I’m looking for other people who are in the process of job-searching to commiserate, encourage, rant, and just bond with.
Come and tell your story of being unemployed or looking for a job.
I have only been in a serious job search for about a month, but man it’s a tough market out there! I’ve had one interview that I thought went well, but they offered the job to someone else, so I guess it didn’t go well enough. I’m keeping busy with volunteer work, taking care of my 4 kids, and looking for a job.
I need a better job. After 15 months of seaching, I took a hard pay cut last fall. But I really need to get back out there and look some more.
When I was looking, I concentrated on eating well, exercising daily, and my daily routine of hunting for work. I logged absolutely everything that happened.
Network on LinkIn, facebook, twitter, whatever you can exploit. Monster seemed like the best job board. Good luck!
I finally found something about a year ago, but it took 18 months of searching, so I can still related to your situation.
My advice is to to talk to people around you and don’t let yourself get isolated. I don’t necessarily mean in the networking sense, but just to keep up your communication skills. Job searching can be a lonely business and you can find that you are a bit rusty in talking about what you do.
An example of one thing I did was to talk to a friend of my husband’s who is a recruiter. She doesn’t even work in my field, so she wasn’t going to find me a job, but she was able to listen well as I talked about what I was looking for and offer tips on how to do better searches and how to use Linkedin and so forth.
The biggest thing for me was treating it like a job. I’ve had a bunch of friends who were laid off and they were all, “I took a vacation, learned a hobby and spent some quality ME time.”
I am incapable of that. Get me a job and I’ll use my fresh vacation time for that stuff.
So, I joined some job searching groups to hang out with people and learn their strategies, I took meetings with people who held similar jobs to the one I wanted and I spent time on the job sites (Indeed and Monster are good).
It made me feel like I was useful again even if I wasn’t getting paid. I was out there. I was being productive.
And I have to go against the advice you read in the books - I didn’t find personal connections to be that useful. I found quite a lot of jobs online, had a really good resume, could write a good cover letter and got interviews. Maybe I’m a special case or maybe times are changing, but there’s a LOT of jobs to be found online.
It is a very hard market out there depending on what you are looking for. A family member is looking for a job in executive search and it is very tight because the search firms are depending on the firms still feeling the effects of the economy. She identifies leads and has solid follow-up conversations and interviews, but they are really stockpiling candidates to keep their pipelines active until they are really able to make a move, so they keep her at arms’ length. Grr.
I feel your pain, and spend a lot of time talking about the reality of the situation, the need to follow up on every lead and really keep your head down and your outlook positive.
Frustrating - but I don’t see any easy ways or shortcuts.
Please take care - I can’t connect all the dots, but from some of your posts it sounds like you are going through a few changes, no doubt influencing this job search (and if I connected the dots in a completely wrong way, I apologize!). Best of luck.