I know the author of Unemployed Files and he offered to post an article that I wrote. I normally don’t do this sort of thing but I feel like I have a lot of good advice to spread. Like the author, I was recently a victim of The Second Coming of the Great Depression. The author is very creative and that is his talent. My main talent is being a planner and being organized. Even though I try to be creative and funny, I just never quite got he hang of it since I got a C in Humor for Engineers in college.
Resumes
Everyone knows that the resume is the foundation of the job search. There are many different kinds of resumes out there and here is the biggest thing about resumes: if you talk to 10 different people about resumes, you’ll get 10 different answers on what to put on them. I’m not going to expound upon that stuff because I’ll just be the 11th different answer that you hear and I’m just some idiot on the Internet. However, hear are some things that I do know:
- Be confident in your resume. It represents you and others may have different opinions about your resume. Learn to know when to take their advice and when to stick to your guns about your resume.
- Your resume should be in .doc Word format. Yes, I know that there is the new fangled .docx Word format, but there are still lots of people out there running older versions of Office that don’t have the compatibility packs installed either. You could also save your resume in PDF format, but I prefer .doc since almost every computer can edit Word documents. Also, this is your primary version of your resume and should be formatted properly and be pretty and everything.
- After I have a pretty, formatted version of my resume, I then create a plain text version of it. Here is the thing though. I still keep it in a .doc format. I just take my pretty resume and then convert everything to a 12pt Courier font without any kind of special stuff such as bold, italiacs, underlined, etc. Also, EVERYTHING is aligned to the left side. I don’t change the information at all; just the formatting. This really helps because you never know when you are going to need to copy and paste your resume into a job submission site and then you’ll have to deal with mucking around with it. Do it once at the beginning and be done with it.
- Next step is a Google Docs version of your resume. Here is why. You may already be using Google Docs which is great. Then, just share your resume with everyone in the world. After this, go to http://tinyurl.com/ and create a custom URL for GD resume. You can actually create a custom URL such as http://tinyurl.com/uf-resume/ which then points to your GD resume. The reason for this is that the GD resume is something like docs.google.com/View=id?th3oue_UP86x456ou3 which isn’t easy for someone to type in. For this resume, I just copy my plain text resume into here and then do a few things such as bolding stuff, but it is essentially my PT resume.
- Next up is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social networking site focused on the professional environment. The way that I describe it is LinkedIn is for the 9-5 professional crowd where you want to get business done, Facebook is for the happy hour type of crowd where you go to have a bit of fun and unwind, and MySpace is the dirty area of town on the other side of the tracks where you go at 2am when a “good idea” suddenly becomes a bad one. There are many different things to utilized LinkedIn for your job search. For one, you can link to a website. How, but you already have a website. OK, it isn’t a website, but you do have a TinyURL that points to your resume. Also, under your experience, post the highlights from your resume there. You have to be picky because a Word document really isn’t limited in size but I think the LinkedIn Experience section is limited to something like 2500 characters. I also copy this from my plain text resume.
- If you are a creative type, definitely have a web-based portfolio of your work so that it is easy to see. With everyone, including my grandmother, on the Internet these days, it is important to utilize Internet resources for your job hunt.
Business Cards
You never know when a networking opportunity is going to come up. Hell, I’ve traded business cards with another customer at the mechanic before. This is usually something that people forget until it is too late, but they are pretty easy to get. You could use an online service that has free business cards such as http://vistaprint.com/ which I’ve heard good things about. You could also print your own if you have a decent printer at home. You go to an office supply store and they have templates for business cards. I use one made by Avery that has clean edges, a nice linen texture, and can be printed on both sides. The pros of creating your own business cards are you can download business card templates online, edit it however you like, and then print them whenever you want. The cons are that getting things lined up perfectly when you print them can be an exercise in futility.
The information that is critical on a business card are name, title/position that you are seeking, phone number, and email address. Also, you know that TinyURL thing that we created earlier that links to your GD resume? I think that is critical as well. Remember that the resume is the foundation to your job search and it is pretty cool to tell people that they can easily find your resume from your business card. Or if you have a portfolio website, you can just link to that as well. In this day and age, I don’t think address is needed anymore on a business card unless you have a physical business somewhere. You could put a catchy phrase describing yourself on there as well, but I’ll leave that up to you.
Once you do have business cards, the most important thing is to actually keep them on you at all times. I usually have about 5 or so in my wallet because you never know when something like this will come up. Yes, you could trade phone numbers with a business contact, but then you have another person in your phonebook with about 400 other people in there. A business card is a physical reminder of your meeting. And another piece of advice, if you get a business card, immediately flip it over and write a few details about the meeting such as date, setting, and what you talked about. It’ll be easier to remember that meeting later on.
