I’m not surprised to hear that your notes are being met with crickets, because they’re attached to job applications, and so are likely being treated as part of the application rather than a separate attempt to network. I don’t know what you’re writing in these notes, whether it’s a “please keep me in mind” kind of message or more of a “can we chat sometime”, but any message will be intrinsically tied to your job application because that’s the context it’s being received in. And if they’re choosing not to contact you about the role, they’re unlikely to reach out just to connect because it could easily be perceived as part of the hiring process.

You can absolutely network by sending notes to people online though! Not all networking needs to be done at in-person events (though that’s maybe the best way to meet people). Sending somebody an email or message over LinkedIn asking to chat about what they do - in person or online - is pretty conventional. Just reach out to these people individually, rather than through hiring channels. Ideally this is something you’re doing regularly, not just when there’s a job available. The real advantage of having network connections is having people think of you when they start the hiring process, so they’re more likely to reach out to you first. You want to make those connections before a job comes into the picture.

That message could look like, “I’m really curious to hear what it’s like to work at [company], to see if it might be a good fit for me in the future. Would you mind chatting with me for 30 minutes online this week?” Ideally you send a message like this to somebody in the role you’d like to eventually get, or somebody at the senior level of the team. You don’t need to reach out to HR or other managers, creative directors or senior creatives are best positioned to advise you regarding what they need at the company.

Or if you’re a little earlier in your career (and genuinely want the guidance), you can reach out to a senior person and ask for a portfolio review: “I really admire the work your team does, would you be available to review my portfolio and give me some guidance on getting a job at a place like [company]?” If you suggest doing these meetings in person, it’s polite to offer to buy your contact a coffee or similar small thing to thank them for their time.

As to your “schmoozing ability” note - I find it’s more helpful to think of networking as simply “getting to know people”. A lot of people think networking is a specific song and dance that can be kind’ve slimy, but anybody who acts that way isn’t usually well received - nobody likes that guy. Networking is usually just people gathering to talk about a shared interest or goal related to their work (if it wasn’t work-based, I think it’d just be hanging out?).

If you do go to design events and want to meet other people, it can be helpful to just focus on chatting about the event at hand (“What brought you here? What did you think of the speaker?”), or ask people about their jobs. Topics relevant to where you are and what you’re doing at that moment, that everybody has answers to (and you don’t only have to talk about design or work). Having a human connection is what keeps you in somebody’s mind for later, so showing interest in others and sharing a little about yourself is really what your goal should be with networking. The benefits of being known - standing out in a pool of candidates - comes naturally from there.

A very polished resume that speaks to your achievements in your roles rather than just your responsibilities, and a polished portfolio showing examples of the specific kind of work they’re hiring for are important too. But presumably most of the applications you’re up against are also well polished (all the more reason to make sure yours is sharp), and those documents aren’t seen until they’re seen - meaning, from the exterior of the “pile” (the email inbox or what have you) your application looks the same. This is why people talk about how important networking is - because a personal contact in addition to your application is really the only way to direct attention towards yourself.

There's no one service or one person that can make job hunting really easy. Honestly, the whole process of job hunting is a slog. The internet can make it feel like job hunting should be easy, with sites like LinkedIn or Indeed displaying tons of job postings. But it’s not as in your control as it may seem.

I think the people that have the easiest time job hunting do these three things:

1. Give yourself every opportunity to hear from the places you want to work, even when you’re not looking, so you know when they put out the call that they're hiring. Businesses don’t all use the same tools for hiring, so you can’t rely on an automated LinkedIn email to stay on top of things. Dig into the businesses that you want to work for. Check their websites for job listings, follow them on social, sign up for any newsletters. If you're a designer, this is exactly why I built the Toronto Design Directory.
   
   
2. Widen your net by looking for more than just “Junior Graphic Designer” jobs. Titles like “designer” or “graphic designer”, or more specific roles like social media designer, visual designer, UX/UI designer, or web designer. Even “design officer” or “communications designer”, “marketing designer”, those jobs can right for you, just with different titles or more specific duties. A lot of people make narrow assumptions of what they’re qualified for and automatically count themselves out (especially women). See what else sounds close to what you're looking for; interviews are for figuring out how good the fit is for both sides.

