As I mentioned on yesterday’s post, I lost my job to a layoff last Thursday. Although I had already started the search even before I was granted an involuntary vacation, the idea of no longer being employed has an amazing way of motivating you to shift the job search into overdrive. As the search for my first job out of college was facilitated through our career services office and my only other position was a referral through a friend of mine, the real world job search is completely new to me.
Although we are only a few days into the full job search, I have already learned quite a bit. My Friday evening was spent searching Careerbuilder and Monster for relevant job postings, and a good part of my Saturday was spent applying for the positions I found the night before. In the process, I updated my resume on both sites, and apparently on Monster I neglected to set the search preferences to private. So the bullet point list of my lessons learned so far:
- If you are in an in-demand field (I am an accountant with experience over the last several years in internal auditing), absolutely do not put your resume in public searchable mode. I posted mine Saturday afternoon and my phone did not stop ringing all day today, not including the numerous emails I received as well. I finally took the resume down Monday afternoon because I couldn’t keep up with all the recruiters that were calling.
- Many of the headhunters and recruiters are working the same jobs. Of the many calls I received, a couple asked me if I would be interested in a job I had already interviewed for, which was arranged by yet another recruiter.
- Applying for positions posted by a staffing firm is a good way to get access to many different positions without having to apply for all of them separately.
- Applications for positions through staffing firms tend to get much quicker responses than applications to positions posted by the companies directly. I guess a recruiter being paid on commission is a lot more motivated than a corporate HR rep being paid a set salary. But ultimately the process is dependent on those corporate HR reps at some point, so don’t expect to get hired overnight.
- Track your applications and interactions with recruiters in an Excel spreadsheet. This is good to keep up with recruiter names and what companies you have applied for through which headhunter. It also serves as good evidence of your job search activities if you have applied for unemployment.
I’m sure I will learn a lot more before I eventually get hired somewhere, but I wanted to give everyone a glimpse into my job search odyssey.
