Unemployment is a lot of work

This is no vacation. This ain't no party. Far from it. When you're unemployed, don't expect any coffee breaks. There are no friendly chats with your fellow associates. No pot luck lunches in the break room. If you're serious about doing your work to find another job, you seriously hunker down and focus on the task at hand.

For example, my goal for this week is to apply for 15 jobs. When you're collecting unemployment, the minimum number is 5, so I am trying to do three times the minimum. I have to complete this by Saturday. So far today, I have applied for three, and I will apply for at least one more before I clock out for the day. You might think that applying for 15 jobs over the course of a week is nothing. Think again. You have to tailor your cover letter and your resume to each of the jobs you're applying for. There is no "one cover letter and one resume fits all." If you want your information to be noticed, you have to include specific keywords and phrases that you find in the job description or on the company's Web site. If you don't do that, you're wasting your time, because most resumes are initially not even seen by human eyes. In most cases, resumes are scanned by a computer, and if the HAL 9000 doesn't find those keywords, your resume will fall into a black hole. Keywords are key.

One of my other goals this week is to follow-up with some of the companies that I sent resumes to in past weeks. By Wednesday, I need to email an HR manager I talked to in January and see if I am still in consideration for an open position, and I need to call another HR manager and do an informational interview about her company and how I can best position myself to apply and get serious consideration for a job I would love to do. You can't be shy about this. It's too serious to be a shrinking violet. I have too many people counting on me, including myself, to get this figured out as soon as possible.

Monday is also the day I go to my Job Seekers meeting at Christ Fellowship Church in McKinney. Today's meeting was excellent. Stephanie Lyon, our group's Life Coach, changed the organizational setup of our meeting. It seemed a lot more focused and informative than some of the other recent meetings we have had. She is starting to become more demanding of us, requiring us to write down our stated goals and meet or exceed them. I really appreciate that reinforcement.

It would be so easy to put things off. It would be easy to turn on the TV and channel surf. It would be so easy to cruise the Internet aimlessly. The latter is so tempting, since I am right in front of this computer for most of the live long day. But so far, I have had the self discipline to keep the TV off during the day. I occasionally find myself looking at the news or something online, but then the automatic guilt-switch kicks in and I quickly return to my job search.


Writing this blog is also another goal of mine. I am trying hard to write something each and every day. I seem to be veering from being extremely serious to extremely silly in my postings. At some point perhaps I will settle into a routine of being seriously silly.