Networking
You aren’t going to find your next job on Dice.com, Monster.com, or one of the hundreds of others job sites out there. And as most people know, most of the responses you get are spam or people offering opportunities to own your own business by selling insurance. You need to be proactive about networking. Find out any networking opportunities in your area. Always have business cards with you as well and if you think you’ll have enough business cards, then double the number that you bring with you. Practice at having a 15 second to 2 minutes spiel about yourself, what you are looking for, and what you are great at. You need to have this sales pitch about yourself done well rehearsed as well. The key is to also present yourself as how you can help your future employer/clients instead of what you are looking for. Present it as a way that they would benefit from having you employed.
I’ve been to a few recruiting events lately and here are a few other tips that I’ve learned that many others don’t do. I bring a small padfolio that isn’t fancy, but on the inside, I have plenty of business cards, a pad of paper and pen, as well as a copy of my formatted resume. It isn’t for people to take, but in case anyone is interested in my resume, I can say “Well, I happen to have a copy here with me. Would you like to take a quick look at it now?” If someone has a great piece of advice or a company that is hiring, I write it down immediately in my padfolio. Also, if someone doesn’t have business cards, you can have them write down their info in your padfolio as well. And the most important thing is to follow up with people afterwards within a day or two.
Networking is going to be how you find your next job and you need to be proactive and prepared to increase your chances of finding your next position.
Interviewing/Prep
Here is another topic where there are 10 different answers if you ask 10 different people and I admit that I hate interviewing. It’s crap because you have to pretend to be someone you aren’t and that is just tough for me to do, but the most important thing to do is to focus on your strengths. You can mention your weaknesses but only in passing and mention that you are working on them. The most common type of interview questions are behavioral interview questions where they ask you to describe a situation where the sky was falling and how you saved the day. If you’ve been out of work for a while or you are trying to think of an answer for an off the wall question, you’re going to stumble upon the answers which is not good. This is where you can do some homework no matter for which interview you do.
Go online and find all types of behavioral questions online. There are millions of them. You’ll quickly find out that they boil down to three to maybe five general types of questions or situations. This is good because this is easier to handle. Now, use the S-A-R technique from your past experiences. In short, this technique is where you describe a Situation, then your Actions in that situation, and then the Result of that situation. By using this technique with your experiences, actually write down some of your situations that you could potentially use to answer these behavioral interview questions. Also, think of experiences that aren’t specifically on your resume. Of all the points on my resume, I have just as many talking points that I use in an interview that I’ve practiced.
Once you start writing down your experiences using the S-A-R technique, you’ll see how one situation can apply to one type of behavioral question and another situation can apply to a different type. By doing this, it will really help you to figure out some of the things that you’ve done in the past. It’ll refresh your memory and it is great practice prep for an interview. You will want to focus on your strengths as I mentioned before. And if you write them down, you’ll have something to review later when you have an actual interview. And the biggest thing that employers want to hear is about how you can benefit their company, not how their company can benefit you.
Other
Finally, here are some general thoughts that I’ve discovered that’ll help when you lose your job and are looking for a new one. Stick with your schedule. If you are used to going to bed at 11pm and getting up at 7am, do that. It won’t be such a shock when you go back to work. Stay busy as well. You don’t have to spend 40 hours a week looking for a job, but keep yourself occupied by doing stuff. Actually, use this as an opportunity to do something that you would never do. Get a part time job somewhere where there are a lot of people. You could use this as a networking opportunity as well as long as you have plenty of business cards with you. You know what areas you are weak in. Work on them while you have the time. If you don’t have coding skills, take a class at a community college or teach yourself. If you aren’t organized, go clean out your filing cabinet or that stack of papers on your desk that is your version of a filing cabinet. Put things in their proper place and realize how much better it is to be organized. Work on some missing skills. A lot of the positions that I’m looking for require Visio and MS Project experience and I’ve been teaching myself those applications over the last few weeks. Or do something off the wall like volunteering somewhere.
Losing your job can be very traumatic and it is for most people, but it doesn’t have to be. You can be very proactive about finding your next job and it’ll take a lot of work, but the more work that you do now, the quicker that you’ll find your next job. And as I said at the first part of this article, I’m a planner. And I always plan for a rainy day. Hopefully, you’ll learn a lot from this and you will be better prepared because this isn’t likely the last time that you’ll lose your job. Have an emergency fund on hand and have a plan on what things can be cut from your budget if you have to. This isn’t the end of the world because billions of people before you have lost their job and they all have found a way to survive. And you can too.
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