Stop Applying, Start Building: How to Create Career Opportunities Before You Graduate By Paul Kalra, Schulich alum and founder of Part n Parcel. First in a series on building your way into a career.*
Here is the graduation you want: degree in one hand, signed offer in the other, and a big trip booked for the gap in between. Here is the one most people get: forty applications, two replies, and a summer refreshing your inbox.
Qualifications matter, but they rarely separate you from the equally qualified people in the same pile. An application is a queue, and everyone in the queue looks the same: same degree, same formatting, same three bullet points about leadership. Every week you spend only applying is a week you are invisible.
Finding a job does not start with applying. It starts with building something that gives employers evidence before they have to take a chance on you. That sounds hard. It is not, once you break it down. And there is a second prize hidden inside the work: you find out who you actually are and where your career can really go. Sometimes that is a bigger discovery than the job.
THE MOVE: BUILD BEFORE YOU APPLY
Here is the whole strategy in one sentence: do not tell employers what you can do. Build something that lets them see it.
Call it the Build Before You Apply method:
- Start with a problem you understand personally.
- Create something useful for the people facing it.
- Involve alumni or employers in what you build.
- Publish the result.
- Use that evidence to start career conversations.
The Build Before You Apply method is a career strategy where a student launches a small real project, such as a niche community, an interview series, or an AI-assisted tool, to create visible proof of their work and build relationships with alumni and employers before submitting traditional applications.
It only works if the thing you build is true to you. Borrowed tactics read as gimmicks, and recruiters have seen every gimmick. So, the starting point is not a tactic. It is your story. Are you new to Canada? Do you love organizing people? Do you enjoy writing? Are you the one who builds things? That is your raw material.
Do this now: write down your story in one line before you read further. Everything below works better when you pick the version that fits it.
WHICH TACTIC FITS YOUR STORY?
Start a community for people in your shoes.
New to the country and torn between starting your career here or back home? Many students are carrying that question alone. Open a group on WhatsApp Communities, Discord, or Telegram. It is true to your situation, others will join because they relate, and it costs nothing to start. There is a bonus baked in: you learn to run a platform you have never run before, and community-building is itself a skill employers increasingly pay for.
A community is a living thing. It grows while you sleep, members help each other, and it keeps producing proof every day. When a recruiter looks at an application, they see claims. When they look at a community you built, they see people whose careers are better because you showed up. That is not another resume claim. It is visible evidence that you can organize people and create value.
Once it has a pulse, point it at employers. Invite three alumni from companies you want to work for to speak at your first event, online or in person. Better yet, ask one to host it at their office. Now you are emailing Deloitte with an invitation from a community of people they want to hire, instead of an application. Same inbox, completely different reception.
Do this now: open the group and personally invite your first ten members.
Write for your school and feature an alumnus.
Pitch an article to your program, your club, or the career centre newsletter. Interview an alum at a company you want to join. Ask for their story and a quote, not a favour. When the piece publishes, send them the live link. They have now seen your work, your initiative, and the result it produced, and you never submitted a resume to get there.
Do this now: pick one alum and send the interview request this week.
Use the mentor program as a connection, not just advice.
Your school keeps a bench of mentors. Most students treat it as a place to get advice. Treat it as a place to find someone whose story rhymes with yours. It may never become a formal mentorship. What you are really getting is a person who has faced what you are facing and can open doors you cannot see yet. Mine opened one that changed my life. More on that below.
Do this now: get in touch with the alumni team and get started on the mentorship program. Ask for a match whose background rhymes with yours.
Go directly to alumni on LinkedIn.
Filter by your school plus your background: same country of origin, same program, same career pivot you are attempting. Then ask for their story, not a job. How did they get past what you are facing right now, personally and professionally? What does their life look like today? How did it all come together?
A request for someone’s story usually earns a warmer response than a request for a job, and a good conversation can naturally end with “who else should I talk to?” The message has to be authentic to work. “I saw you switched from marketing to finance. I am struggling with that same move” will get a reply. A template will not.
Do this now: find five profiles and send one message today.
HOW DO YOU BUILD ALL THIS IN AN AFTERNOON?
