Getting a job is hard right now—ask any Gen Z grad who’s at risk of being “unemployable“. But Squarespace’s chief marketing officer, Kinjil Mathur, says that’s long been the case, which is why she had to get creative when she was starting out nearly 20 years ago.
The New York-based exec has worked in the elusive worlds of tech and fashion, climbing up the ranks of Conde Nast, Saks Fifth Avenue and Foursquare to the C-suite at $6 billion software service provider Squarespace.
However—contrary to the notion that Gen Xers and geriatric millennials had it easier—Mathur didn’t expect to walk straight into a job with her finance degree at the ready, back in the 2000’s.
Like many graduates today, she recalls being “worried about her future” and thinking outside of the box to get some real work experience under her belt.
“Every single summer I was trying to find some internship,” Mathur tells Fortune. “I just wanted to get experience.
“In my freshman year—and this is dating me—but this is when we used to have telephone books where you had yellow pages that had the name and number of every business and every person in your city.
“I went to the business listings and I just started calling up companies and asking them if they had internships available and that I would be willing to work for free.”
It worked. Mathur’s first foot in the door of employment was at the travel firm Travelocity during her first summer at the University of Texas. She did admin and research for its general council—all for free.
In the end having that experience listed on her resume turned out to be priceless.
Mathur insists, “you’ve got to be willing to do whatever it takes” early in your career.
“I was willing to work for free, I was willing to work any hours they needed—even on evenings and weekends. I was not focused on traveling,” Mathur concludes.
“You really have to just be willing to do anything, any hours, any pay, any type of job—just really remain open.”
One internship led to another
For Mathur, that first internship created a snowball effect on her career.
“The next summer, that experience helped me get the next experience and so on [and] so forth,” she adds.
“By the time that I was a junior, I had enough real world experience that when I went into these interviews, I could talk about them, and talk about business in a way that resonated with the people interviewing me because I had been doing it for a little while.”
Mathur was offered a full-time job as a technology consultant at the global consultancy Protiviti before even graduating.
“I was in my 20s advising much more senior people on all things tech at their company,” she adds. “So you can imagine that dynamic too, it wasn’t an easy job.”
Yellow pages is out—but shooting your shot isn’t
Although the Yellow Pages stopped printing after more than five decades in 2019, it’s never been easier to track down prospective employers.
Like Mathur, many Gen Z grads today are successfully trying their luck with strangers to get a foot in the door of employment.
Just last week, Ashleigh Spiliopoulou told Fortune that she stumbled upon her dream employer, Emerge, on Instagram. Instead of waiting for the PR firm to hire, the 25-year-old emailed its founder directly with the subject line “proposal to hustle”—and it worked.
Now, one year later and working as Emerge’s senior account executive, she’s describing cold emailing employers as the “life hack to avoiding long interview processes.”
Another Gen Z grad, Basant Shenouda, landed an internship at LinkedIn—where she still works three years later—by using the networking platform to see which conferences recruiters were posting about. She then waitressed at those events, armed with a stack of résumés to hand to hiring managers.
Meanwhile, 24-year-old Ayala Ossowski used the 20 hours a week she was working at a pizza shop in suburban Washington to try to get poached by DC’s elite. She wore a baseball cap emblazoned with her university logo on the front to every shift and launched into an elevator pitch any time a customer asked about it.
After a month of pitching herself while serving pizza, Ossowski landed her first internship.
Don’t stop hustling once you’ve got your foot in the door
A cold call, email, or tweet may open doors for you—but your efforts can’t stop there.
“Once you have the internship, you’ve got to take it incredibly seriously,” Mathur warns. “I did and that got me the full-time offer.”
After all, employers can close doors just as quickly as they can open them.
It’s why Mathur suggests that unemployed Gen Zers need to ditch their list of demands for prospective employers—including plenty of working from home, minimal working hours and a generous pay check—and start hustling.
“The list of criteria for people coming out of college, or in college, right now is so long,” she says, adding that your time will come to be picky.
But for now, her advice to young job seekers is to flip the script and say: “If anyone can give me any kind of experience, I would be forever indebted to them.”
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