I’m a recent master’s graduate living in Philadelphia. Although I have a job, it doesn’t pay my bills and is not reflective of the level of education I just spent time and money attaining. Although I’ve only had my degree for 4 months, I’ve been applying to jobs for over a year now. I’ve used my involvement and connections and as result I’ve had several interviews, but they hire the candidate with more experience. I am told I interview well and would be a good fit and have a lot to offer, though. So what am I doing wrong?

As my therapist reminds me every session, NOTHING. I’m not doing anything wrong. Most of us are not doing anything wrong. Our parents, older family members, and sometimes even acquaintances do not understand our generation’s challenge of expanded opportunities but limited job market, our millennial upbringing of being groomed to think we’re special and have bright futures but hitting the wall of over-educated and under-experienced. So these well-meaning family members offer unsolicited advice and uninspiring “shoulds” and “to dos.” Recently I received an email like this, and it did not encourage, support, inspire, or help me in the least. It frustrated me; it made me forget everything my therapist and I had worked on; it made me want to yell and cry and scream like a two year old. But I’m twenty-something, not two, so I blogged instead of temper tantrum-ed.

Things NOT to do to support your frustrated, under-employed, job-searching, recently graduated twenty-something:

• Don’t send us job postings from job sites.

We have these bookmarked on our computer AND smart phone browsers. We check them daily. Sometimes hourly. I get emails when new jobs are posted that match my interests/qualifications. If you found the job site, it’s likely it’s a common one we know about. If we’re interested/qualified, we’ve applied. If not, we haven’t. Sending us jobs from sites we already frequent is frustrating for us, and then we feel bad that you’re wasting your time trying to help (and our emotional energy is already spent on keeping ourselves sane, so we’ll have less patience to be able to say Thank You! instead of… something else).

•  Don’t tell us what we need/should be doing to “make it.”

We’ve networked. We’ve interviewed. We’ve followed up. We’ve looked beyond our comfort zone. We know what we need to do. And if we don’t, we know who to go to – our mentors, our trusted older professionals and supervisors, our connections on Linked-In who have third degree connections with somebody who knows someone in the office where we hope to work, and our successful peers we secretly hate for leaving us behind in the underemployed land they used to play with us in.

• Don’t ask us if we want you to review our resumes.

Again, thanks, but no thank you. We’ve got this on lock down, too. We’ve written our resumes, and rewritten them, and continue to improve them every job we apply to. If you are a well-established professional in our field, chances are we’ve already had you look over our resume. Additionally, most university graduates had to create and work on a resume during their college career. By the time I’ve graduated with my Master’s, my resume has gone through many hands, and if something was blatantly discounting my chances at getting interviews, I would have known by now.

So how can you help? Your intentions are pure. Your thought is appreciated. It just doesn’t actually come out that way through the above mentioned ways. You’ve given us a lot of tough love growing up, but right now, I’m afraid I have to tough love you back. Instead of offering us job search 101 advice, try these tactics. They’ll get your same underlying message of support across without causing more guilt, anger, and hopelessness on our end.

• Do offer to connect us to people you know well in the field.

Connections are how we get interviews. It’s the “who you ya know” thing. If you have a strong acquaintance or former colleague in the department/organization/company where we seek employment, let us know.

• Be mindful of our finances, without making it obvious.

I know I’m asking a lot in this post, but this one can be super-sensitive depending on individuals’ comfort level with discussing money matters. Despite our tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram shots that make it look like we’re having the times of lives living up our fabulous, fashionable lives gallivanting around in the city, we’re not (at least not as extravagantly as we try to portray). It’s likely we’re job searching for a position that can support us beyond our studio apartment with no cable tv and stealing internet from the neighbor who doesn’t put a password on the wifi. We owe our credit card companies for that drink we bought our friend on her birthday, and for the pair of shoes we had to get because you can’t wear flip flops after October above the Mason Dixon line. My parents have been incredible in helping finance my life during graduate school and, now, the post-grad job search  – they’ve paid for my flights home for the holidays and come up to visit me once a year and treat me to groceries and nice dinners out. If you can offer that, we’ll take you up on it. For holidays that include gift exchanges, suggest modifying that tradition. For birthdays or other days where you normally buy gifts, send us gift cards – it’s not impersonal, it’s not lazy, it’s vital to our survival. Gift cards for a local grocery store, Target (stay tuned for a blog post about this place), etc. are not only acceptable to us, they’re heaven-sent. We’ll let out a huge sigh and hug the envelope close.

• Ask us about the rest of our life stuff and things you know we enjoy.

Job searching can breed incredible amounts of stress. Talking about the job search can be just as exhausting. Ask us about our friends, our apartment, our new favorite yoga pose, our other hobbies and things that we do for fun, or that guy that we met last month (on second thought, maybe you shouldn’t ask us about our love lives, either). Help us focus on the positive things in our lives by directing our conversations toward things besides the job market. We’ll welcome the break from thinking too much about our future.

Maybe those are just rules for me. But I feel better now, and that’s the secret reason we start blogging anyway, right? Twenty-somethings, how do you survive the job search process? Did I miss anything? Good luck and stay positive. We won’t be sitting here reading blogs about job searching forever.  ~CkB