Getting a Job - The Process

In today's tough job market, you have to spend as much time looking for a job as would be if you were working at a job. You need a set routine and you should have a plan. This is the advice you get on every job-hunting site and is as true as any other advice you get, but you have to take it for what it's worth. It may work for you the first few weeks you are looking for a new position, but after that it's hard to put in 8 hours a day applying for jobs.

In the first week of unemployment it is pretty easy to spend a full workday looking for a new position. Assuming, of course, that you are looking for a position that would require a resume or CV, a cover letter and at least one interview. Many jobs that fit this description will also require an application, but you'll need to get a foot in the door first and your resume is your ticket to doing it.

Everything is fresh the first week of searching. You have the nice cover/cover sheet watermarked fancy bond paper with envelopes to match, a printer full of ink, a roll of stamps and a plan. You have a book on how to write the perfect resume and you settle in at the computer to get started. The first plan of attack is to visit the on-line sites and apply for the best jobs you can find. These are the ones not too far from home, they have benefits, the feel of decent-to-good pay and are well within your skill set. You've followed the instructions in your books and you email your resume to at least 10 companies.

The next set of possibilities comes from the phone book or places that you have heard are hiring or are in your vicinity and you'd like to work at one of them. These are basically cold calls, you don't have a job description to work from or a position open notice, so you arrange your resume accordingly and send it with a cover letter. Then you wait a couple days, practising your interview skills and reading up on the various companies so you will show confidence during your interview. After a round of phone calls to make sure your information was received, you decide to widen the circle.

Back to the online sites, with not as many restrictions in place, you send out a lot more resumes. You hit the papers again, ask around and go back through the phone back to see if you missed any companies with potential. Out goes another round of resumes. And you wait for the phone to ring.

By the end of the second week, you are no longer able to stretch this job search into a full time position. You have applied for every position that you feel even remotely suited for and have used up all your stamps and most of your bond paper, with nothing to show for it. After a few weeks of this, sending out a resume whenever there is a new job posted anywhere, you begin to think it is hopeless and start the interim job search.

You are not alone, there are hundreds of other unemployed or underemployed souls doing the exact same thing you are. And that is where the problem lies; all of those other people who read the same book you did, wrote the same boring resume that you did and got ignored, the exact same way that you did. The person who got the job did not read the same book and did not write the same resume. Her resume got her in the door and into the interview chair. That's the type of resume you need to write.