Don't leave 10 minutes before the miracle! My 138-er friend landed a real job!

To my Brothers and Sisters of Displaced American Workers United,

Please take hope in the happy news I received this afternoon!

Of my four best friends, two have been unemployed for under a
year. The other two have been jobless over 30 months. Of the
latter two, the one I used to job search with just got a job offer
today for a 90-day contract-to-hire position within his field. He
interviewed on Thursday, and today (the very next day) he got
"the call." He starts Tuesday! During his 90-day contract, his
pay will be fairly low, but if his employer decides to hire him, his
pay will be “living-wage,” and with full benefits.

Upon hearing this wonderful news, I tonight buttonholed my friend
over the phone and told him that I wanted him to share his
thoughts on his unemployment experience, and his suggestions for
my Brothers and Sisters of DAWU Forum, while everything was still
completely fresh in his mind.

Please pardon if what I have written below is not in my usual
sequenced layout. I had an understandably excited guy on the other
end of the phone, and I just let him speak free-form (a mile a minute)
while I scribbled notes on a legal pad. . .

WW


# 1. GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE


Mix up your job search. Don’t keep doing the exact same things over
and over again day after day. Don’t limit yourself to cyber hell, and
just make the job boards your whole job search. Take that class!
Don’t walk away from government or other types of job-search or
educational assistance just because people aren’t bending over to help
you, or because they’re giving you the run-around. Be persistent, but
be nice at the same time. Get to know the staff at the assistance-
center or whatever. If you do that, they're more likely to have your
back.


Cold calling is a productive tool, but it is some work! You have to have
a plan before you make a cold call, and you have to know what you are
going to say, and what you think they might ask you or say to you, and
how you will answer them. Cold calling is out of your comfort zone, and
you are going to get hit with a ton of rejection. But I got some really
good interviews from cold-calling, and if you’re already getting rejected
all the time from sending hundreds of resumes to job-board ads, what’s
cold-calling gonna hurt? What you’re doing now isn’t working, and so, do
you have something better to do with your time?


# 2. NETWORKING AND REACHING OUT FOR HELP


If you are out of work for over two years, you need to tell that to
everyone you meet who you are going to ask for assistance of
any type. Don’t be dramatic about it, but make it very clear to them
how long you have been out, and how much you need help . . . every
bit of help that you can get or you won’t be able to ever get your life
back.


Start developing relationships with people now. Even if you get a job,
keep building those relationships, because you don’t know anymore if
your company will even be around next year. Do the Linked-In thing.


# 3. LTU-DEPRESSION


Depression – f------ big time – sleep is important. . . . Depression-naps?
There are times when you do need them. But sometimes you have to
fight off the desire to sleep or you won’t get anything done.


Fighting unemployment-depression is almost as important as job
searching, because if you can’t fight off the depression on a day-to-day
basis, it’s going to hurt your job search a lot. You’ll find yourself saying
to yourself: “well I got out 10 resumes to job ads, so that’s good enough
– I did something.” But that’s NOT good enough.


Part of the job search depression, I think, comes from making bad
decisions over and over again . . . like staying in your comfort zone -
when staying in your comfort zone isn’t cutting it.


If you are keeping yourself busy, that is a good thing. Also, I had daily
devotionals sent to my email. I started practicing kind of a meditation.
I meditated to a piece of scripture and then I would start praying to God
in a strange way, like I was talking to a friend. It helped me clear my mind.


I did a lot of self-reflection. If I was really depressed, I would ask myself:
“Well, what HAVE I been doing with my time?”


Get a good wake and sleep schedule and do whatever you have to do to
keep to that schedule. Don’t be waking up at 10am on a weekday! Don’t
be a night owl, unless you are just applying for night shift jobs.


Yeah, I got a job because I kept trying and I kept changing it up so that I
wouldn’t go crazy. But I know that I could have tried harder. I could have
done more. But the depression just kept my output down – it was really
hard to fight that, and it was a fight every day – that’s every day.


# 4. ADS AND RESUMES


Chances are that your resume is OK, but keep it really simple, and write
it in such a way that anyone who reads it will be able to identify exactly who
you are right away (e.g., industry, type and level of position). Don’t make
them have to guess or have to read for more than 15 seconds before they
know who you are.


If a job ad looks really good, than that usually means that it looks really
good to a lot of other people too. I tried not to get myself jacked up when
I saw a job ad that looked really good.


