985 postgraduates, challenge the 2024 involution employment season

However, in the public’s mind, postgraduates who graduated from 985 and 211 seem to be more competitive because of their academic advantages.

So, what is the real situation? Yidu Pro found that many 985 and 211 graduate students who just graduated and started working this year had more than one offer in hand at the end of the autumn recruitment. They seem to have choices, but the road to finding a job is not without sadness.

Graduates from 985 and 211 universities may be more popular if they are in core positions in hot industries, such as technical positions in the AI ​​large model industry, but this is only a small part. The vast majority of graduate students looking for jobs may have a deeper understanding of the ruthlessness of the market.

Under the current economic situation, many people feel that individual efforts and hard work are insignificant and difficult to cope with the overall situation, so “lying down and waiting” becomes a wise choice.

But these 985 and 211 graduate students who are just about to enter the society have no chance to rest easy. In the months of autumn recruitment, they need to constantly adjust their expectations and adapt to the environment.

01 Some people rejected offers from big companies to join foreign companies, while others moved all their staff to join state-owned enterprises

At this time last year, Mindy, a graduate student majoring in journalism and communication at a 985 university in Shanghai, had just gone all in on the autumn recruitment rush.

As for the autumn recruitment, Mindy did not have a clear direction at the beginning, so she chose to apply for jobs everywhere, using the Internet and fast-moving consumer goods industries where she had worked during her internship as an anchor, and then continuously expanding to more industries as the autumn recruitment progressed.

During the three or four months of autumn recruitment, Mindy submitted at least 150 resumes, trying everything from Internet companies to state-owned enterprises and foreign companies, and entered the interview stage with twenty or thirty companies.

Also in September last year, Jin Xi, a graduate student at a 211 university in Beijing, began his journey of campus recruitment, and from the very beginning he focused on state-owned enterprises.

By the end of the autumn recruitment season, Jinxi had received several offers, all of which were from central state-owned enterprises. He finally decided on a state-owned enterprise and started working there this summer.

When confirming their final destinations after graduation, Jin Xi discovered that all six people in the dormitory would end up working for state-owned enterprises.

Although the starting points and ideas are different, the Internet industry, which was popular in previous years, now seems to be losing its luster.

When Mindy was choosing among the seven offers, she did not select a large Internet company, even though the total salary package offered by one of the large Internet companies had reached 400,000 yuan, which was already at a relatively high level among the salaries of liberal arts graduates.

However, after comprehensively considering the happiness index, cost-effectiveness, and balance with life at work, Mindy finally gave up the job in a large company that required more overtime and 24-hour standby, and instead chose a foreign company.

02 In the past two years, even 985 masters have to adjust their expectations when looking for jobs

Regardless of their final destination, after the autumn recruitment season, many 985 and 211 graduate students looking for jobs can receive multiple offers. But in fact, the road to autumn recruitment is also a process of constantly adjusting expectations.

First of all, there is a general understanding among 985 and 211 graduate students that they can no longer compare the current job market with the situation in previous years.

For example, for graduates of business and management majors, it was not particularly difficult to enter securities companies or banks after graduation. If you follow a good project in an investment bank, you may even have the opportunity to earn a million yuan a year in the first few years after graduation; while banks mean stable income and generous benefits.

But now, the trend of salary cuts among securities firms is still spreading, and recruitment has also slowed down. The demand for employment has decreased, but the number of people submitting resumes has increased instead of decreased. Taking Minsheng Securities as an example, its human resources director once said that the number of resumes submitted in the autumn recruitment season of 2024 increased by more than 30% year-on-year. The difficulty of campus recruitment into banks is also rising, and there is no shortage of competitors, including graduate students from the top two universities.

As the channels to enter securities firms and banks become narrower and narrower, state-owned industrial enterprises with relatively low thresholds have become the choice of more people.

Secondly, 985 and 211 graduate students will be more aware during the fall recruitment that their competitors also come from 985 and 211 institutions, and it is difficult to gain an advantage solely by relying on academic qualifications.

“Only when I actually experienced the fall recruitment did I realize that the situation was much more severe than I had imagined,” said Mindy. “After realizing the cruelty of the fall recruitment, I was very anxious for a while.”

Before the autumn recruitment began, Mindy thought that she was at least a 985 graduate student and had multiple internship experiences, which made her competitive. But after the autumn recruitment began, Mindy found that many positions that seemed promising did not even pass the initial screening of resumes. Some positions had been interviewed for several rounds and she thought they were a sure thing, but in the end, she failed inexplicably.

She concluded that the pace of the Internet industry is fast and the interview process is very tight. Moreover, when these companies recruit people, they prefer someone who has internship experience and can quickly get started and take on work after joining the company. Therefore, they pay more attention to the candidate’s understanding of the company’s business and professional ability for a certain position.