This is where AI changes the math. The community welcome post, the event page, the speaker invitations, the interview questions, the article draft, the outreach messages: all of it used to take a month of evenings. With Claude or ChatGPT drafting alongside you, Luma or Eventbrite hosting the event page, and LinkedIn filters doing the alumni search, you can build a credible first version in an afternoon.
Use AI for the first draft, not the final relationship. Let it prepare the questions, the invitations, and the event copy. The judgment, the curiosity, and the follow-through still have to be yours. And the artifact itself is proof: more and more postings ask candidates to show they can work with AI, and instead of claiming the skill, you are demonstrating it.
ChatGPT and Claude help you create. A newer set of tools introduces a more important skill: managing AI as a team. [Buzz] (https://buzz.xyz) gives people and specialized AI agents a shared workspace. [Paperclip] (https://paperclip.ing) lets you give agents roles, goals, budgets, and approval rules. Both are free and open source. Treat them as emerging tools to explore rather than something you will master in an afternoon, but the skill behind them is not going anywhere. Employers will increasingly need people who can decide what AI should do, give it the right context, review its work, and improve the system.
So do not just use AI to write one invitation. Build a small operating system: something that can find possible speakers, research them, prepare personalized invitations, track replies, and draft follow-ups. In practice, that can start as simply as a saved set of instructions in ChatGPT or Claude, plus a public event page run the same way every time. You stay responsible for judgment and relationships. The system handles the repeatable work. Two guardrails as you go: keep a person in control of anything sent externally, and never give an emerging tool private contact information or access it does not need.
Your first project is not the final product. The real asset is the repeatable system behind it, and if you document that system as you build, you can run it again for a new audience, a new employer, or a new problem. That is more than a project. That is a scalable skill.
Do this now: choose one problem, build the first useful piece, and document the steps so you can run the same system again.
BUILD IT LIKE A BUSINESS, NOT A ONE-OFF
One employer may not be hiring. Another may not be a fit. So do not build this for one company. Make the format repeatable: an event series, an interview series, an article series. Each edition compounds. More alumni, more employers, more published proof of what you can do. You are not applying to one company anymore. You are building something several companies are watching.
And when you publish what you built, tell four things: the problem you noticed, what you built, how you and AI divided the work, and what happened as a result. Credit the alumni and classmates who helped, and tag Schulich so the next student can find your example. Public credit is how one edition recruits the next, and it costs you nothing.
DOES THIS ACTUALLY WORK? HERE IS MY STORY
At Schulich, I joined the Undergraduate Business Council and worked my way to president. I created events and newsletter content, and I used them to help our corporate partners recruit students. Then those partners started recruiting me: American Express, Johnson & Johnson, a PepsiCo internship, and my first full-time role at Procter & Gamble. I never stood out in an application pile. I was useful before I ever applied.
Years later, a mentor I met through Schulich opened me up to entrepreneurship, and to an idea I had never heard in a classroom: the lifestyle business. I built a company, sold it, and today I run [Part n Parcel] (https://partnparcel.com), a managed shipping economics company for Canadian e-commerce merchants. Two people, supported by AI systems, help hundreds of brands access enterprise carrier rates and keep improving how every order ships. The advantage is not that AI writes faster. It is that the repeatable work became a system, leaving us to handle judgment, relationships, and exceptions. A lifestyle business does not mean a small ambition. It means the business is built around the life you want, and it can still scale.
THE CAREER YOU DID NOT APPLY FOR
Sometimes the project stops being a tactic. The event series becomes a skill. The article becomes a portfolio. The tool becomes a business, or a hobby that keeps you sane. Start small, test, learn. A business built around the life you want is a real career path, not a consolation prize. That path gets its own article later in this series.
WHAT’S YOUR STORY?
So here is the question this whole article has been building to: what is your story, and what would you build from it?
Built something using the Build Before You Apply method? Publish the story, tag Schulich, and submit it to the Centre for Career Design. I have proposed an annual follow-up featuring several students, what they built, how they used AI, and what happened next. That is published proof of your work, and a reason for alumni and employers to pay attention.
Full transparency: this article is me running the Build Before You Apply method, twenty years after I first used it. Someone has to say yes first, so let me be your first yes. If you want to practice the interview tactic, profile me. The first serious ask gets an interview, and I will help you shape the piece for submission to Schulich.
*Next in the series: How to Build a Small AI Team, from chatbot prompts to repeatable systems. *
