“I’ve been recommending Graduate Mentor to a lot of people I know because I truly believe it should be the first thing someone should do for their career.” Emanuela Sula.
Hear from Emanuela on how one session with a Graduate Mentor helped launch her career with Deloitte.
I graduated from Université Toulouse 1 Capitole in 2017 with a BSc Management degree and worked for a few years before deciding to come to Swansea University to study an MSc in Finance in 2019. When the pandemic started in the UK in March 2020, seven months before I graduated, I began searching for graduate jobs recommended by my lecturer and through my own research. I must have sent about 15 applications a day and was getting nowhere and was feeling disappointed. After several months with no interviews and no feedback I figured it must be my CV so decided that I needed a second opinion.
In August 2020, I began searching for mentoring services for CV reviews and found that almost all charged for this service. Graduate Mentor, however, did not so I checked out the platform a bit closer. I searched and found a mentor called Zoe, checked her availability and booked a session with her to brush up my CV. Zoe accepted my request and we spent an hour on Zoom checking my CV, looking at different templates and getting me to focus on my cover letter. I then applied to Deloitte for the graduate audit scheme and heard back in December 2020 and was so pleased to find they wanted to see me for interview on 7th January 2021 – it worked!
The first interview went really well and they invited me back for a second interview a week later. The feedback they gave me was that I was quite stressed during the interview so I needed to make sure I was more relaxed for the next one to really nail it. I went back to Graduate Mentor and this time searched and found a mentor called Peter who had lots of experience and was very senior. This was perfect as I wanted to do a mock interview with someone like him who could almost be my boss in my next job. I sent him a booking request, he accepted and we met over Zoom for an hour. I felt much more confident and was very well prepared for my second interview with Deloitte on 14th January 2021. It went really well and later that day I was offered the job!
I didn’t stop using Graduate Mentor there as I wanted to do one final thing to help me with my first day at Deloitte. I decided to really focus this time on finding a mentor with an audit background just to put the finishing touches to my plan to really make the best first impression on day one. I searched again, found Benyam, sent him a booking request and we set up a Zoom call. He was able to explain what to be aware of in my first job in audit, the future prospects and other unwritten rules of the industry. I started with Deloitte in February 2021 as a Junior Auditor and I couldn’t be more thankful to have discovered Graduate Mentor. I’ve been recommending it to a lot of people I know because I truly believe it should be the first thing someone should do for their career. Finding a mentor helped me a lot in every stage of the hiring process and I believe it’s going to help many more people. I hope my story can influence more people to use your platform.
