What is the actual smartest way for a college senior to get real responses from professionals on LinkedIn when you have no work experience to reference and family breathing down your neck about it?
Senior year was supposed to feel exciting but every family dinner has turned into a job search status update and the pressure is making the whole process feel heavier than it probably needs to be. I have been connecting with alumni and professionals in environmental consulting on LinkedIn but the reply rate is low enough that I genuinely cannot tell if I am messaging the wrong people, writing bad messages, or just sending too few to get any statistical signal. My roommate who graduated last year said consistency was the answer but I cannot figure out what consistency looks like when classes still eat most of the day. What strategies have actually worked for you when building a professional network completely from scratch with no industry experience yet? And I keep reading about using a linkedin automation tool to scale the process but I have no idea whether that is appropriate for a student or whether linkedin automation at that level just gets accounts flagged before they even get started.