Dealing with long term unemployment

The Employable is an online community that seeks to fill the void for job seekers. This piece offers advice for dealing with long term unemployment. For the most part the advice in this piece are not radical, and things I have linked to in the past provide similar advice. My primary motivation to highlight this piece was the community itself. I like the idea on an online community with such a positive focus on this particular problem.

Hopefully it will be helpful for anyone out there that was unaware of it, and in this situation.

Fighting the Unemployment Stigma

Here is a post over at CareeRealism that offers some interesting advice for fighting the unemployment stigma. Now as I have mentioned before I was recently unemployed for very close to two years. There were many things about my situation that are likely unusual for the typical worker who is in this situation. The three tips from this piece are as follows (read their full post to get a better sense of the reasoning...):

• Stop looking for a job
• Press 'Play' on life
• Get a 360 degree evaluation

I agree with all of these, the second two are very good, and read well as stand alone tips. The first makes total sense if you read their entire description. There is always a reason you have been unemployed that long. Sometimes it is something you can control (being selective in you applications looking/waiting for a perfect fit, etc.) and sometimes they are things you can't control (living in an area with a high concentration of people in your industry, making the candidate pools very competitive, etc.)

By stopping and re-examining your situation and what you have been looking for can help put things back into perspective. As a personal example I live in between two highly ranked programs that produce librarians. Add to that many people in this area tend to stay close to where they have grown up, so there are many qualified librarians in the area. I have been typically told that I am one of one hundred or more candidates for most jobs I was applying for (I don't think any employer has ever given the exact number, not sure why?)

By slowing my search and spending some time to re-evaluate I was able to finally come to the conclusion that I need expand beyond traditional libraries. I found employers in my area that needed research/instructional skills and was making headway. Now if you have read this blog long term you will know I have settled into a part time librarian position. But if this opportunity had not come about, I was seeing positive signs that the re-evaluation was producing benefits (i.e. getting invited for the next round of interviews at one of the employers outside of my industry.)

What do others think?

Preparing for the new job market

Here is some career advice from a blog that I am less familiar with, but it matches much of what I am reading elsewhere. The advice boils down to the three tips:

• Pay attention to your industry.
• Develop niche expertise.
• Learn to market yourself.

These are again tips that may career counselors and  career bloggers are giving. This makes me feel comfortable pointing my readers to a anonymous blog post. I also find it interesting because of the theme it is constructed around. The job market is changing.

Now I have blogged about this premise before:

Is Traditional Employment Dead?
Traditional Employment (part 2)
The new job interview?

These three posts all tackle the issue from different angles... but taken in total I believe that they are pointing towards a growing trend in employment. So back to the article that motivated today's post... the three tips fall in line with things I have been saying in most of my blog posts. By paying attention to your industry through business news sources you are performing the research necessary to keep sharp as a job candidate. In this post (Company Research - business news) I detail how to conduct the research in the business news sources to learn and keep current in your industry.

By developing your niche and learning to market yourself you can stand out in a crowded candidate pool. These are actually the reasons I started this blog. During a lengthy unemployment I received some advice that to stay connected and relevant it might help to blog about an area I felt was my strength. Since I had worked with students at a major university, teaching them how to conduct this type of research to prepare for job interviews I felt I could broaden those skills for all individuals hunting for employment.

I would love to hear from any of you who feel that employment is changing.

More interview question advice

Another piece from Forbes about interview questions designed to trip us up, in this piece Jenna Goudreau lists 10 of these questions. Notice that number three is very related to the theme of this blog, researching before the job interview. I was actually asked this question at a recent interview.

Being able to connect with their situation goes a long way, and being able to tie your skills and abilities to their situation gets you even further.

Her analysis seems very reasonable and helps dig into the intent that interviewers are trying to get at by asking these and similar questions.

I hope that these are helpful to anyone who is interviewing in the near future.

