Application strategy: Ensure your foundations and track results beyond rejections.

In this article, our co-founder Liam-Elio discusses the value of slowing down the graduate application cycle by starting earlier, ensuring your foundations and tracking your results beyond a binary of success and rejection. These 3 pillars are the difference between a student who applied 300 times with the same quality application and a student who applies 50 times with an application that improves on each attempt.

Start earlier:

You don’t have to be good to start, but you do have to start to be good.

Far too many students start their graduate scheme hunt too late. Most major opportunities open around late August to September, and some infamously close in a matter of days. This means setting your foundations early is vital to being able to gain an advantage in the rolling period and give yourself the best shot in securing opportunities. Starting this process later than August will mean needing to balance learning application strategy with actually applying, which adds more stress and workload to the graduate application cycle.

Students who start in October might need to cover 15 applications a week, if you start in September, you might only need 5-10 applications a week, allowing you to spend more time on each application and more time reflecting on your performance. This reflection aspect is crucial; a student who is not actively reflecting on their application performance isn’t making 300 applications; they are applying once 300 times. If your first application and last application are of the same quality, it’s hard to expect a different result.

Ensuring your foundations:

Your foundations in your application strategy can be broken down into 5 major aspects.

1: Your CV

2: Your visibility

3: Your commercial awareness

4: Your organisation

5: Your experience

Get your CV checked. If it is the case of just having someone read through it and give some pointers, then we advise avoiding paying for this. CMD Careers and other platforms offer free CV reviews, as do university career teams and most professionals. We advise starting with your University careers team, and if you need more detailed support or specific advice, come to a service like ours. We offer a full RAG summary of your CV discussing content, structure and impact.

Visibility is becoming the new currency of the student market. LinkedIn, as discussed in our last article, is becoming a major differentiator between the average student and the future professional. Make sure recruiters can find you, and when they find you, they see you actively engaging with the market you want to join. For example, if you want to go into finance, start posting about market updates, financial terminology and case studies. The rule here is to try and educate others on concepts you didn’t know before university; there will be first and second-year students also learning that content, and that’s who your insights will support. Visibility will make networking easier as people will get the opportunity to see what you do before you tell them about it.

Commercial awareness is vital for graduate schemes in finance, business, law, consulting and banking. This can be as simple as reading about the market and company you are applying for in the news and checking out some of their recent projects. To take this further, write up case studies on these recent projects and post about them as part of that effort to educate others and show what you have learned.

Being organised will take almost all the stress out of graduate applications. Get yourself a tracker, including:

1: Company name

2: Company link

3: Application date

4: Current stage

5: Final outcome

6: Personal comments

7: Recruiter feedback

Choose an application rate and be consistent with it. For students with other commitments, we recommend no more than 10 applications per week. For students with a bit more time on their hands to apply no more than 15. This sounds low and probably runs against a lot of advice other services will provide. Think about it, if you do 30 applications in a week, that’s 6 days of 5 applications, leaving you with 1 day to recover and reflect. If you also land interviews for 50% of those roles, you now have to plan 15 interviews compared to 7 and 2, which can start to really impact your free time. Start slow, if you need to build up the pace, you ca,n but better to start slow and set the foundations than rush through applications and burn out.

The last part of your preparation is gaining experience. As a student, all of the following are legitimate points of experience:

Part-time jobs: Shows that people trust you with their money and business, and develops soft skills.

Society hackathons and committee: Shows leadership and project management alongside being able to build communities and work with a team to run successful events.

Forage: This platform provides experience on par with internships, students complete free accredited courses designed like virtual work placements for companies like Deloitte, Goldman Sachs and BCG.

Projects: Making your own projects and case studies can be really valuable in technical and analysis roles. Make sure to reflect on what you learnt and get visibility on the process and outcome. This could be a LinkedIn post on a robotics project, a GitHub account showing Python scripts or a marketing portfolio on a website.

University/school projects: While not as independent, academic projects often involve report writing, data analysis and some final deliverable that can be used to show your experience in a specific market sector.

Tracking your applications:

Get yourself a tracker, throw something together in Notion or Excel and just start tracking your applications. Not only will this help with organisation and keeping on track of everything as discussed above, but it will also help show you your progress. One mistake to avoid here is to only track the final outcome. This can actually cause students to get more demoralised as they see a long line of “rejected” as the application status of each entry. Rejection is normal; even candidates who convert quickly will be rejected. I landed a graduate role in less than 30 applications and was still rejected 26 times. If you are reflecting on your application strategy properly, your first application should be noticeably worse than your last.

Instead of tracking just the final status then it's best to track the final status and your most recent status. For example, for role 1 my most recent status might be “Interview results pending” and then my final status is “rejected” this means when I reflect on role 1 I can see that I actually got quite far through the process and if role 1 is at “Interview results pending” maybe role 10 is “passed interview” and role 15 is “final interview confirmed”. This approach to tracking applications gives you much more grace and helps remind you that each application is moving you forward.

To support this sense of development, students should also track their own feelings about their application before they get formal feedback. This will help you assess how aligned your own insight is with recruiters’ perspectives and also give much-needed context when reviewing applications to how YOU felt about the performance. This will help you differentiate between a good application you weren’t confident in, a bad application you were confident in and a good application you were confident in. Again, as we progress, we should see a stronger alignment between object performance (how far we progress through the application process) and your own insights.

Starting earlier, setting your foundations and tracking your progress will change how quickly you progress through your graduate scheme application process and massively increase your confidence as each opportunity rejection or success will be a new experience in learning more about the application process to get closer to that final set of offers.

If you feel you need more individual support, CMD Careers runs 1-1 sessions at the weekend from 8 am – 11 am with an accessible rate of £15 per hour.

We aim to provide this accessible service to more and more students at university events and open days, so if you like what we do and want to see us at your institution, get in touch.