> I may not be applying to the easiest jobs to get but I'm finding it incredibly difficult to even get an interview. After graduating from a top 25 undergraduate business program in 2 years and then going on to earn my MA in econ in another 2 all the while playing Division 1 football I thought it might be easier than normal to get a job.
The single best source of job listings you're going to get at this stage are the ones from your school's career services. That is a list companies that are trying to hire a recent grad from your school, which gets you through a filter. When dealing with general-purpose résumé drops online, you end up in a pile of thousands of résumés, and unless you have certain words on your résumé ("Harvard", "Stanford", "Google", etc.), it's a pretty lost cause.
Another big thing is to network. Go to conferences and meetups and such, find people who have a background similar to you doing something you want to be doing and see if they have any suggestions to fill in the middle.
Finally, find some way to demonstrate that you can "do stuff". Take publicly available data and produce something out of it. Build a model with some data in a kaggle competition. Also...
> On a positive note, it's my opinion that energy prices are a better indicator of economic growth than interest rates and energy prices should continue to fall for the foreseeable future. The only problem is how quickly the economy will artificially inflate after years of QE.
Here's a possible place to start. You're an economist - give me numbers! Turn it into a blog post or three. Demonstrate that you can find data sets, build a model/visualization/whatever, and communicate your thesis clearly. Don't know how to do something along the way? Learn it. Do it. Advertise the fact that you can do it.
> Ideally I'd like to be at an audacious startup.
> Stepping away from the startup scene and simply looking at businesses in general, it's ridiculous to think that an employer would hire you and put you to work with no training. Also a hire should be a long term strategy, turnover is very expensive and destructive to company culture.
Part of the problem is startups don't often take a long term view out of necessity. When you're 20% of the workforce of a company, you need to be producing from day 1, or at the very least demonstrate that you're a quick enough self-taught learner that you don't need dedicated resources from the company to get you producing in a timely manner - otherwise, the company isn't going to last long enough to realize your potential.