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Saturday, September 17, 2011

Notes From the Job Hunt

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming (hah, pun! Second programming post delayed. No?) to bring you some of the results of my now 7 month long job search. Some of it will be philosophizing about it, some kvetching, and some, true to the intent if not always the practice of this blog, will be useful tidbits I wish someone had told me in a consolidated place sooner. In particular, this post is written for all my other friends in exactly the same boat as me. I'm not employed yet, so clearly I'm not a pro, but I've also been doing this for a while and have picked up some tips that cut out a lot of wasted time (and I've had my share of interviews in the last week, which makes me think I’ve been doing something right).


You don't need me to tell you that the job market is terrible, or that this is not the situation our previous lives led us to expect when we hit the workforce. I'm not going to go on about it at length, just acknowledge that it's the way things are and the world we find ourselves dealing with. Of the recent graduates of my very highly regarded, very expensive college, I know very few who are employed at the moment, slightly more who managed to hit grad school without a pause. But the vast majority of us are struggling to get a job with little on our resumes or in our skill sets—usually by now not as a passion but as a necessity. 

I will say this, briefly, before I get to the useful stuff: there are some (few) good things that have come from these grim economic days. Contrary to what I expected, the world has not gotten more cutthroat as jobs get fewer and resources scarcer. There has never been a better time to pull together as a community; the people I know forward each other promising job opportunities almost as soon as they see them, help each other edit their resumes, recommend and refer their friends and colleagues, lend each other their time and resources when necessary. Rather than every man for himself, it has become clear that it's almost impossible to get by without a close-knit community behind you. In a more general sense, from what I can tell it's the nonprofits that are hiring, more than financial companies, law firms, or nearly anything else. (Well, and anything science/tech of course. You lot are never in want of employment.) There has never been a better time to be nice, do good, and make friends with any and everyone you can. That isn't to say you should wheel and deal--anyone who knows me knows I'm not much good at faking things I don't feel and that I hate schmoozing. But you'll be better served if your first urge is to help others, make friends, and be decent.

So how does one go about finding these 'job' things when one didn't major in a subject with a clear career path laid out before it? 

1. First off, the basics. You should have a professional email address and resume--and if you like you can have a professional-ready twitter, facebook, and blog too.  This means using some variation on your name for all identifiers (no references to your favorite movie, D&D character, or leet speak), and if you’re using a twitter, facebook, or blog, posting absolutely nothing you wouldn’t say to an employer’s face.

Now, there are many ways to do a resume. Certainly pretty much everyone agrees that if you haven't won the Fields medal yet and you're under 30, your resume should fit onto one page. In general, people also agree that you should list your complete and most professionally-presented contact information at the top, your college degree and GPA/honors below that, and your relevant previous work experiences with some explanation thereafter. At this link I have posted a template resume with general instructions on how to complete it. It is modeled off of my own, which is in turn the result of a consultation by Chris Furuya of Furyous Consulting many moons ago. She helps people get jobs actually for a living herself, and I recommend reading her advice.


2. There's no easy way to say this, kids, but know somebody. Connections and personal references are easily the number one way to make things happen career-wise. From personal experience—you can nobly pound pavement as an unknown for months and get nothing, and mention your difficulties to the right friend and suddenly have options. 

This isn't even necessarily bad or unreasonable in a tough economy and flooded job market, though it does undeniably tip the scales towards outgoing, upper-class people. If you know someone personally you probably have a better idea of their reliability, moral character, and previous work. There are a lot of people out there looking for jobs and many aren't qualified, or are crazy, or are perfectly capable but will drive their boss absolutely nuts just due to personality clashes. You spend an inordinate amount of time with the people you work with, and hiring mistakes are expensive. So you go with what you know in a bloated market where you can afford to pick and choose.

3. However, we don't all have the luxury of a ready-made portfolio of professional contacts. So what then? First of all, you can start building one, and should, with a LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is facebook for the professional set, and an easy way to get your name and face out into the world. Make one, keep it up to date, follow as many of the profile optimization tips on the site as you can, and LinkedIn-friend all your previous employers, colleagues you worked closely/got on with, and maybe some people you went to school with. Fill in all the fields, and if you did well at a previous job then ask for a short recommendation. It's a lot less fraught than a recommendation for a specific job, as it can be a couple of sentences long, the author can edit it if it's not working for you, and you can reuse it again and again. It's a threshold thing as an entry-level employee—it proves you're not crazy and reliable—but you'd be amazed at how important thresholds can be.

4. Still, you need to find specific positions to apply to. You can't just have a LinkedIn profile (although they do have a job hunter section worth checking). There are many, many job search sites. I will list some of the better ones I've found below. Make a profile on as many as you can stand, and make it complete and up to date. I've gotten several interview offers entirely cold, just from people finding my resume on some of these sites—but only after I posted a complete, up to date profile with every field filled out for every one of these.





Idealist –Volunteer jobs, internships, and job-jobs, all at nonprofits or groups that somehow qualify as serving an ideal and trying to do good.


And some more industry-specific sites:


Higher Ed --Jobs in higher education (including some entry-level administrative jobs).

Care --Jobs as a child-sitter, pet-sitter, elderly care provider; basically anything that involves looking after people. Part-time, one-time, and full-time all available.

Elance --Freelance work of all kinds, writing, programming, design, you name it. Competition is fierce though.


Having made accounts on these sites, use their search criteria wisely and apply liberally, because it will take more applications than you think to get a callback. In particular, apply to recently posted jobs over older ones. Your chances will be much better.

