Graduating from college isn’t the reliable ticket to a good job that it once was. Landing a job often takes months (12% of 2023 grads were still looking for a job 6 months after graduation) and many grads end up settling (1 year out, over half are in a role that doesn’t require a college degree). 

How can we help? That’s the question we’re working on with our partner organization, a non-profit that provides comprehensive college access and success services, from admissions advising to career preparation. Through interviews and surveys with their students, we’ve been learning a lot—from how much they underestimate what strong interview prep looks like to how rarely they tap into their networks.

There’s one trend that especially stands out: students don’t start their job search early enough. Of the unemployed grads we surveyed, 76% hadn’t started looking at jobs until after they’d graduated. Those months without income are hard and stressful—so why don’t they start looking sooner?

They’re paralyzed by fear of failure

One reason we found: seniors were avoiding their job search out of fear of failure. 

In the words of one unemployed grad: “I didn’t have much internship experience and was worried I wouldn’t find an ideal job, so I procrastinated on applying to my dream roles.” Her hireability wasn’t anything out of the ordinary—56% of college students who want an internship don’t get one—but fighting imposter syndrome is a constant battle for first-gen students. 

And she wasn’t alone. When we looked across students’ stories, their fears tended to cluster around a few common themes:

• Not good enough.
  “️My biggest fear is not being qualified enough/not having the necessary experience.”—Brian
  
• I’ll have to settle.
  “My biggest fear is not getting a job that makes you feel fulfilled and makes you burnout.” —Nimo
• A bad start will stick.
  “My biggest fear is your first job hindering your trajectory and not being something you like.”—Godson

It’s only human to avoid things that you expect to hurt. 

We created an activity to address these fears head-on

What can we do about this paralyzing fear of failure? It’s a prime opportunity to lean on interventions from the academic world of behavioral science:

• Self-compassion—Expressing understanding and kindness to yourself as you might express to a friend insulates you from getting overwhelmed by failure or rejection.
• Distanced self-talk—Referring to yourself in the third person reduces distress.
• Saying-is-believing—The act of writing down a message reinforces your belief in it.

Drawing on these research-backed approaches, we created a simple activity for job-seekers during a live virtual event. 

Participants wrote down their biggest fear, then wrote a note of encouragement as if talking to a friend who had that fear. For example:

• Brian worried he was not good enough, but consoled a fake friend with: “Most jobs descriptions are a wish list, and not every candidate will have 100% of the requirements asked for, so still apply if you have most of the requirements.”
• Nimo worried he’d have to settle, so wrote: “A lot of people don’t land their dream jobs right away, every step you take in your journey is progress. Learning what you don’t want is good because it’ll help you steer to healthier workplaces.”
• Godson worried a bad start would stick, but turned it around with: “You should take it as a learning experience and remember the most important thing for you to do is learn as much as possible and leverage it into a new opportunity.”

Next, we walked participants through the steps of what needs to happen as part of a job search. They flagged tasks that they hadn’t yet done and made a plan for when to do them, since behavioral science research shows that the more people spell out when and how they’ll do a task, the more likely they are to complete it. 

A few weeks later, we also repeated back their words of optimism in a personalized email. 

It boosted job search confidence by 24% 

After the event, participants rated their confidence in their job search as 2.9 out of 4—up from 2.3 before the event. 

In the words of one participant, “It not only grounded/calmed me down in the job hunt but gave me a good starting place.” 

So where do we go from here? We’re excited to work with our partner organization to make this event part of the standard curriculum available to all seniors. And, now that we know what students are nervous about, we can directly address those concerns with fear-busting language across a whole suite of communications. 

This is the value of applied behavioral design: understand what’s getting in the way, and use it to build experiences that clear the path forward.