Thursday, October 27, 2016

Job Hunting in the Modern Age

I remember the old days when you were job hunting. You'd get up get the Sunday paper out and start looking. You'd circle the jobs that looked promising. Once done looking through the whole paper you'd start responding to the ads.

Out would come your typewriter and you'd start working on your cover letters. Typing each one. Then you'd type up an envelope and put the cover letter and your resume in the envelope and mail it off. Your resume would of course have been done at the local copy place on some nice heavy paper to make it stand out.

Yes times have changed and in some ways it hasn't. Thank goodness you don't have to mail anything any more. You can do one cover letter and then tweak it to your heart's content to make it fit with the job you're applying for. Your resume is now a PDF so paper stock is no longer an issue. With email and the web things have gotten so much easier.

One thing that hasn't changed is when jobs are posted. Sunday still seems to be the big day for jobs to be posted. It's the same old idea of getting people to respond early in the week so you can get them in for an interview. Now of course the response are in someone's in box the minute they walk in on Monday morning.

And now you don't have to do all that much looking. You can go to all sorts of sites Monster, Career Building, Duke Jobs, Indeed, Washington Post and a host of others and post your resume. You can then set up a key word search on each of the sites. The sites will then look for jobs containing those key works and email you the listing of the jobs to you. In fact you only have to sign up on a couple of sites because they will share your information with other sites and those sites will send you job listings as well!

Needless to say I have one very full email inbox. I still do some searching on my own on other sites too. There are new postings until about Wednesday. After that it's what I call reruns the listings just repeat.

I get up on Sunday and start looking. I spend a couple of hours looking at the job postings. Sometimes it's a little less. The thing is you can only spend so much time on it and you need a break. I look each day through Wednesday then I take a break.

The hard thing when you are unemployed is you feel you need to be looking for a job all the time. I feel a little guilty when I'm not. But I've learned there is only so much you can do each day. Once you've done that you have to come up with other things to do. I took some classes at the DC Library on Excel and actually learned a great deal. I was planning on taking more classes this month but the times didn't work out for me. I'm going to look at the schedule for November to see what's available.

And that's the new way to job hunt. I'll go into all the different ways you apply on line in another post.



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