Graduate Mentor is a platform giving graduates free one-to-one mentoring with mentors. Launched in August 2020 in response to the covid jobs crisis it was fantastic to finally give life to an idea that had been created 10 years again and remained dormant until now. We are actively targeting under-represented and diverse graduates to enable them to make connections with over 100 carefully selected inspiring business leaders, senior graduate recruiters, University careers staff, professional coaches, alumni and industry experts. Since we launched we have had 500 sessions, many success stories, positive feedback, partner enquiries, media coverage and new users registering on the site. One particular positive outcome is something I’d like to share as it happened very quickly and was such a brilliant start for the initiative.
I’ll let our mentee, Henry, explain how it all began.
“I got an email from my brother about graduate mentor. He had a job already so passed it on to me to check out. I had just graduated in Automotive Engineering at Northumbria University and had already applied for five graduate jobs with no success. I did get the final interview stage with BAE Systems but it fell through so I turned to the graduate mentor website.”
“I searched for mentors and found a guy who specialised in Engineering. I sent Vince a mentoring session request, he replied and we spoke for an hour over Zoom. We had a few emails to and fro afterwards. He really helped with my CV, tips on how to apply for jobs, good websites to use but what really worked was making a speculative approach.”
“He told me to choose a company i really wanted to work for even though they weren’t advertising any graduate vacancies. Then he said find the CEO on LinkedIn and send a message with your CV attached. Within 30 minutes I got a reply and we set up a chat over Zoom. I must have impressed them because he offered me a job to start the next day!”
This was a great result for Henry and having this mentoring session completely changed his approached….and it worked spectacularly well! To learn more about Graduate Mentor visit graduatementor.uk or contact Dan Hawes at [email protected]
