Basant Shenouda spent six months after graduating from one of Germany’s top universities sliding into recruiters’ DMs on LinkedIn and applying for jobs online—and getting ghosted. So she volunteered to waitress at a conference six hours away, where she handed her résumé to 40 recruiters and landed a job at LinkedIn. Now she’s at Google.
“It is becoming harder and harder to reach the hiring manager, even virtually—which used to be a more nontraditional method,” the Egyptian-born Gen Zer who graduated from the University of Bonn in 2019 tells Fortune. “It’s incredibly hard to spotlight yourself.”
It’s a feeling many graduates know well. With more than a billion users on LinkedIn, overloaded recruiters are increasingly ignoring messages from strangers—so Shenouda switched tactics, using the platform not to cold-message hiring managers, but to track which conferences they were posting about.
One event in particular stood out: Online Marketing Rockstars in Hamburg. “It’s a really well-known marketing and sales conference in Germany,” Shenouda recalls.
“I graduated in marketing and was looking to get into sales, so it was just the perfect place where the decision-makers I was looking to target were going to be,” she explains. “People were even flying in from the U.S., so it was a good networking opportunity.”
