Gen Z grad landed a job at LinkedIn by waitressing at a conference full of recruiters and handing out her résumé during breaks—now she works at Google

Basant Shenouda spent six months after graduating from one of Germany’s top universities sliding into recruiters’ DMs on Linked In and applying for jobs online—and getting ghosted. So she volunteered to waitress at a conference six hours away, where she handed her résumé to 40 recruiters and landed a job at Linked In. Now she’s at Google. “It is becoming harder and harder to reach the hiring manager, even virtually—which used to be a more nontraditional method,” the Egyptian-born Gen Zer who graduated from the University of Bonn in 2019 tells Fortune. “It’s incredibly hard to spotlight yourself.” It’s a feeling many graduates know well. With more than a billion users on LinkedIn, overloaded recruiters are increasingly ignoring messages from strangers—so Shenouda switched tactics, using the platform not to cold-message hiring managers, but to track which conferences they were posting about. One event in particular stood out: Online Marketing Rockstars in Hamburg. “It’s a really well-known marketing and sales conference in Germany,” Shenouda recalls. “I graduated in marketing and was looking to get into sales, so it was just the perfect place where the decision-makers I was looking to target were going to be,” she explains. “People were even flying in from the U.S., so it was a good networking opportunity.” With that in mind, Shenouda volunteered to clean up glasses at the conference to gain free entry, and traveled over six hours from Cologne to Hamburg by train with a stack of résumés in hand. During her breaks at the conference, Shenouda put her CV in front of 30 to 40 faces, with the premise that she was looking for feedback on it—while secretly hoping her bold approach would impress just one recruitment manager. And after a six-month hiring process, it paid off. “I was one of the only graduates at the conference, and so it was full of opportunities for me,” the 29-year-old adds. “I got insight into my résumé, developed a lot of r