The way it works typically is if you can't work through your on-campus recruiters when you graduate your pretty much screwed. Most good programs will teach you how to network and get you introduced well before you graduate. At least that's what they did at USC (University of Southern California) for me. Your not the first 3.9+ GPA person I've seen go jobless. It would happen to a lot of USC grads we had because they never took any time to network and stuck with the books. It's rather difficult once you graduate if you have no connections.
Try a local recruiter at this point who looks for positions in public accounting. Since you have no experience you are probably going to have to stick with public accounting unless you have a good connection. Big 4 generally won't hire from recruiters with no experience because of the fee, but a local firm might. Try everything from Big 4 to local firms. If worse comes to worse move out of the area. I've moved to 3 states (CA, AZ, TX) since I graduated back in 2004 and finally settled in TX and got a good opportunity in Austin at a local firm then moved on to industry.
Ask yourself:
– Am I trying to make an effort meeting people (Attending networking events locally – Austin has a group called Linkend Austin which has networking events etc…try other association e.g. if your miniority try something like ALPFA)
– Have I ever tried cold calling firms to introduce yourself (Don't balk at this my wife did this and networked her herself up to a position at a design firm this way)
– Have I looked into the my local Book of Lists to see what firms are out there to get contact information of who I need to contact?
– Do I only look at on-line postings from places like Monster (Bad Idea)
– Have I tried contacting a highly recommended local recruiter (Good Idea)
– Am I interesting as a person in general (Bookworm only is bad – public accounting interviews in my experience is 40% about the experience and work and 60% off-topic.
I'm actually surprised there isn't a lot of linkend connections being made here. If I knew about linkend when I was in auditing back then I would definetly have used it to add all my client contacts that I liked. Clients switch jobs too. Not sure if that is an ethics issue though, haven't gotten that far in my studies lol.
REG - 67, 76 (Q4 2009) - Used CPAExcel first time, Used CPAExcel + CPAReviewForFree
BEC - 83 (Q1 2010) - CPAExcel + CPAReviewForFree
AUD - 89 (Q2 2010) - CPAExcel + CPAReviewForFree
FAR - 81 (Q4 2010) - Roger CPA + CPAReviwForFree
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