Surfing (F)un-employment

You can lose yourself in the job search. After the umpteeth delicately-tweaked cover letter, painstakingly curated resume and well-written introductory email, you begin to feel like you're faking it. So I created the resume for who I actually am. Here we go: SELECTED EXPERIENCE MahEars, Philadelphia, PA Music Curator and Sonic Aesthetician 1989 - Present Develop classic rock, sixties girl groups and sundry genres into bizarre yet pleasing playlists Retain a disturbing amount of recording trivia and factoids gained from late-night Wikipedia rabbit trails Alienate coworkers and friends with anachronistic song lyric quotes Disturb fellow commuters on the Schuylkill Expressway with morning drive-dancing MahBrain, Philadelphia, PA Smartass in Residence 1986 -  Present Create charmingly/alarmingly specific to-do lists and goals Actively collect strange facts to develop obscure jokes and stories Despises the patriar...

Resume scanning software. Ghastly. Gone are the days of the whimsically written resume and the manual review. Toss in a handful of keywords, delete the word creative, and voila, maybe someone will pay attention to you. Fortunately, the way to evade being passed over by the robots is to add more robots. I popped my resume over to Jobscan  and threw a few job descriptions into the other field. I haven't updated my resume in a while (whoops), so it was expected that I only matched the descriptions at about a 56 percent rate. If you're new to seeding your resume with keywords, this is a great place to test what words work for you.

One of my favorite parts about working for the county newspaper in college was getting to interview many different kinds of people. Whether it was making a rural borough council member sweat with rapid-fire questions about millage rates, or profiling an Iraq War vet documenting his experiences, each interview spawned more stories than from the interviewee alone. So it is with job interviews: I've come to value interviewers who step out of the "where do you see yourself in five years" line of questioning. The better candidate also needs to offer more than just generic questions. For me, it helps to think like a journalist. What questions would help draw out a good story? Of course, we can't have all good interviewers and interviewees, but that's why these comics from The Oatmeal exist. They're old posts, but classic. My favorite bad interviewee is the mute, only because I like nachos. What's the best question you've asked/have been asked in an i...

I graduated college with 20K in student loans and not a whole lot of comprehension about education. In contrast, some of the smartest people I know didn't even graduate high school. One colleague - I call him Programmer 1 - dropped out of school after seventh grade. Yet he can worm his way around higher mathematic concepts, program in at least eight languages, and is at least bilingual (he gleefully refuses to speak anything other than English around me, so I can't confirm the third language). How did he manage this? The other classroom. You know, where folks go after they leave work for the evening. They go home, pull up the laptop or book and start learning for their own benefit. One of my bosses told me about this classroom, and I initially dismissed it. Whatever happened to work/life balance? But it's not education solely for work -- it may be learning for the rest of your life. A few years ago I had the opportunity to delve into information assurance. I didn't ...

I recently sent my resume to a friend for his review. It's fascinating to see different folks' criticism of form and content, but I wasn't prepared for his evaluation. "It's only one page?!" he squawked. "You can let it run to two pages?!" I squeaked back. I was stunned. I've read a lot of resume-writing articles and books, but I was still stuck in the one-page-or-bust mindset. Fortunately, my friend blew apart my mediocre resume. Miracle of miracles -- I suddenly had room to explain my biggest accomplishments. There's a lot of advice about what works and what doesn't for resumes and cover letters, but I've learned to keep it simple. Show your strengths. If you're passionate about the projects you've worked on, it will show on your resume and others can catch the vision. Most of all, I've learned about the power of human relationships. Not simply playing the job hunting equivalent of LinkedIn Professional Pokemon (...

The parallels have been noted many times, but job hunting really is like dating. You're all giddy and hopeful, and maybe if you're talented enough (or have friends), you get a call. You set a date. You stress out over your outfit and debate whether a Spanish soccer jersey ( Casiiiiiiillas !) could be considered appropriate. The day arrives. Conversation flows and you discuss vision, dreams, ideas. Everything's sparkly and magical and the receptionist smiles beatifically as you exit. Elated, you begin planning your new life. Once you've ridden that delightful puffy cloud, reality dumps you into a steaming pile of silence. Trying not to look too desperate, you send a kind, handwritten thank you note. Nothing. The Easter Island statues talk more than your company-to-be. You spend weeks going over everything you said, searching for the source of some unnamed offense and driving your friends crazy with your self-psychoanalysis. Screw that.  Though no amount...

