It's now been a week and a day since my last (first) post and interestingly enough, I feel like I've worked a 60 hour week, which is strange since I'm unemployed.
To conserve our now drastically diminished income, we took our nearly 4 year old (Lincoln) out of daycare so he's now home with me and our 8 month old (Oliver). So I am now juggling two energetic boys, fun and highly educational activities, nutritious meals, structured and unstructured playtime, and my best attempts at keeping the house clean (not totally successfully), all while conducting an intense job search. Man, I'm tired!!! And now I'm going to do it all again tomorrow. I know some other stay-at-homers might read this and think, "Hmph, rookie! I do that every dang day!!!" I know you do and I have a tremendous amount of respect for you. I really truly do!
Having shared all of that personal stuff, let me tell you how social networking has made the above easier. . .well, at least the job searching part.
The day I got laid off, I remember thinking "Great! Now I have to look for a new job!" I think most people have been there. What an unbelievably tedious and boring chore that process is! It easily becomes a full-time job in and of itself; sprucing up your resume, getting it posted to various job-searching sites, setting up job alerts, contacting references for recommendation letters, etc. This all takes a lot of time to do and as I mentioned, I've got 2 boys at home with whom I want to spend quality time playing transformers, having lightsaber duals, reading books, drawing transformers, learning letters and words, playing at the park, transforming transformers, and all that other stuff. (We're kind of going through a Transformers phase right now).
So as I thought about what lay ahead and this incredibly undesirable job search before me, I started thinking about how to do it with limited time. Obviously, you should start any job search with networking. The employment specialist in my church told me just today that 70% of candidates are hired because of some kind of personal connection. Very few get hired simply by posting a resume on a job searching site. Bummer, that seems so easy to do. . .right?
The nice thing is that this doesn't rule out the great tool that is the World Wide Web. Enter Social Networking. We're all familiar with Facebook. I'm on Facebook, and yes, I'm on there a lot. It started out of sheer curiosity. Then I found friends from high school, and from my LDS mission to France, and some obscure old friend who lives in Whoville USA, and yada yada, I was hooked. I've never been into the games and other stuff on there. I think most of them are lame and a big waste of time. I just dig status updates. I think they are funny; sometimes they are inspirational, and sometimes they make you want to throw up because there is way more information than you ever wanted/needed to know.
The site is fun but at its heart Facebook, like other social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and a host of others, is a brilliant tool for connecting with people both familiar and not. So as I sat last Thursday dreading my looming job search I suddenly got this brilliant idea! "What don't I use Facebook to network with my social contacts and find a job?" Ding, lightbulb!
WHAT I DID:
I created a note on Facebook detailing my situation, what type of position I was looking for, and my basic qualifications, along with a request to read and respond with any leads. I posted this on my Wall. Literally within minutes I had my first response with a website to check out. A few minutes more brought several more leads and some words of encouragement, which was deeply appreciated. At this posting, I've received great advice, more encouragement, ideas, and over 10 great leads and contacts to follow up on. Considering it only took me about 10-15 minutes to put the note together and post it, I'd say that's some pretty solid success. You can read my note here.
So I'm calling this my first major success for Job Search 2011. Incidentally, I've also revamped my Linkedin profile which you can view here.
Please feel free to share either links with anyone you know who might be able to help me. Here they are in their pure unadulterated URL format:
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