My many moons of unemployment has finally come to an end. I figured that in the event it happens again (because you never know; a friend of mine was just laid off after a little over a year just like I was at my last Snake Pit gig), I should write a bit about what I did, what worked, what didn’t, etc., etc.
1. Never stop. I mean, really, do you have a choice? Because I had job search reporting requirements during the first quarters of my unemployment insurance, it was easier to stay focused and on track. The state’s suggested minimum was something like “fill up a couple of these sheets with 15 fields a week” but really, I’m not the sort that just goes around throwing everything I’ve got against the wall to see what will stick, so my reports were closer to one sheet each time I had to show up for the required workshops. I guess I’m in the clear as I haven’t been audited. Which leads me to my next point…
2. Be selective. With rejection after rejection, I did start to feel that perhaps I was being too picky. I even thought about swallowing my pride and shooting for administrative assistant positions (obligatory “I do not diss AAs, after all I was one and damned good one, too, I just don’t think I could go back to it” statement goes here). But after working for the Corporate Man for the past three years or so, I really didn’t want to go back to that if I could at all help it, especially salary-wise. Once I did that, I came to the cheesy realization that doing work that mattered on some scale really did make a difference to me. I was willing to take a pay cut to do it, just not for one that I couldn’t survive on. Also be selective in the fact that you really need to pay attention to the base qualifications in a posting. Do not waste yours or the mark’s time if you don’t meet MOST if not ALL of the minimum qualifications. It’s icing on the cake and a nod in your favor if you can meet at least some of the preferred, but I am here to tell you that’s no guarantee either that you’ll make it past the screening for a preliminary interview. We all know it’s tough out there and the waters are thick with perfect candidates. We live in a world now where it makes my eyeballs pop and my jaw drop to see a search that’s been extended due to the employer being unable to find a candidate in the first go ’round. Truth is from what I heard in one interview process I was a part of, it’s generally because for some reason, the original winner didn’t work out. In brief: if you’re not qualified or insanely over-qualified, don’t do it.
3. This one is for the employers. Do you remember that part in MIB where the cohort of interviewees are testing to get in? The scene where they’re given pencils and paper applications and told to sit in egg-round chairs to fill them out? And Will Smith’s character drags a table over? STOP FORKING MAKING US DO THAT FOR GOD’S SAKE. I think this needles me most because I had to do it like twice in as many weeks very recently. I showed up on time for my interviews and then I spent the first 20-30 minutes filling out a damned application whilst stuck in a chair with a clipboard (maybe) in my lap. Better prepared outfits will generally do the interview and then hand you the application packet to go home, complete in a neat, orderly and in-depth fashion then send it back to them ASAP. The first time I had to do a bit of guessing because I didn’t have the complete specifics in front of me for my 10 year job history (i.e., starting salary, titles for old supervisors who weren’t on my reference list, etc.), but I had all that with me the second time. And for heaven’s sake, if you have the form in an electronic format, DO NOT PRINT IT OUT AND MAKE ME FILL IT OUT BY HAND. I have pretty much the world’s worst handwriting and it’s gotten progressively worse over the years since I actually write less and less. Another one that took the cake? A Wonderlic test during a cattle call interview after we’d all sat around scribbling madly on our application forms. So it was a good 45 minutes at least before we even got anywhere near the hiring manager. If you insist on making us do this up front, I beg of you to give us a proper place to do it. Other than our laps. Please.
4. In these electronic days, there is no time to prepare your resume and cover letter a piacere. Oftentimes job announcements will come down within hours of being posted because they’ve been bombarded with apps just that quickly. So the time you used to take to have friends/colleagues peruse and proof your materials or to let it get cold for a couple of days to come back and look at it with fresher eyes is *poof* all gone. Alas, every tiny detail still matters. First thing I do is work from well-tailored cover letters that I’d written previously and re-tailor them for the posting at hand. Second thing: the best proofreading tactic that’s worked for me is to read the letter aloud as if I’m presenting it a couple of times. I have found all sorts of stupidity in my letters that I would have missed otherwise. I just today found a mistake in an email I was preparing to send where I had substituted the word “Sciences” in the job title for “Services” in three different places. But because I caught it in the email before I sent it by reading my body text aloud, I was able to fix it everywhere else.
5. Look good, although sometimes this can backfire. I think it might have been one of the things that weeded me out of the process I talked about here because I just didn’t look the part. Having been freshly sprung from the corporate world, I may have frightened the public services people off. I put away Anne Kleins and went with tamer oxford mid-heel pumps because yes, even that level of detail matters because for me, shoes make the swagger and I might have been swaggering overmuch just a tad. One time when I remembered to check the suit the night before I caught one of those stains that happens in the laundry room from dust or what have you on what was supposed to be my clean shirt. People, there are reasons that job hunting pundits crank out those hundreds of articles of advice…there are actually pearls of wisdom in there. That group interview I went to? To a person, if I had been the hiring manager, I’d have rejected most of them out of hand. This is what I saw: too-tight slacks, open toe pumps showing off a candy stripe pedicure, a tight sweater layered over an untucked novelty print tee and a sloppy weave. A nice 3/4 black suit jacket over slouchy leggings and crocs. An outfit and hairdo that would have been great for a country church deaconess but no good in the interview room. A gray suit that was so oversize and with pants so long I wondered how they didn’t trip over it on the way in coupled with shoes that looked like they’d been run over several times and left outside in the elements for a week or six. But you know what the funny thing is? The hiring manager immediately picked me out as someone she couldn’t make an offer to because the salary was just that low. And she was right. It was.
5. Even if they said no, I still made an impression. I just hope it was a positive one, because I’m not stopping. I’ve been doing this for over a year now and of course, just like when you start dating someone for real and all of a sudden formerly invisible hot prospects start coming out of the woodwork, my feed just lit up over the last couple of days with very viable opportunities. Like one career site I read says: “…because EVERY job is temporary!” I took the first and best offer I was given, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still shop.
::pushes cart down the aisle::
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