(FORTUNE Magazine) – HEAR a pounding? It's Chris Henry, U. Hartford '93, beating his betasseled and bemortarboarded head against a wall. He graduated in May with a BS in electronic engineering (grade point average: 3.4). He followed every bit of advice his campus career office offered. And by graduation day he had this many job offers: none. He was still unemployed as of mid-June. Debts he incurred putting himself through school have started coming due. How does Chris Henry feel? Worried. A little bitter: ''You spend big dollars for an education to fulfill your dreams,'' he says. ''Then this.'' Well, okay -- that's U. Hartford. What about U. Harvard? Those kids, surely, have jobs. Don't bet on it: Throughout the Ivy League, about half the seniors needing a job didn't have it as of graduation. No matter where you look along the trellis of higher education -- from ivy at the top, on down to kudzu at the bottom -- you quickly discover that seniors' analysis of their own employment situation is correct: It blows. By itself, that isn't news. Prospects for seniors have been bleak four years running. All the numbers are down: total job offers, offers per graduate, recruiter visits per campus, number of campuses visited, starting salaries. What is news? Recession and restructuring have done more than cut the jobs available to seniors. They have permanently changed the way graduates and employers seek each other out. Students unaware of these changes -- or unwilling to play by a new set of rules -- are striking out cold. Georgann Occhipinti, head of college recruiting for MetLife, says she used to enjoy visiting colleges. The kids inspired her. They looked at life the way Errol Flynn looked at rigging: something to be swung through, lustily. Now? ''Their spirit has been broken. They all need Bromo.'' If you are the parent of a student in college or approaching it (or a student yourself), how scared should you be? From a recruiter's perspective, here's the way it looks. Maury Hanigan, president of Hanigan Consulting Group in New York City, consultants to the largest of the FORTUNE 500 on recruiting, says a sputtering economy is only one reason her clients have cut hiring of new grads by 60% since 1989. Technology has permanently reduced the number of entry-level jobs. Insurance companies that used to hire grads to crunch numbers now crunch them with computers. It's the same with car companies: Since the advent of CAD/CAM, fewer new engineers get hired. Companies can't afford to hire duds, so openings for grads often aren't being filled by strangers. They're being filled by people handpicked well before graduation. Bill Dittmore, director of recruitment and college relations for General Mills, says, ''About a third of our offers to new grads go to people who've already worked for us as interns. We plan to raise that to between 40% and 50%.'' By making offers to people already familiar with the company, Dittmore gets a higher acceptance rate and lower turnover. Union Carbide has also set 50% as its target, says Don Gatewood, Dittmore's counterpart there: ''We try to I.D. the best and the brightest at the freshman level, then bring them in for co-op work programs or summer jobs. That way if we hire them later, they're already socialized. And they're quick starters too.'' No wonder there's panic. Seniors who did internships have an inside track. Everybody else is competing not just against peers but also against out-of- work adults. When Kurt Opsahl, a senior at the University of California at Santa Cruz, went to his career counseling office, he was told the man in charge, about to be laid off, was out looking for a job himself. On every desk sit resumes. Whatever an employer wants is in that pile: a tap dancer who knows Fortran? A zither player who speaks Yiddish? How about a blond, blue-eyed, 6-foot 3-inch, Norwegian-born, Italian-speaking spelunker who runs spreadsheets and hang-glides? Morgan Stanley just hired him: Pal B. Ristvedt, U.C. Berkeley '93, starts work July 15. Supermen like Ristvedt speak dismissively of peers who failed to get jobs, suggesting they just didn't try hard enough. That is also the feeling of the homecoming queen of Ole Miss, Jennifer Long, University of Mississippi '93. ''I always said I'd graduate with a job,'' she says, her nails freshly done, ''and I wasn't about to go scurrying around at the last minute to get one.'' She started looking junior year; senior year she interviewed with seven banks. Bingo: bank job. ''A lot of girls in my sorority, they waited. A lot really didn't try.'' Jobs are out there -- and good ones. But to get them, students are having to look earlier, work harder, work smarter, and sometimes venture off the beaten path. Winners, losers, and recruiters all agree the chances of success go up when hunters heed these rules:

-- Start early. Like freshman year. The most powerful reason may not be apparent: The fact a candidate started early, working from an intelligent plan, shows an employer he can plan. This demonstrates leadership skill. Somebody doing a good job managing himself is qualified by his actions, not just by words on a resume. Says Maury Hanigan bluntly: ''Any student who doesn't have a job right now is a student my clients don't want.''

-- Get experience. Participating in an internship or co-op work program is practically a must, for two reasons: First, in a pile of resumes with uniform GPAs, ones with work experience stand out. Second, an increasing number of companies are making full-time offers only to graduates who have interned there.

-- Go to employers. Small companies, the engines of new job creation, typically don't have the resources to recruit on campus. Says Bill Dittmore of General Mills: ''Students need to go beyond the FORTUNE 100 and look at other companies. They need to be adventurous.'' Kurt Opsahl, founder and editor of a student newspaper at U.C. Santa Cruz, says only one senior on his 30-person staff got a newspaper job, ''and he had to go pretty far to get it -- Anchorage, Alaska.'' Opsahl applied only to papers in California. He's still looking.

