Phrase to express activity in landing a job

Question

In addition to Use of "gain employment" expression? :

I'd like to say that former students landed jobs at great companies. At the the same time I'd like to express their efforts/actions and active attitude to it. So they were not only hired, but found those jobs and employed themselves. What are the best phrases for it:

• landed jobs

• got jobs

• gained employment

• employed themselves

Are there any extra variants?

In addition: ngrams results - is it relevant now?

To the answer: yes, they succeeded in their job finding. Some of them run their own business. So "actively networked" is good to describe the process. However, I'd also like to express the result. I fell that "employed themselves" is not the best choice. Neither "gained employment" - gain employment is fine there, if you're talking about being employed in general, at some time in the future

Answer 1

The phrase you may be looking for is

actively networked to find their job

it generally means in order to find a job they contacted people whom they either already knew, or wanted to know and reached out to companies they were interested in working for.

Your phrases

landed jobs
got jobs
gained employment

is the result of successful active networking, that is getting a job.

employed themselves

doesn't really make sense unless they started their own company.