Friends sometimes ask me what should be put in a cover letter. I've read some cover letter books (boring!), and looked at tons of online examples. Maybe it's the journalist in me, but I always read the ones that tell a story. Don't tell me that you're a great _______, demonstrate that you're a great _____. I loathe the cover letter-speak we use: multi-faceted, creative, utilize, ideal candidate...the list goes on. Gag. I'm a literary ninja. What are you?

In 2009, I was laid off (quite suddenly) from a job I hated. I decided from then on I didn't want to take a job unless I liked what I was doing or I liked my coworkers. These two criteria were put on hold when I decided I wanted to take a job so I didn't have to live in a cardboard box under I-95. I'm happy to say that I'm no longer in danger of that. Plus I have regained the two criteria in my job search. I accepted a job on Tuesday as a marketing and communications specialist for a manufacturing startup. I don't have too many details at this point, but it's definitely going to be weird to transition from writing tons of cover letters and resumes to writing public relations materials full time. I smell an adventure. In the meantime, I still owe you a review of What Color Is Your Parachute 2011 and Knock 'Em Dead Cover Letters . Pinkie promise.

If Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0 wants you to practice stealthy cover letter maneuvers and ninja-like resume writing, I'd rather wear a pith helmet, ready to exclaim "Crikey" like a certain Australian naturalist when first observing a dream job -- then go after it. I'm calling it my plot, prepare, pick strategy. I didn't dress up like David Livingstone , but I did use safari-like tactics when I targeted my internship. First, I researched prospective companies in my area that fit my interests and career path. I followed them on Twitter. I read their blogs. I've created Google news alerts for them so I can track their industry activity. In short, I've stalked them like a cheetah stalks an unsuspecting antelope on the Serengeti , except I'm a lot nicer and less likely to feed on your carcass. So how did I finally net my internship? The company tweeted about a summer internship opportunity. I mentioned the tweet in my cover letter, didn...

I've enjoyed reading Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0 . The authors divide their massive job-hunting treasure map/survival guide/pep rally into four parts. Each section is packed with advice, cajoling and "Guerrilla Intelligence" sub-sections that detail self-marketing strategies. Levinson and Perry's contention is that the job market is so competitive that ordinary job-hunting strategies are defunct. Therefore, guerrilla tactics -- effective marketing principles and tech savvy -- are de rigeur . The book, published in 2009, reflects the U.S. economic climate and pessimism of the time.  Unfortunately, at least for Part I,  the publishing date also showcases some passe technologies and applications. For example, Alta Vista is listed as a top news search engine. This may be still be true, but they didn't even appear in this article . (To be fair, the article counts both news search engines and individual news outlets as "news sites.") Personally, ...

Awesome woman surfer; photo from here .  It's your fifth day on the couch, cuddled up with your laptop. You're trying to sell yourself without sounding cheap, which is difficult considering it's 3:30 p.m. and you're still in your penguin pajamas. The momentary glee from browsing travel sites is dampened by the realization that you're spending your vacation fund on your student loans (oh, the agony!). Those wretched AES people may be surfing the Banzai Pipeline, but you're stuck surfing job sites. What to do? Beside attempting to rig a contest so your nemesis wins a lifetime supply of Marmite , you can catch up on reading. Off to Amazon with ye! Against my better judgment, I binge-bought job-searching books to see if they'd really help me land that glittering, light-from-heaven, angels-singing job. I intend to report back my findings to see if they smooth out job surfing, or just plain wipeout. Here are the victims: What Color is Your Parachute? 2011...

  Thus begins 2011: time to update resumes, cover letters, network like crazy and madly troll the Interwebz, kiddos. Wishing you all the best in your searches. For now, I'm cuddled up with the newest issue of Real Simpleton and yearning to creatively re-purpose my trouser socks.