Landing that first job often requires creativity.
Consider the approach of Yarko Petryshyn: in February, the 28-year-old law school graduate of the University of Leicester in England, who now lives in Winnipeg, received an offer for an articling position. After six months of delays, however, Petryshyn says the firm decided it could no longer hire him “in the near-term.”
This put Petryshyn in a bind. Thinking he had secured employment, he had stopped looking for work and hiring season for articling jobs had passed.
Instead of waiting for new job postings, he took out a seven-day classified advertisement in the Globe and Mail that ran last week, marketing himself as a “recent law school grad . . . seeking articling opportunity nationwide.”
“Almost three million people a week read the Globe and Mail,” says Petryshyn, reflecting on his initial thought process. Moreover, he reasoned, classifieds appear “at the end of the sports section, so if anybody reads the sports section they’ll come across the ads. I just figured there’s got to be a chance someone somewhere is going to read this and may have an opportunity available.”
In the end, his posting, which cost $430, elicited half a dozen emails, none of which had anything to do with an articling job (several of the emails, for instance, asked Petryshyn, who has not yet been called to the bar, to provide legal services).
Based on the lack of results, he says he would not advise other job-lookers to advertise themselves in the classifieds.
Fortunately, for Petryshyn, his father is a lawyer in Winnipeg and has agreed to take his son on as an articling student — an offer Petryshyn says he will likely accept within the month.
Petryshyn can be reached at ypetryshyn@shaw.ca.