-

hearsal. Oh, and the music re-

quired feedback, too.

“Which one of you owns press-

ing play on the speaker?” she

shouted to the groom’s family.

“My mother kept giving me

death glares,” Steph recalls. “I was

like, ‘You just have to trust me, I’m

making it better.’ ”

Diana, a sportswriter, says she’s

grateful for Steph’s help and orga-

nizational skills. She was so high

on newlywed bliss at the day-after

brunch that she doesn’t even re-

member Steph initiating a discus-

sion with the group about what

they could improve next time.

Some experiments in bringing

new work techniques home during

the pandemic have flopped. Sarah

Elk, a Chicago-based partner at

Bain & Co., and co-author of the

book “Doing Agile Right,” em-

ployed kanban boards, a staple of

agile management, to keep four of

Pleaseturntothenextpage

FROM TOP: ILLUSTRATION BY JON KRAUSE; LINDSAY MANN; KILEIGH HOLMES

WORK

& LIFE

RACHEL

FEINTZEIG

Steph Nearhos, top right,

and Diana C. Nearhos.

Ren Herring, far left, and

Brett Holmes.

to overcome their hesitation to

network, which he says has been

essential to his own career. “The

further I got out of college, I felt

like I developed that network and

I’m comfortable sharing those con-

nections,” he says.

Almost 700 alumni, parents, and

friends of the college came forward

after Colby put out its initial re-

quest in May, highlighting existing

internships and job openings as

well as many opportunities they

had created specifically for this

year’s graduates. Colby President

David A. Greene says in a typical

year, about 95% of members of the

roughly 500-member graduating

class have a job or internship or

are headed to grad school by about

six months after graduation. Cur-

rently, roughly 10% of Colby’s 2020

grads are still looking for their first

opportunity.

Alumni can help

job-seekers make

connections inside

companies. They

also can help them

stay motivated in a

punishing climate.

Kevin Muñoz says he

graduated from

Colby in May feeling

confident about his prospects, but

his self-esteem waned as he applied

for about 100 jobs and received re-

jection after rejection.

Through Pay It Northward he

connected with about a dozen al-

ums in different industries who of-

fered everything from mock inter-

views to insight into the tech

industry, where Mr. Muñoz was

looking for a job. The Colby pro-

gram connected Mr. Muñoz with

digital identity-verification com-

pany IDmission, which hired him

in October as a solutions consul-

tant onboarding clients. The com-

pany’s CEO, Ashim Banerjee, is the

father of a current Colby senior.

Mr. Banerjee says working di-

rectly with the college to find ap-

plicants has made him reconsider

his company’s hiring process,

which previously consisted primar-

ily of posting on job sites. “We’d

get flooded with responses and

mostly by the time you started

wading through [applicants], you’d

give up and look for someone who

knew somebody.”

In many cases, a friendly con-

versation with an alum can help

grads shine in a way they might

not in other settings. After four

years as a pre-med student at

Rice University, Simi Rahman de-

cided during her senior year that

she didn’t want to

become a doctor.

She began think-

ing about how to

package her sci-

ence background

and research ex-

perience. Through

LinkedIn, she

reached out to Ian

Akash Morrison, a

2013 Rice graduate who had co-

founded a campus start-up acceler-

ator. She thought an encouraging

conversation would be the end of

their interaction, but a few days

later he called to say that the con-

sulting firm he had founded, Optio

Ventures, was looking for an ana-

lyst. “In March, even in September,

none of this seemed possible to

me,” says Ms. Rahman, who landed

the job and began this month. “I

just kind of needed a chance.”

Recent graduates

are encouraged to

build their careers

through networking.

G

rounded from his typical

weekly travel during the

pandemic, consultant

Ren Herring has taken

on a new project: opti-

mizing his life.

Holding court at the red break-

fast table in his Yarmouth, Mass.,

kitchen, armed with a laptop, the

36-year-old has led daily 8:30 a.m.

stand-up meetings with his part-

ner, Brett Holmes. They’ve covered

topics like how to handle the sand

that keeps getting tracked in from

the driveway and who takes the

dog for his morning walk.

Evenings are often spent rear-

ranging furniture: “Literally no

room is the same,” Mr. Herring

says. They also delve into hairy

problems like why, after multiple

meetings devoted to the subject,

Brett still can’t remember to put

his keys in the escalating series of

containers they’ve tested out by

the front door.

And any moment is a good time

for real-time feedback, or RTF, as

Mr. Herring, who works at Price-

waterhouseCoopers, calls it. A re-

cent evening spent executing a

steak tostada recipe together re-

quired numerous pauses for RTF

on topics like cleaning the cheese

off the grater more quickly.

“I’ve just brought the way I work

with the clients and the way I work

at PwC into our house,” Mr. Herring

she calls an in-service to her hus-

band each time she rearranges the

kitchen and closets, which is fre-

quently. About six months after

she began the debriefings, he fi-

nally asked her what the heck an

in-service meant.

“I had to tell him they’re little

small mini-meetings where you

learn new information.

The new information

was, ‘Where’s the

salt?’ ” she says.

Then again, the only

thing worse than get-

ting an in-service might

be not getting one.

“I’ll come down at

night to try to get a

snack and I’m looking

for plates for 10 min-

utes,” says Ms. Dem-

kowski’s son, Drew, 21.

It’s annoying in the mo-

ment, he adds, but she

does always seem to

manage to find more optimal spots

for cups and pans.

His mother once printed him

copies of the timesheets she uses

with clients so he could record

hourlong intervals spent on video-

games and homework. He wasn’t

surprised to find she had lots of

feedback for him this spring when

says. “It works for me.”

“I think that Brett

sometimes wants to lock

me outside,” he adds. “I

think that’s fair.”

We’ve all had some

trouble adjusting to more

time at home. But perhaps

no one is wreaking more

havoc than the suddenly

stationary consultant, used

to soaring off to businesses

in need each Sunday to

Thursday. There, their ad-

vice was appreciated and

they were well-compen-

sated for it. Now, unable to

hop a plane to Cincinnati to

wander around a client site

in search of synergies,

many are turning their

skills on the ones they love.

“We live it. We can’t

turn it off. It’s not something that

you say, OK, today I’m not going to

be a consultant,” says Julia Dem-

kowski, who runs her own firm,

Stanford Management Consulting,

in Fredericksburg, Va.

She’s been on a mission to max-

imize efficiencies at home for

years, administering something

They can’t jet off to make clients more efficient, so

they’re channeling their energy into their loved ones

The Consultant

Home Takeover