Not finding a job... 4 possible reasons

Over on AOL Jobs is an article giving four reasons why you are still unemployed. My first thoughts upon reading this was that these reasons were overly general and unhelpful. I hope that anyone who has been or still is in the long term unemployed (anything over six months) they have read many articles like this one. There list (if you don't have time to read the short piece) is as follows:

• do a little soul searching
• identify what your target employer wants
• ramp up your networking
• demonstrate your expertise

Are there any of these you aren't doing? If you answered yes, then maybe you want to start with the soul searching. But I feel that it would be fairly safe to assume that most of you have done these and many things like them. While I don't claim to be an expert on numbers 1, 3, &4 I hope I am qualified to speak on number 2. If you haven't read my past posts on researching companies you may want to start there (research tips, you may want to focus on the oldest three posts which are specifically on company research.)

But how do you do this research if you don't already have a list of target companies in mind. One of the best ways I know of would be to use RefUSA or some similar database that lets you filter by type of company, geography, and other characteristics. These are typically subscription tools, so you first step will be to visit your local public library (or it's web site) to find out if they provide access to such a tool (you may be surprised!) Here is a graphic showing just some databases useful for this research and what you may find:

From the Purdue University Career Wiki

There are many others, and if your library doesn't have access to these, start a conversation... explain what you are trying to learn and you may find that the librarian can be very helpful, they may have others that can help you in the same area.

If they do have access, then hopefully a reference librarian there can help demonstrate how to search effectively... but things to look for are the following:

• setting your geographic preferences (typically by zip code)
• setting your industry (or type of company you are looking for...) this can either be done with government codes or with common yellow page style headings

these are more or less essential, but some additional options you might want to use:

• company size (either number of employees or by sales volume)

once you have a reasonable list, you can begin with web searches... but you may want to consider reading about the companies in the business press, here are my thoughts about those types of searches.

Hopefully this advice is just a bit more practical  than the AOLJobs article, and I wish all job seekers out there good luck as the global economy slowly begins to turn around.

-George