When life rudely intervenes to disrupt and unsettle your routine and settled life, after you get over the sudden smack on the head and other sensitive places, you may find yourself as I did suddenly in the business of finding another job.
With the help of Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed and other job sites, I applied for 21 jobs only last week. So far this week, I've applied for 16 more. I expect to apply for five or six other jobs by the end of the day on Friday. Altogether, I will have applied for an excess of 40 jobs in the last two weeks. That's not even counting all of the jobs I applied for in weeks past.
I am not complaining! Thank goodness I live in an area where the job market is humming along. I have lots of experience, I have a college degree, I'm modestly articulate, modestly smart, very nice, very reliable and oh-so-worthy of whatever job I end up landing. I'm trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave and reverent. I guess I left out "clean" from that list. Don't worry, this Boy Scout took a shower this morning.
For every one of the jobs I've applied for, I've provided a slightly modified cover letter and resume, each tailored to include keywords that appear in the job description or from that company's Web site. It's a lot of work. I could be lazy about it and just cut-and-paste over and over again, but I'm trying to go about doing this job search the right way.
Yesterday, I spent a long time totally updating and revising my online portfolio. Before I had two, neither of which I was particularly thrilled with. The new one is a whole lot better, far more organized, and includes some modestly cool features like live links to my LinkedIn profile and this wonderful blog I'm writing. I am so glad my wife and I bought Adobe CS5 recently. Adobe Acrobat is so perfect for creating interactive portfolios.
What bothers me most about the job-search process is having to constantly fill out online forms. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to fill out my first name, last name, address, county, home phone number, cell phone number, which number do I prefer for them to contact me with, and on and on and on.
What's really fun and frustrating are sites where you just completed a very complex online form with your entire life history, press the "submit" button, and then lose everything because the next page fails to load. So you go back and try it again, fill it all out again, press "submit" and lose it all, again. I'm pretty sure the problem is at least partially dependent upon the browser. I love Google Chrome and use that pretty exclusively. I used to love Firefox, but it is so darn slow compared to Chrome. I try to avoid using Internet Explorer, but darn it, it seems to have the fewest number of problems with these online forms. There's something about it that keeps the connection alive so you don't lose your data. "Maybe Microsoft is finally doing something right," Steve said with a slightly bemused look on his face.
One of the cool features of Chrome is, it will remember what you've filled out in other similar fields and automatically fill out a lot of the forms for you. That's incredibly helpful, except when it places your phone number in your city field, and your city in the state field, etc. Most of the time it works just fine, but you have to be extra careful and proofread what it fills out for you. And of course, you have to hope that when you press the "submit" button, it actually submits the data and moves on the confirmation screen.
Well, I had started writing this earlier today, and was a bit discouraged since I have had no interviews since last month and no one had responded in any significant way to any of my many job applications. However, in the hours since then, I now have two job interviews to go to! One tomorrow morning, and another one on Monday morning. Plus, this afternoon I had a phone screening interview for another job, and it looks like I may get a call from the Hiring Manager for that about the middle of next week.
It's so exciting to get a job interview. However, I have to caution myself that it's an interview for a job, not the job itself. Still, having two and possibly three interviews to go to soon gives me hope, and that's a great thing to have.
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