-- Do the homework. Fawn Baird, Bowdoin '93, did so much research on companies where she wanted to work that her roommates kidded her about being a human database. ''I'd memorized so much that when a company's ad would come on TV, I'd spit out the CEO's name,'' she says. UNUM Life Insurance in Portland, Maine, was impressed with her knowledge of its business and hired her. It also helps to know what's selling. Hanigan says her clients are trying to hire more grads with ''global management aspirations'' and facility in languages. ''Companies have been caught short not having enough managers to send abroad or use in joint-venturing,'' she says.

Judy Artime, U. Virginia '93, landed an internship with Institutional Investor magazine partly because I.I. is launching a newsletter on emerging European markets, and Judy speaks Spanish and French.

-- Have grit. The self-discipline Ted Morrell picked up at a military high school served him well. This June the Marist College business major started work at Real Decisions, an information technology consulting firm in Darien, Connecticut. But he logged many hours getting there: ''I spent September of senior year making a list of all the companies I was interested in. I made goals every day, every week: Five applications have to go out today; tonight I need to make a list of five for tomorrow. I was up to about 100 companies, sending resumes and cover letters, putting in 15 or 20 hours a week. That thing adults say about job hunting -- that it's a full-time job? I couldn't agree more.''

-- Milk all connections. After Ted had done all that, guess how he got hired: His uncle knew somebody in the company. Says Morrell: ''Everybody in the working world is a connection for you. You never know what will turn up.'' Hartford U.'s Chris Henry thinks one reason he's had trouble finding a job is that his divorced mother knows nobody in engineering. Which kids have the best connections? Could be the lovable wags at the Harvard Lampoon (see box).

-- Don't shirk extracurriculars. I am reading now from something called the Short Biography of Pal Ristvedt: . . . He is President of the Undergraduate Finance Association and the Undergraduate Management Consultants Group, President of Beta Gamma Sigma -- the Business School Honor Society, President of the Association of Norwegian Students Abroad, as well as a former president of the Cross Country Ski Team, a former member of the U.C. Berkeley Model United Nations and the Berkeley Hang Gliding Club. Makes you wonder what was in the Long Biography. Says Ristvedt: ''The people who get involved in those things are the ones who get the jobs. It shows leadership.''

-- Pull out every last stop. Larry Brewer, who graduated from the University of Mississippi with a BS in biology, didn't take chances. He earned the best grades he could. He did extracurriculars. He served an internship. But he went his classmates one better and hired a search firm, ADIA Personnel Services, to tout him to employers. Even with that leg up (and although the campus career office had told him to act relaxed in interviews), he was nervous. ''They tell you not to rattle your keys, to control your hands, not to volunteer stuff,'' he says, ''but I have friends who'd been through 30, 40 interviews and not been hired. I was nervous. I was praying.'' He dressed carefully. ''I guess personal hygiene has to be at the top of everybody's list. I wore my best suit -- pretty much my only suit -- and a tie.'' What kind? ''That tie had a luster to it,'' he says, happy at the memory. ''It was a kind of a paisley tie. Teal. Blue-green.'' He got hired anyway. In May he started at Cargill, in the corn-milling division. GRADUATES whose ships haven't yet come in are a mixed bunch, but statistics don't illuminate their differences. Some are despondent. Jobless Lisa Vance, Harvard '93, says she's undergoing ''massive denial.'' She interviewed but got no offers. Now, on May 28, she's re-rifling the binders in the career services office. ''I haven't found too many things that would be appropriate. I . . . haven't found that many things at all. If you'd told me last year I'd be in this spot now, I never would have believed you.'' Some graduates have trouble telling if they're employed or not. Judy Artime's internship with Institutional Investor runs ten weeks, then stops. What happens then? If she's lucky, it becomes a full-time job. If not: Hit the pavement, Judy. ''My gut tells me to hope,'' she says. Others, definitely employed, are doing things that don't require four years' school ing. Marist College director of career development Deidre Sepp notes, ''There has been a drop in the number of grads reporting a connection between their field of concentration and their first job. They're working in places they never would have chosen.'' Says Santa Cruz grad Kurt Opsahl: ''I'm grasping at straws. I graduated with highest honors in economics. Flipping burgers would be pretty sad.'' Going from the tables down at Mory's to waiting tables down at Mory's hurts. But seniors everywhere are biting their lip and doing it. Finally, there are kids who are jobless because they don't know what they want to do. If you thought this species had been made extinct by a Darwinian economy, you're wrong. Toujours la goof. Plenty of graduates don't immediately recognize in municipal bond trading (or anything else) a fit life's work. For them, placement centers are a waste of time. It's hard to be placed when you don't know where you fit. . If a 1-to-10 scale of cluelessness existed, with 10 being the high extreme, says Lang Williams, U. Virginia '93, ''I'd be about an 8.'' The foreign affairs and French double major is off to Vail, Colorado, in July, maybe for 16 months, maybe longer, maybe to paint houses, maybe to wait tables. He isn't sure. Oh, he did the interviewing thing. He talked to some investment banks. But as they talked back, he recalls, he started thinking to himself: I am 22 years old. Do I really need to start an IRA? He decided not. ''It just wasn't the real me,'' he says of his near brush with banking. ''I was B.S.-ing 'em. I really didn't expect to be invited back.'' And he wasn't. So it's off to Vail, with a ya-ha-ha and a yo-ho-ho, roistering down the boulevards of life (or 16 months of it anyway). Mothers of Vail: Keep your daughters in. Life is real? Life is earnest? Could be. Lang may rue the day he didn't start that IRA. He may pound his head against a wall. But for now he's happy. And somewhere, Errol Flynn is proud.