By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
Depending on who you talk to about the job application process, you’ll hear a tale of two markets.
On one hand, the prospects for seniors are as good as ever: with low unemployment across the country and a 92% success rate for Baylor graduates, some find that their dream job is just a few steps away. But for others, the job market is a heartless domain ruled by AI resume scanners, elusive recruiters and hundreds of dead-end applications.
Portland, Ore., senior Lucy Ray seems to have evidence for the first side of this story. A computer science student with a minor in environmental studies, Ray has developed passions for working with data and software as much as she has geology and earth sciences. During her summer internship in Exxon Mobil’s low-carbon solutions group, those interests perfectly intersected, just as they do in her data engineering role at Matador Resources, where she’ll join full-time after graduation this month.
For Ray, it is about as close to a dream job as she can get.
“I think it’s really cool to be able to assist a team of engineers in their data management or analysis,” Ray said. “Coupled with my passion for geology and environmental sciences, this industry allows me a unique opportunity to combine those things.”
According to the data, Ray is far from the only Baylor senior with a job lined up after graduation. Data from Baylor’s Career Center website shows that Baylor’s class of 2024 had a 92% success rate. Jeff Stubbs, a senior director in the Career Center, said that success rate is an average of the placement rate for students seeking full time jobs — which was 91% — and the enrollment rate for seniors who continue their education, which was 93%. That’s about seven points higher than the national average success rate of 85%, Stubbs said.
The numbers also show that these jobs are good ones. Baylor’s class of 2023 earned an average starting salary of $60,000 a year, which is competitive with the national average of about $64,000 for that year, especially when considering the cost of living in Texas, which Stubbs said is where most alumni work.
But there’s another side to this story, one that says the job market is far less welcoming for new graduates. Data from Career.io shows that every job posting has 118 applicants, which gives applicants a greater than 99% chance of filling out an application only to be rejected somewhere down the line.
And while Ray’s story is one of success, it also highlights some real issues in the job market. Ray’s internship, for example, did not exactly come easily for her.
“With Exxon, I started talking to their recruiting team my freshman year and landed that internship the summer after my junior year,” Ray said. “That’s kind of what it takes to show those companies that you’re really serious about the position they’re offering and to get them to even look at your resume.”
Ray said she spent over two years attending networking and professional events, all to land a role that she’d be in for three months. And on top of that, she wasn’t even guaranteed a full-time offer.
“Even though they really liked me, they were not able to guarantee a return offer,” Ray said. “I was told that in any normal year it would have been a slam dunk, an easy conversion to full time.”
While Ray did end up with a return offer later down the road, she had to turn it down because her fiancé had accepted a role in another city. After years of work for just one internship, rejecting the offer seemed incredibly risky, she said.
“It was such a hard thing to do with no other concrete job prospects,” Ray said.
Thankfully, Ray’s experience with Exxon led her to a role at Matador Resources. But her story hints at a challenge that job-hunters and career advisors have realized: that having the right skills is only one ingredient in a casserole of requirements.
“Just having good technical skills is not really enough to guarantee that you’re going to land an internship or job offer,” Ray said.
Failure to focus on the other parts of the job application process — networking, building an AI-proof resume and tailoring your experience to the roles you want — is a large reason why students get discouraged and can’t find positions, Stubbs said.
Stubbs also said those who apply “blindly,” meaning without a connection to someone at a firm or without a tailored resume, have significantly less success. Over 90% of blind applicants won’t even make it past the applicant tracking systems, which are AI resume reviewers that over 95% of businesses now use, according to Stubbs.
This information hints at why sentiment around the job market is so contrary to the data: there is a distinct line between the informed and connected applicants, whose information gets bumped to the top of the pile, and the blind applicants, who are lucky to even receive a rejection email.
But there are ways to overcome these challenges, all of which Ray did. Two years of networking was far from the only thing she did. Ray also met consistently with the Career Center team.
“I would set up appointments with the Career Center to review [my resume] just about every semester and do mock interviews,” Ray said.
Is all of this work for just one internship too much? Maybe. But, Stubbs said he believes the rules are not ours to change.
“If you know and understand the technology, I think it helps you,” Stubbs said. “We could sit there and say, why is [applicant tracking technology] available? But the why is not so important as knowing that they are using it. And if you have that information … you are at an advantage.”
