Top skills college grads need to get hired

College degree, check! Now you may think that you’re all set to land your dream job with your brand new degree, but there are a few skills you might want to pick up or at least be aware of before scheduling your first few interviews.

Below you’ll find the top 5 most sought-after skills that hiring managers and employers will look for from your graduating class. If you’re hunting for that entry-level job right now, read on to learn more about what skills are desired and, more importantly, how to position yourself to obtain them.

5 Skills Employers Look for in New Grads

Adaptability

Some might call this problem-solving or flexibility, but we’ll refer to this skill as adaptability. Whether you’re in a small startup or a Fortune 500 company, you may look back at your weekly To-Do list and recognize that your focus is completely different from just a few months ago. Times change, tactics change, marketing channels change, and a great employee will take the learnings from one channel and apply them to a new one that the company deems as more important. Projects can pop up, and you may have to drop everything you’re great at to support an all-hands team effort to solve a problem. Maybe your company has been marketing on Facebook since 2009 and has now put you in charge of all TikTok marketing operations. Projects will always change, team, resources, channels, and priorities therefore, as these natural flows of a high-paced work environment affect your role — your hiring company will try to see if you’re willing to adapt to the change and become a true resource to the team. Don’t resist change, don’t be afraid to learn new things.

Technical Skills

It’s no surprise that entry-level careers have begun to become extremely unrealistic, with some employers asking for entry-level roles to require 3-5 years of experience. Trust us, we think this is crazy too. But there is one way to truly separate yourself from the rest of the applicants, and that’s by showing some technical skills. Take a look at a few job descriptions of the roles you’re targeting at different companies. What tools do they use, what’s the project or channels you’ll spend the most time on, and what jargon should you be aware of? Getting a head start by being familiar with their tool stack or at the very least industry-specific terms will help you stand out as someone they have to spend less time training. Additionally, if you’ve written “expert in copywriting” or “expert in Photoshop” on your resume, make sure that you’ve at the very least read a few books, watched a few tutorials, or have done some freelance work to be able to explain how you would approach the role. For example, if we’re hiring a marketing specialist, we’d strongly lean towards someone who has at the very least used all of the tools we use on a daily basis, such as Facebook ads manager, TikTok ads manager, Canva, Mailchimp, etc.

Strong Work Ethic

No matter what industry you’re in, there is a surefire way to quickly become a rockstar at your company — to have a strong work ethic. Best of all, you require absolutely zero job experience to demonstrate a strong work ethic. Showing up on time, being committed to high-quality work, and continually trying to improve will certainly make you stand out amongst all of the quiet quitters on the team. We must mention this before moving on to the next skill however when you enter a new role, you’ll probably be excited to prove yourself, to push yourself, and to work every hour of the day to move up the ladder faster. One piece of advice for those ultra-ambitious ones is to make sure to maintain balance. There’s nothing worse than to set a blistering pace during your first six months, to the point where you burn out and when handed a tough project to spearhead, you simply can’t perform close to your previous speed. Your team will notice and wonder what happened. Make sure to be a strong contributor, but don’t work every hour of the day, work weekends, and never take vacation days (even if you just stay at home). Take some PTO, enjoy your weekends, and crush any task given to you within normal working hours.

Initiative

Another skill that every single hiring manager looks for is someone with initiative. Being proactive in the workplace is taking on a side project that no one has time to learn and becoming the go-to person for all things SEO or Web flow design. Someone who goes above and beyond to teach themselves and take on additional tasks is a team's dream. Sometimes there are opportunities that the team isn’t even thinking about just yet, but you bring an idea to the table that becomes a core feature of the business — now you’re bringing value to the team. We’ve all heard the saying before in the workforce, but becoming an employee that’s impossible to let go is someone who contains all of these traits. If you become indispensable to your company, your trajectory within the company will be fast-tracked, and if they don’t promote you quickly, you will process enough skills to switch to another role with this newfound knowledge that you’ve been exposed to.

Analytical Skills

Critical thinking is a topic covered in college, but how well do you gather and evaluate knowledge — and sort through all of that information to pull out valuable insights to make better decisions? Think about designing an app, analytical skills will lead you to A/B test designs and flows of the app to see which one performs better with the user. A similar example can be pulled from social media — you can post 30 posts per month, but which posts are performing best and why? How can you improve? Should we focus more on one channel? How can we measure where most of our power users are coming from? These are all very real questions that you will be faced with, and knowing which metric matter most to your business will be imperative to know. During the interview process, try to understand what’s the business's #1 metric for success.