Write cover letters. I cannot stress that enough. What's more, customize them each time. The first five or so will be onerous, but if you manage to identify a few types of positions that you're interested in—say administrative assistant, legal clerk, and project manager—then you will eventually end up with an archetypal administrative, legal, project, etc cover letter that you only need to tweak slightly to mirror the employer in question's language. Read the job description, particularly requirements/qualifications, note their buzzwords and reuse them in your description of your skills and experiences. More importantly, think about experiences you've had that you can genuinely couch in those terms. They want adaptable? Find a situation you've been in that was in constant flux that you handled with grace, and explain that. Also, try and make the occasional specific, quantifiable example of something you did well. Do database management? How big was the database? How much more did you get done than is average in a week? I have a general cover letter template posted here, but cover letters require significantly more fine-tuning than resumes and you'll start to get a better feel for them the more you write. I would advise google-ing examples online.

Finally, sometimes it’s worthwhile to tweak your resume for specific jobs. I usually find, as an entry-level person with a relatively short employment history, that this is unnecessary. Especially if all your work experience fits easily onto one page. However, if you are applying to a kind of job with highly specific requirements, it might be worth having a separate resume for that type of work. For example, I would love to work in a natural history museum. On the resume I send to positions like that, I include the week I spent digging up dinosaurs as job experience. But I omit it on applications to administrative or legal jobs—it’s cool, but totally irrelevant to them. That said, some people recommend customizing every resume for every position. I’d say that probably does increase your chances, but the trade-off is that it takes a lot of time for a very small pay-off. In the end, do the cost-benefit yourself on how much you care about a specific job.

5. There is a problem with all of the lovely above sites you're writing your delicately crafted cover letters through, though. You are really not the only person who knows about them, and you are entry level. Meaning not hard to come by and, in this economy, competing with people who have 3-10 years experiences in the theoretically-beginners' jobs you are trying to get. Meaning employers must waste much less time showing your competitors how to staple things right. 

Career Builder's competition comparison was a particularly grim and shocking experience for me—I had been spending full work days applying for jobs, crafting cover letters, the works, for a couple of months. I had essentially seen every relevant job posting in my geographical area and was actually low on new ones to apply to. Then I looked at the competition for one administrative job I applied for and saw to my shock that far more than 200 other people had applied for the job. They generally had 5-9 years experience on me, were willing to travel further than I was, and were much older. Going through the last five jobs I had applied for, the same was true of all of them. 

One of my bosses once told me that he reads the first 10 resumes he gets, skims the next 20, and then throws out the next several hundred. He just doesn't have time to process more than that. And, understand, this was for several unpaid internships like the one I was doing at the time. I'm certain paid jobs that aren't at start-ups get many more applications. As such, your best bet is to be in the first 10 resumes any employer gets. Now, most of these sites do let you narrow your job search by the date they were posted. I immediately narrowed my search to only jobs posted in the last 24 hours and felt terribly clever. I applied to three jobs and checked the competition—my 24 hour rule had gotten the number of other applicants down all right.

To the 100-200 range. 

Even one day after the jobs were posted, more than 100 people had already applied, with a similar breakdown of experience and age. This is not a total kiss of death—usually many fewer people had bothered to write cover letters than had submitted their resume. I would argue that the cover letter gives you an edge in any job application where the employer really wants you to show commitment to the organization. But it's still a small drop in the ocean.
So what solution am I offering you? Not a perfect one, but one I feel really slow for missing earlier. Twitter. Apparently, people tweet job postings. Lots of people. There are entire streams devoted to certified nursing jobs in Los Angeles. There is also TwitterMyJob[link], another resume-posting site that lets you get jobs in areas you're interested in tweeted to you in real time. 

How much faster can you get if you just search Twitter for #jobs or use that service? Well, Twitter linked me to one posted on good old Career Builder and I applied immediately, taking the time to write a custom cover letter for it. Competition? Not enough people had applied yet for Career Builder to have statistics on them. I will also add that the rate at which I have gotten interviews has increased exponentially since I started doing this.

So I might suggest making a Twitter account, if only for professional purposes.

6. Always, always being doing something. Besides job hunt. Sounds unintuitive, I know. But in addition to the mental health boost you will get from shoring up your ego a bit, there are a lot of advantages to volunteering or being actively engaged in some community. One is that long-term volunteering certainly can turn into a job if you gain enough special knowledge, become invaluable enough to the organization, or generate enough of a reputation in a related industry. Another is that gaps in a resume can be the kiss of death—it’s unfair, but many employers will assume there is something wrong with you if there is a large period of unemployment and often interviewers (or even pre-interview forms) will ask you to explain any gaps in your employment history. Volunteering is yet another badge of the functional, capable citizen who wants to work. Don't get a volunteer gig so all-consuming that you can't devote your greatest effort to the job hunt, but find something engaging. Because finally, volunteering is a way to gain new skills that make you more employable, get references and recommendations that make it easier to get paying jobs, and discover new passions that might lead to new professional avenues. It also lets you meet people in a professional context, adding to that network of contacts we were talking about. On that note, be sure to add people you volunteer with on LinkedIn.

7. This final note is just about making ends meet—there are staffing firms out there that, if you can get them to take you on (most do require you to apply, as you would to a regular job) will give you part time/temporary work that will fill up those employment gaps and give you something to pay the bills with. It’s hardly reliable, but it can help string you along. Getting temporary gigs on Care.com can serve a similar purpose—for every full-time nanny gig on there, there are some frazzled parents who need you to just give them this Friday (or even the next three) off. There is also, if there are universities or colleges near you, psychology departments. I strongly recommend avoiding any drug trials, even though they pay well, but often institutions of higher learning will have experiments on a fairly regular basis that will give you $10-$30 to fill out forms, play video games, or otherwise have a fairly non-invasive guinea pig experience.

These are my big suggestions and lessons at present—have any more? Any good (or terrible) job-hunting stories? Questions? Corrections? Anything? Bueller?

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