Once she went to interview for a product manager position at a large company. The company suddenly notified her of the interview for the next day, and she also had to make a PPT. Mindy had to postpone all her plans for the evening and prepare for the interview urgently.

When it came to interviews with central state-owned enterprises and foreign companies later on, most of the positions she applied for were management trainee positions. During the interviews, the companies focused more on the overall quality and general abilities of the candidates, and that’s when Mindy felt relatively calm.

also,Graduate students from 985 and 211 universities are going for autumn recruitment, and they also need to adjust their expectations in terms of salary and benefits.

When Mindy was looking for a job, she originally thought that for a 985 graduate, a monthly salary of over 10,000 yuan should be the bottom line. After all, the cost of living in Shanghai is relatively high. However, she did not expect that the salaries offered by some companies could not even reach this level.

In an unfavorable employment environment, only by adjusting expectations reasonably can we find a balance between ideals and reality.

03 In the trough period, it is more important to find the right platform and seek stability

In the past, when 985 and 211 graduate students looked for jobs, high salaries and growth potential were placed at the forefront, and finance and the Internet were typical high-potential industries.

Nowadays, this situation has been reversed. Of course, there are still opportunities to earn high salaries in the Internet and financial industries and to “take a chance and turn a bicycle into a motorcycle”, but technical talents may be more popular.

Taking the Internet industry as an example, the positions open by large companies during this campus recruitment season focus on technical positions.

According to statistics, in this year’s Alibaba campus recruitment, the recruitment demand for technical positions in some businesses accounted for more than 80%. ByteDance has more than 4,000 campus recruitment positions, and the demand for R&D positions has increased by 60% compared with last year; JD.com’s campus recruitment is known as the largest campus recruitment in the industry, and it has increased the salaries of campus recruits, and the increase in production and research positions is relatively large, among which the average starting salary for algorithm positions has increased by more than 75%.

“The job market in 2024 will show a partially prosperous scene”Li Ye, a practitioner in the smart manufacturing industry, described it to Yidu Pro.

A small number of positions are still competing for talent with high salaries. For example, some fresh graduates with an algorithm major received offers from more than a dozen large companies at one time during the fall recruitment season last year. However, most fresh graduates are not “pigs on the vent of the wind.”

Li Ye communicated with the company’s recent graduates and found that engineering graduate students from the same 985 universities could get seven or eight offers upon graduation only through offline recruitment seminars and internal recommendations from senior students during the fall recruitment season three years ago. However, last year’s fall recruits, in addition to these channels, also obtained more comprehensive campus recruitment information through recruitment platforms such as BOSS Direct and Zhaopin.com. They put in more effort, but the offers they received were of lower value and in fewer numbers.

He explained that another reason behind this is that some “high-tech” companies are unwilling to recruit fresh graduates for core positions.

“Recruiting fresh graduates is equivalent to preparing wedding clothes for others,” because fresh graduates need one or two years of training before they can really get started with the work, but by the time they are able to get started, they have been poached by other companies. Therefore, many companies prefer to recruit people with two or three years of experience who can get the job done directly.

The 2024 “College Student Employment Survey Report” released by Zhaopin.com shows that the offer rate for fresh graduates with master’s and doctoral degrees is 44.4%, lower than last year’s 56.7%.

The situation of 985 and 211 graduate students is becoming increasingly awkward. Many graduates place stability in an important position when looking for jobs.

The report from Zhaopin.com also pointed out that among the job-seeking graduates of 2024, 47.7% hope to work in state-owned enterprises, ranking first among all types of enterprises, and 51% believe that “stability is the most important”, an increase of 10 percentage points year-on-year.

She had received an offer from a large Internet company to become a full-time employee after an internship, and the work content was what she was interested in, but within a few months, her “mentor” during the internship had left. This meant that after graduation, she would have to enter a new team to adapt to the environment, and it was difficult to guarantee that she would still be doing what she liked.

It is precisely because she has witnessed the rapid personnel changes in large Internet companies that Mindy has become more concerned about job stability. “An unstable working environment will drain a lot of energy and fighting spirit, not to mention personal growth.”

Jin Xi, who joined a state-owned enterprise, told Yidu Pro that although he had gained stability on the surface,In the current market environment, stability is relative.Perhaps state-owned enterprises are more stable than large Internet companies, but no one can guarantee that they can stay in a central state-owned enterprise forever.

He believes that in addition to stability, choosing a good platform is equally important. A good platform means more opportunities for growth.

During the trough period, these 985 and 211 graduate students missed the bonus of an era, but they were also accumulating strength for the next bonus period by choosing the optimal solution within the range.

(At the request of the interviewees, all names in this article are pseudonyms)

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