No one is going to give you credit for having a real job in college, regardless of whether you did or not (unless you interened at said job). They are expecting to train you from the ground up. If you can't use the current job to network into some other company you've worked with you need to scale back to at least to get in the door. Again, you can't sell yourself to an HR person who has no idea what the job is, they are just looking at numbers and line items (salary needs, years in field, GPA, degree, etc). If they are reading your cover letter it's only to see if you spelled anything wrong.


You’re still giving people too much credit, I did the same thing coming out of school. After about 9 months I realized, just like in school, people in the business world are mostly stupid. Hiring is wild hairy guesswork. Your approach may be better long term but if you want a job within 3 months it's not a good plan.

I can't comment on 65k because I don't know what that means in canada with exchange rate and cost of living.