Persistence pays! No one knows it better than 23-year-old Vatsal Nahata, a Delhi student who landed a World Bank job after over 1,500 connection requests, 600 cold-emails, and 80 odd cold-calls.
In a long LinkedIn post, Nahata, who graduated from Delhi's Shri Ram College of Commerce and completed his Master's from Yale University, narrated his struggles to land the right job, two years after his long and arduous search.
It was March of 2020, and Nahatawas about to complete his Master's. “COVID-19 had just been declared a pandemic and companies were on a spree to fire employees. Every company was preparing for the worst, and it made no sense to hire. A historic recession seemed looming.”
He said he would reach final rounds of several companies only to be told that they could not sponsor his visa as former US president Donald Trump's stance on immigration made it very uncertain for companies to navigate and predict US immigration policy.
“Everybody wanted to play it safe and hire US citizens,” he wrote.
“I thought to myself: what was the point of coming to Yale when I can't even secure a job here,” he wrote. He was beginning to find it harder to sound confident about getting a job in the US while talking to his parents.
“But I was determined that returning to India was not an option, and that my first paycheck would only be in Dollars,” he wrote.
He said he decided to completely avoid job application forms or job portals and went “all out on networking.”
“In those 2 months, I sent over 1500 connection requests, wrote 600 cold-emails, got on 80 odd cold-calls with all types of people (I was clocking close to 2 cold-calls per day) and faced the highest number of rejections I've ever gone through.”
He said he was getting nowhere, but the repeated rejections helped him to develop a thick skin.
“You could wake me up at 4 am in the morning and I could smoothly network and sell my skills to the most seasoned American executive, all while knowing that this call is probably going nowhere. Things became so desperate that I would often cold-call people in my dreams.”
He said ultimately his strategy of knocking on enough jobs paid off as he ended up with four job offers. He chose the World Bank. “They were willing to sponsor my visa after my OPT and my manager offered me co-authorship on a Machine Learning paper with the World Bank's current Director of Research (something unheard of for a 23 year old).”
After a stint with World Bank, he now works with International Monetary Fund as a research analyst.