3. Networking. Many jobs are not posted online, and are filled by word of mouth and referrals. So, it's really, really important to have a good network that you maintain. That doesn’t mean meeting a person once, adding them on LinkedIn, and hoping they’ll reach out to you one day. If you’re job hunting, reach out to your contacts and say “I'm looking for a new job, if you could let me know if you hear of anything you think it might be a good fit for I’d appreciate it”.
   
   Good networking also means meeting a variety of people. You said in your letter that you've done some networking and attended some mentoring-style events like Portfolio Review Night. Widening your net in this area will help too. Don’t just talk to designers or go to portfolio-related events. Get to know people in other roles and even people in different industries. Attend talks, art shows, conferences, even parties. Anybody can be the contact that helps you next.

Finally, you said you used Creative Circle, which is a recruiting agency here in Toronto. I find recruiting agencies don't tend to hire juniors. External recruiting agencies usually get paid a percentage of the base salary of the role they're hiring for. Since juniors aren’t paid a lot, recruiters don't make a whole lot of money off of those roles. Businesses don’t often use recruiters to hire juniors either because those rules aren't hard to fill. They’re not specialized or require any particular experience, so you don't really need a recruiter to find the right candidate. If Creative Circle told you there's no junior roles, that doesn't surprise me. Recruiters just don’t tend to hire for junior positions.

You also mentioned using Access Employment to find jobs. I find services that are not industry-specific aren’t super useful either. I'm sure there's exceptions, but generally speaking if the people working at a company like that don't know the design and advertising fields very well themselves, it's unlikely they're gonna be able to connect you with those jobs or give you useful advice because they won’t be familiar with those industry norms or requirements.

Job hunting is really hard, it takes a long time. It usually takes months to find the right job, and unfortunately there's not a lot you can do about that. Part of it is just a numbers game: so many people apply to a given job that the odds are just not in your favour for being selected out of that pool. Sometimes it even comes down to good timing: companies aren’t always hiring when you’re looking, and that's not something anybody can control. You can take some of the pressure off yourself when you acknowledge these facts and that there’s nothing you can do about them.

I totally appreciate where you're at right now because I heard a lot of the same things when I was starting my career and it was confusing to me too. The whole catch-22 of "you need experience to get experience" is so frustrating especially when you're starting out.

The way agencies work isn't rocket science, but there are specific systems that are pretty consistent across most agencies and in a lot of creative and marketing departments for different kinds of businesses. I think what people are saying when they say "we want agency experience" even when they're hiring for a junior role, is that they want somebody who knows the system, who knows how agencies work, how “we” work. They want somebody who can do the creative work, knows how the creative process unfolds within an agency, and how to work with all the people involved.

Creative agencies generally have these three departments. There are other people in other roles at agencies, but this is the foundation of most agencies and a lot of other businesses that do creative as well:

1. The creative department. That's you guys, the designers, art directors, copywriters, creative directors, and so on.
2. The account services department. These are the people that liaise with the clients, that have those back and forths about process and manage the client relationships.
3. The project managers. They write the timeline and keep everything running and everybody on track, sometimes they also work on the budget.

A lot of other creative departments that are client-side or in-house (like banks and retail companies and tech companies) are filled with people who have worked at agencies, and those people have brought the systems that they know from those agencies to these other internal departments, ‘cause the system works well there too.

So what someone's saying when you don't have agency experience is that they can't see that you've worked in a similar structure before. They can’t see from your resume or interview that you know how to collaborate with people in other roles in an agency, or have an understanding of what everybody does, or how the system works. This is likely a problem for them because they need their new hire to just come in and do the work without any training or managerial oversight.

The fact that if you have no agency experience and they're still interviewing you anyway, after seeing your resume with presumably no agencies on it, means that they like your work enough that they’re probably open to you having earned this experience elsewhere. So my advice to you is to talk in interviews about how you have worked with other people in the past. That can be classmates and teachers if you’re just out of school. Or if you've only had retail, food service jobs, or similar, talk about how you work with your colleagues. How you communicate with your boss, any external vendors, delivery, garbage takeout, whatever. Anybody that you've ever had to communicate information with and do some kind of collaborative work or task with professionally. That'll speak to how you can work with other people and that'll address the heart of their question about how much agency experience you have.

