What Color Is Your Parachute? 2010: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers

Rare book

Part I
Finding a Job . . .It was the best of times,
It was the worst of times,
It was the age of wisdom,
It was the age of foolishness,
It was the epoch of belief,
It was the epoch of incredulity,
It was the season of light,
It was the season of darkness,
It was the spring of hope,
It was the winter of despair,
We had everything before us,
We had nothing before us,
We were all going direct to heaven,
We were all going direct the other way . . .

Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities
1. Finding a Job . . . Even in Hard Times: Rejection Shock


Charles Dickens had it right. For some of us, this is the worst of times. Our house has been foreclosed, or seen its value drop dramatically. Fuel costs are killing us. Rice is scarce, and getting scarcer. Food prices are soaring. Businesses are folding. Companies are cutting their work force dramatically. Millions are out of work.

But there are others who are barely touched by any of this. They cannot understand what we are going through. At least 138,000,000 people still have jobs, in the U.S. Some of them, well-paying jobs. They are well off, and in some cases, have money to burn. For them, this is the best of times. They cannot understand our pain.

But we, when we are out of work, go looking for another job; but we, when we are finding it difficult to feed our families, go looking for a better-paying job. And that is when we run into the nature of the job-market, and the nature of the job-hunt. It isn’t as easy as we thought it was going to be.

Tom Jackson has well characterized the nature of the job-hunt as one long process of rejection. In job-interview after job-interview, what some of us hear the employer say is:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO YES.

Before we get to that final YES–or if we are lucky, two YESES, so that we have a choice–before we get there, the job-hunt is nothing but one long process of rejection. And we, so unprepared for this, go into a kind of Rejection Shock.

Naturally, we have questions.

I just lost my job. How many others are in the same predicament?

Well, you’ve got lots of company. As of June 2009, the number of people out of work totaled at least 14,500,000 individuals. And that’s a government figure. In the U.S. there are always many more people out of work than the government will ever admit–regardless of which party is in power.

Will I need a computer and Internet access, to go about my job-hunt in this twenty-first century?

It’s not mandatory, and if you don’t have a computer, there are non-Internet job-hunting resources, of course. For example, if because you lack a computer you can’t access Job-Postings by employers on the Internet, you can always look at the Help Wanted Ads in your local newspaper, especially the Sunday edition.

There are also regional papers devoted to nothing but job openings, such as JobDig, which, at this writing, publishes fourteen local weekly newspapers in twelve states, mostly midwestern (from Minnesota down to Texas). A subscription for thirteen weeks costs job-hunters $65. Call 877-456-2344 to see whether or not there’s a local paper covering your part of the country.

According to the latest figures, however, at least 74.7 percent of Americans use the Internet, which adds up to 227 million users. Others, of course, usually have a friend who can go on the Internet for them.

Moreover, if you know how to use a computer but just don’t happen to own one at the moment, many public libraries as well as Internet cafés can let you use their computer for a fee. (To locate the Internet café nearest you, have a friend use his or her computer, to input your zip code into the comprehensive directory found at www.cybercaptive.com.)

In view of this virtual omnipresence of the computer in our culture now that we are firmly in the twenty-first century, I have freely listed job-hunting resources that are found only on the Internet throughout the rest of this guide.

What are the most helpful job sites on the Web?

For overall free guides to the entire job-hunt process, in addition to my own website, www.jobhuntersbible.com, there are seven sites you will find are the most comprehensive and helpful:

1. www.job-hunt.org, run by Susan Joyce.

2. www.jobstar.org, run by Mary Ellen Mort.

3. www.rileyguide.com, run by Margaret F. Dikel.

4. www.quintcareers.com, run by Dr. Randall Hansen.

5. www.cacareerzone.org, run by the California Career Resource Network. Once you are on the home page, it gives you a choice between running the site under Text, Graphic, or Flash. Choose Graphic.

6. www.asktheheadhunter.com, run by Nick Corcodilos.

7. www.indeed.com, run by a privately held company founded by Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, with the New York Times Company among its shareholders. This is the answer to a job-hunter’s prayer. There are lots of job-boards out there, thousands in fact; these, if you don’t know, are websites that list employers’ job-postings, i.e., vacancies. Such postings are also to be found on employers’ own company or organization sites. Want to look through every one of them? No, you don’t. What you want is something that sweeps through all of them for you, and summarizes what it finds–in just one place. What you need is a site such as Indeed (URL above). It is the most comprehensive job search service on the Web, as it plucks job listings from thousands of company websites, job boards, newspapers, and associations. It has a UK site, whose URL, not surprisingly, is www.indeed.co.uk.

My picture of the job-hunt during this computer age, is that you call up a search engine, like Indeed, and input the job-title you’re looking for, and the geographical area you’d prefer, and by the next morning or within a few days at most, you’re told there is a match. A match between your experience and skills, on the one hand, and what some employer is looking for, on the other hand, with a vacancy they’re trying to fill.

Ah, you’re exactly right. That’s how it works, these days. There are thousands of testimonials from job-hunters who have used the Internet successfully, to find a match, and thence a job. But this job-matching doesn’t work for every job-hunter. In fact, it doesn’t work for the vast majority of job-hunters.

Why not?

Well, job-matching works by using job-titles, and job-titles are, generally speaking, a big problem for the Internet. Well, not a big problem when you’re looking for a job that has a simple title, such as administrative assistant, or gardener, or nurse, or driver, or waitress, or mechanic, or salesperson. Any of these should turn up a lot of matches.

But, you may be looking for a job that various employers call by differing titles, and that’s an entirely different ballgame. If you guess wrongly what they call the job you’re looking for, then you and those employers will be like two ships passing in the night, on the Internet high seas. Your faithful, hardworking computer will report back to you in the morning: No matches, when in fact there actually are. You just didn’t guess correctly what title those employers are using. Oops!

Another problem: you may be looking for a job-title that essentially has disappeared from the workforce. Over the centuries, our economy has moved from one largely based on agriculture, to one largely based on manufacturing, to one largely based on information and services. As each transition has occurred, certain job-titles have essentially disappeared from the workforce, and in large numbers. Oh, they’re still around, but in such small numbers that no one tells the Internet. Blacksmith is one example that comes to mind. There are blacksmiths, still; I happen to know of one of them. But I wouldn’t count on the Internet turning up many matches, if any, with this title. The same fate generally awaits job-titles with the old words assembly line and manufacturing in them. As Senator John McCain truthfully told Michigan voters back in 2008, Those jobs aren’t coming back.

Finally, job-titles are a problem for an Internet search because a particular search program on the Internet may depend completely on beginning with a prepared list of job-titles that you are required to choose from, and in the interests of space and speed their menu may only offer you a choice between two dozen or so job-titles, which does not come even close to mentioning all the possibilities; i.e., the 20,000 job-titles that are out there in the workforce–including, of course, the one that you are searching for, in particular.

So sure, Internet job-matching works. Sometimes. Beautifully. You must try it, using Indeed, or a general search engine such as Google, or Metacrawler. Input anything or everything you can think of to describe what you are looking for.

But know ahead of time that you can’t count on it necessarily working for You. In the end, it’s a big, fat gamble. And not at all the sure thing that so-called experts would have you think it is.

So, how many job-hunters who try to find a match, fail to find a match, on the Internet?

There are various answers to that question. Take your pick: (1) Lots and lots. (2) 90 percent, studies say. (3) ? Big question mark. Studies are notoriously unreliable, so–in the end–we don’t really know. We’re just left with lots and lots.

So, if you conclude that Internet job-matching is a big, fat gamble, that’s all you really need to know.

Oh, and one ...