Salary Negotiation

Salary Negotiation is never fun, but this two step process from Julia Philips on the 4 Business Networking blog is sound advice. The only problem is the way she casually mentions checking Google to find out the salary range for the position type and experience level.

• First this is not easily achieved by a Google search...
• Second, you also need to account for your geographic area.

I have mentioned before several web services for salary searching. I have also talked about America's Career InfoNet, which is a subset of Career One Stop. The ACI is a nice site with a usable interface for BLS data. You can use it to find your job/title and your zip code; and then get high, median and low salaries for both annual and hourly rates. Factoring in experience can be much more difficult. The typical method suggested by many career counselors is to peruse job ads, but my problem with that is that most ads don't list a salary. When they do, they give a large range so that it is difficult to judge where you lie on an experience scale.

Now if you are lucky and the place of employment is something like a government position or other job where the budgets are a part of the public record, then you can look the info up online... but if you don't personally know people who hold positions to the one you are applying for (and their personal experience) then it is difficult to use this data. At best you can use it to calculate a local high, median, and low salary.

The morale of this post is, that while I totally agree with the importance to have an idea of an appropriate salary before beginning the negotiation. It is not just a simple Google search away. I hope my tips are useful for those of you preparing for such a negotiation.

Good Luck All.

Is it a Mistake to Hold Out For a Full-Time Job?

This is the question posed by Fran Hopkins in a piece over on the AOL Jobs blog. Before I get into her reasoning I must state the obvious, that this is a very personal decision that hinges on many factors that are all unique to your own situation. For Ms. Hopkins she feels that she can support herself as a freelance writer. I she is being published on AOL Jobs, then we can assume that this is a reasonable decision for her to make. We of course don't know how long she has been looking, what exactly her specialty/field is or her geographic location. All of these will play a large role in this type of decision.

For myself, I have taken part time work. First I am geographically tied to one place, so I can only apply for jobs in a limited area. Second my profession (librarianship) is tied directly and indirectly to government spending, which as most know has been declining in recent years. Lastly and probably most importantly I had been out of work for close to two years. As I described in my last post, a lengthy unemployment is becoming increasingly harder to overcome in this job market. If I had continued to hold out for full-time work I could have been hurting my chances with each passing month.

Unlike Ms. Hopkins I am finding my part-time work very rewarding. The job functions are nearly identical to those I performed in my last full-time job, so that helps. The part-time hours still gives me time to search for full-time work. Perhaps most importantly I can be a little more selective in what full-time jobs I apply for. This is of course something that many might not be able to do, but for my current situation I can be more selective.

If you have been reading my blog long you will be aware of the importance of researching a job and company before and during your application/review/interview process. This means that if you can be more selective (a big if for many job seekers) you have the ability to only apply for jobs that truly match your skills and abilities AND that you are passionate about landing. This will show in both the cover letter and the interview process, which should count in your favor.

I hope that all of you are fortunate enough to have a situation that allows selectivity. Take the time to prepare for the writing of the cover letter and the interview(s). Your dream job is out there for you.

Reasons for employers not calling back.

I have been intending to write about this for a little while, and this article from Fortune is a good place to get us started...

Their list includes:

• Job hoping
• Outdated skills
• Getting fired
• Age
• Unemployement

Three of these five you can't do much about if they are a factor for you (job hoping, getting fired, age.) One you can address/improve (outdated skills.) The final (unemployment) is more of a concern if you don't use the time to stay active in your field. Some of the suggestions from the article include:

• Online courses
• Certifications
• internships/volunteering
• networking

There is on item that they have overlooked, which if you are in the long-term unemployed you want to think about and try to improve. Your credit. If you are asking yourself why? keep this in mind: It is legal (and becoming more common) for employers to check your credit as a factor in employment decisions. Here are some articles that explain this further: Can credit kill a job offer? or Credit scores and jobs.

If you want to learn more about credit scores and how it can effect you, try this site I designed for the Community College I work at.

Good luck!
-George