See what kind of contact information you can find on people who work in
the companies you are going to cold call, or to apply to for a posted position.
It is better to have the name of someone to send your resume to directly, and,
if you’re lucky, you may be able to find out some information on them, and
you can use that in your cover letter or when you call them.


I make it easy on employers and government agencies . . . like, for instance, I
don’t walk in and hand them paper if I know that they prefer electronic
submissions.


# 5. INTERVIEWING


You have to “read the interviewer.” Interviews are a lot more about
chemistry than about anything else – more than everything else. Your
dress, posture, the rhythm and tone of your voice, an keeping constant
eye contact. They are all really important.


Tell interviewers some stories of cool things that you did for past
employers without being asked to do them. Tell them the stories that
demonstrate your initiative and how your taking the extra step helped
the company. These are “here’s what I can do for you” stories.


When you get unlucky, and you get an interview where your interviewer
is asking questions off a script, you’re in trouble . . . so make sure that
you have developed answers to all the major questions interviews
generally ask, and also develop answers for any question you can think
of that an interviewer might ask you because of the type of job you are
interviewing for. You need to practice answering those questions in front
of a mirror again and again, until it becomes second nature . . . so that
you will appear relaxed and in control when they throw one of those
questions at you.


Near the end of the interview, look the interviewer in the eye and directly
ask them for the position. You ask them, “. . . Is there anything that you
know of that would keep me from getting this job?”


If you are signing up with a temp-service or a placement service or a
headhunter, take the time to build up some chemistry with whoever
you will be working with. If you can build that chemistry, they’re going
to do more to help you. If you don’t have any chemistry with them,
maybe you shouldn’t bother with them, because you won’t mean
anything to them and so they aren’t going to do anything for you.


# 6. TAKING A SURVIVAL-JOB


Don’t go working at the Kwiki-Mart to make a little survival money and
then go home and not job search! Do you want to work at the Kwiki-
Mart forever? If you are working in something that has nothing to do
with your career or your trade, to someone looking over your resume,
working at the Kwiki-Mart is just the same as not working. So the
longer you keep working at the Kwiki-Mart the less people are going
to want you for the job you want to be in. I don’t recommend working
a Kwiki-Mart job unless you have to have the money. But if you have
to have the money than don’t just go home from the Kwiki-Mart with
a six pack and say that you earned a rest. Keep job hunting like you
weren’t working at Kwiki-Mart.

Excellent advice WW! I tend to let my sleeping habits get screwed up when I am depressed and it is a constant battle to try to maintain "normal" hours.

Cold calling is always difficult for me, I appreciate you reminding us of the importance of it. It is out of my comfort zone so I don't like it, but it is a strategy I need to get more comfortable with.

Thanks WW we all need good news, any little bit of hope helps.

It is always good news to hear that someone long term unemployed went back to work.

I can only imagine how happy that person must be.

Then I can imagine how happy I would be - especially if it is a job that I really want.

Good stuff ww!

Thanks WW

Hi Need2Bworking, Quiethawk, Sunrise, Booniebeast and Mrgolf,

Firstly, as a quick follow-up, my friend's date of hire was delayed, so yesterday was his first day. He said that, due to his new employer's need to process a variety of security clearances for him - which, for air transportation positions, have increased greatly over the last 10 years - my friend basically spent his whole first day just sitting at a terminal and reading. It was, my friend reported to me, an exceedingly sedentary 8 hours, and yet, by the end of his first day, he returned home feeling utterly exhausted!

I shared with him that I had felt that same way on the first day of my re-employment in 10/09 . . . even though I also actually did very little on my start date. I think that there is something emotionally draining about being the "FNG" (F------ New Guy), with everyone just staring at you like scientists checking out some newly-identified single-cell life form under a microscope.

Secondly, I found it very interesting that last night I witnessed my friend begin to succumb to that old memory-spin-doctoring called "nostalgia-izing." He had the temerity to tell me that his 139 weeks of joblessless "weren't all that bad, except for a couple of things." Now ladies and gentlemen, as you'll recall from some of my previous posts (on here and on the Original Forum), it was I (rather than his family or girlfriend) upon whom he nightly dumped his job-hunt anxiety . . . despair . . . anger. Now, on his first day back at work, he had the I-don't-know-what to try to tell me that his last 2.6 years "weren't all that bad!"

Humans are strange creatures sometimes. . . .

WW

I had one job for almost 18 years but I do remember the stress of being new. I remember thinking "can I do this?" I remember going to a regional meeting of all the hotel managers and thinking that I would be exposed as "not knowing anything." Turns out I knew just as much as everyone else if not more.