College Graduates are entering one of the most bleak and competitive job markets on record, which has inspired some recent graduates to take an unconventional approach to job hunting. Turnstyle's Tajah Jones profiles Alexander Monsanto, a new accountant who spent six months hunting for jobs the traditional route, before trying something a little daring. Monsanto began taking to streets of San Francisco’s financial district armed with resumes and clad in a sandwich board which reads “Hire Me.” The young accountant says his unconventional approach has lead to three times as many interviews as his online job hunt, and it has lifted the cloud of depression and desperation that set in after sending out hundreds of resumes without a single call or email from potential employers.
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Piece Description
College Graduates are entering one of the most bleak and competitive job markets on record, which has inspired some recent graduates to take an unconventional approach to job hunting. Turnstyle's Tajah Jones profiles Alexander Monsanto, a new accountant who spent six months hunting for jobs the traditional route, before trying something a little daring. Monsanto began taking to streets of San Francisco’s financial district armed with resumes and clad in a sandwich board which reads “Hire Me.” The young accountant says his unconventional approach has lead to three times as many interviews as his online job hunt, and it has lifted the cloud of depression and desperation that set in after sending out hundreds of resumes without a single call or email from potential employers.
Transcript
Alexander Monsanto has achieved a lot of firsts. He’s a first generation American, the first in his family to graduate high school, and the first to get a college degree. All eyes are on him to succeed, but it’s been ten months since he got his accounting degree from Florida Atlantic University, and still no job.
Monsanto: There are times where I would question what I was doing. I studied accounting for four years. If it’s going to be this difficult to get a job, is this really the field I want to be in?
Month after month, Alexander Monsanto emailed resumes, wrote cover letters. One morning he says he responded to every Craigslist ad in the San Francisco Bay Area that mentioned accounting, and didn’t receive a single response.
Alexander Monsanto: It turns into this viscous cycle where it’s not helping to stay home to look for a job. You kind of have to just get out of the house an...
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Intro and Outro
INTRO:College graduates face one of the bleakest job markets on record. It’s so hard to find a job that some grads are resorting to unconventional approaches. Sayre Quevedo, of TurnstyleNews.com profiles one new accountant who spent six months searching for jobs the traditional way, before trying something more daring…
OUTRO:Sayre Quevedo is a reporter for TurnstyleNews.com, a project of Youth Radio.
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