Bottom line, there are only 24 hours in a day. It’s up to you to balance your time between stuff that’s necessary - work, sleep, chores, self care, time with family and friends - and stuff you want to do, like personal projects. You say you’re “pumping out as much work as possible” and that’s probably too much! It’s really important to give yourself rest time, for your own well being and health, and also for your creativity. Design work that’s done under stress or without good rest usually isn’t our best, and if you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to keep churning out work, you’re probably not doing the best work you’re capable of. Taking some time off, counterintuitively, can make your design work better. Pick a couple evenings a week and say you’re not allowed to do design work, you have to relax. Relaxing is a priority, and the only way to conquer burnout.

But I want to address the “pumping out as much work as possible” part of your letter. Reading between the lines, it sounds like you’ve decided personal projects are the solution to your lack of formal education, and for the fact that you don’t have a lot of work from your current job to put in your portfolio. I want to assure you that many designers come to work in this field without formal design education. I know people with degrees in science, math, and history, who decided to pivot to design or advertising later. They didn’t go back to school, they put together a portfolio to show what they were capable of and that got their foot in the door. Working as a designer is very much about how good your skills are, but it doesn’t really matter where or how you learned those skills.

The more experienced you are, the less your education is a factor when you’re applying for jobs. School is just a starting point. Once you’re a couple years in, your professional experience matters more than your education because it’s a much more recent example of your abilities.

Personal projects are great for exploring things you can’t with your job, and can be an asset to a portfolio to show more breadth in your experience and skills. But you don’t need to overdo it: a couple of your best projects are better than a dozen mediocre ones. Quality over quantity is key. If you’re pushing yourself to do design work every night, is that going to be the best example of what you’re capable of? Are you really able to think about your personal style and approach if you’re burnt out?

I suggest taking a moment to pause and think about what you want next. You want to leave your current job, so think about what kind of work you’d like to do instead and do some research into jobs and designers who do this work now. Then figure out what gaps exist between you now and the designer you want to be, and just focus on a couple of those things at a time. Creating simple goals for yourself and choosing one or two things you can do to get yourself there is a much gentler way of working towards your goals than constantly pushing yourself to create every day.

Take the focus off social media too - you don’t need to go viral to get another job. If anything, I find the dynamics of social media are a distraction, and really irrelevant to your career. Don’t let likes and views distract you, they’re not a measure of how good your work is and you don’t need them to prove yourself. The social media beast will always ask to be fed - you can ignore it.

You don’t have to be the best designer you can possibly be to move on to the next stage of your career, you just need to be the designer your next job needs. Becoming a better designer is a slow process, you evolve over years as you have different experiences. You can’t rush yourself there by working in the evenings. Do personal projects because you truly want to, or because they’re specifically helping you reach a specific goal. If you’re feeling burnt out, then those projects are probably hurting you more than helping, and it’s okay to stop.

If you've done a couple of internships, that definitely means you can get hired after graduating. If you've done a couple of internships that means you have experience on your resume, you've made a bunch of connections, you maybe have a couple of job references - that gives you a big leg up when you're job hunting.

Even if you made some mistakes or did some less than great design, that's not that a big deal. Internships are for learning, so as long as you took your feedback in stride and you learned from that, that's fine.

I know a lot of people when they're starting out get stuck on if they're "good enough", which is something that can stick with you for many years. But if people have hired you for internships, that's proof in itself that your is “good enough”, and they want to work with you.

Internships aren't meant to be something people do for a long time. You really only need to do one, maybe two, to get the benefit of having that experience on your resume. Internships in design and advertising usually last three to six months and then you move on, presumably to paid work. If I saw somebody with more than two or three internships on their resume I would really wonder why they felt the need.

I understand that you’re applying to internships because you’re anxious that you won’t get a junior job. But the only way to know if you’ll succeed is by trying. So let's just look at the facts: people have wanted to work with you before, a couple of times from the sounds of it. It’s very unlikely they’re the only ones.