In February, it was decided that it would be best if I looked for another job. I love my job at the crepe café, but the place is so small and only fills up for a few hours at lunch. My previous job had ended in November, and the hours at the café weren’t enough to justify my continuing to work there without looking for something else. And so the job hunt began.
The last time I actively looked for a job was almost eight years ago. Steve and I had just gotten married and moved to Winston-Salem. There was no Waldenbooks there to transfer into and so the hunt for a new job began. There were online job boards then, certainly. Monster was as prevalent then as it was now. And so I used them, along with my experience purging medical records, to try to land an entry-level office job of some kind. I wanted to try something that wasn’t retail.
After posting what I now know was a laughingly amateurish resume, I got in with a staffing agency that placed me in the office of a commercial dishwasher company. And so transpired my glorious four-month career working for Champion Industries. The job was a temp job that I’d taken because it was the first thing made available. After it was over, we were troubled to find that none of the jobs the staffing agency offered were jobs I wanted to take or companies I wanted to work for. And so back to retail I went.
Eight years ago, many retail places still used paper applications. Not once did I have to spend time with a required Career Assessment questionnaire. Within a week, I’d landed a job at Lifeway Christian Store, a job I held for over a year and only quit doing because Steve was starting his own business and it made sense for me to make myself available for all the help he would need. (By “made sense,” I mean to my twenty-four-year-old self. I would never now advise a family to give up a steady income stream when starting a business.)
It was shortly after I quit Lifeway that my under-the-table, couple-times-a-month job I’d gotten through Steve turned serious. I was officially hired and given more and more responsibility over the next three years. Last fall, a conversation with Steve resulted in my being hired at the crepe café. And so maybe now you can see how in thirty years, I have never in my life really struggled to find a job.
Enter in the Great Job Hunt of Early 2014. I started with retail. There was a summer job working on an organic farm that was promising, but we really needed something to bridge the gap until May. I felt bad turning to retail for a throwaway job, but the turnover in retail is high and at least it’s expected. I stopped inquiring in person because all the places I was interested in asked me to fill in an application online. And guess what? Each application came with a 30-90 minute required Career Assessment. “Is retail right for you??” After work at the crepe café, I would spend my entire evening filling out between one and three applications, start to finish, including every required assessment. Applying to retail became a second job! Home Depot required restarting four times because their assessment kept timing out on me. CVS was by far the longest and most horrible. Two hours, total, applying to a company that may or may not call you back (they never did). Application follow-ups were discouraged or just not possible.
Nobody called me. Nobody. Almost five years’ retail experience and all I got was crickets. My phone rang but all the strange numbers were still the legal companies trying to track down not one, but two women who previously had my number and are now being sued. And so I went back to the online job boards to try my hand with my three years’ experience working in an office. And this is what I learned about the current, 2014 job board world:
Resumes are everything. There is no more personal presentation, no more human interaction that gives an initial impression as you ask for a job. Your resume must be concise, yet possess the ability to effectively communicate not only what your previous work entailed but what you brought to the table while you were there. It must be creative but professional, clear but compact, and with some final, elusive “edge” that will set it apart from the hundreds of other resumes trying to stand out. I somehow managed not to know any of this for the first month I applied on job boards. My resume was pitifully simple—much like the woman it was written about.
Cover letters are not optional. The word “optional” is used concurrently with the words “cover letter,” but if you don’t bother to write one to each company you’re applying to, you are seen as lazy and as someone who wants the job less than the person who writes one, and therefore, someone who values the job less. I’m not sure how you effectively write a cover letter to a company whose entire job description from start to finish is only three sentences and very vague, but let me tell you, I sure tried it those last two weeks I applied online.
Yes, I said two weeks. Because guess who didn’t know that cover letters really weren’t optional? After all the research I did on resumes, probabilities converged so that it was never explicitly stated in any of the information I read that cover letters should be written even if they were optional. Googling “how to write a resume” or “the best resumes” circumvents the sister concept of the cover letter. And so I only wrote cover letters for the last two weeks before Phase Two of Naïve Job Hunting began, to be detailed in “Job Hunting Kirstenite-style, Chapter Two”! Seriously, stay tuned. It's much funnier, and comes with an awesome picture.
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