Working at getting work

Ahh, the enthusiasm of the first few days of unemployment. You are motivated, you are excited by the prospects and you have yet to deal with rejection. I remember these moments well from the last time I was laid off and I also remember the challenges of staying in this frame of mind.

It was a busy day for me yesterday. I spent time reviewing my severance agreement. It all looks good so I'll sign it and get it back to my former employer. I worked on my resume - it was already mostly up to date so with a few tweaks, I was ready to use it. It got sent to a couple of contacts, one of which surfaced when a fellow blogger read my post and indirectly got in touch. Her high tech husband now has a copy. The other contact is a contractor at my former employer who reached out to help.

Which leads me to another topic. I received a wonderful outpouring of support from associates at my former employer. I received many text messages, emails, IM's and phone calls. Most expressed the same shock I felt. All of them expressed their appreciation for my time in their lives and I did the same in return. This separation is tough for me, but it also causes the ones left behind to wonder what happened. It leads to the thought that if it could happen to a guy like me, it could happen to anyone. I've often said that while my former company was a little wacky, the people there are great. That statement has been validated again.

I applied for a job on-line for which I am probably qualified and probably missing an essential certification. I spent some time researching that company and contacted a family member who worked there to see if he could add some juice to the on-line application process. The frustration with the online process is twofold. One, your resume gets uploaded, but then it gets scanned and munged up into tiny boxes. Much of the resume is lost in translation. The second frustration is that there is no capability to add a cover letter. The cover letter is an important part of shaping your experience to their needs. I'm going to try to send one of those through my family member to see if he can get it to the hiring manager.

I spent some time getting my LinkedIn profile up to date. That's in better shape although I think I can still improve it. I also plan on enrolling in Facebook, something my carpool mate Kreblog has been suggesting for months. In a later post I'll probably expound on how electronic networking has changed the job search rules.

Got a lot going on today, too. I received some welcome comments on my resume so I need to work on that a little. Several leads have been sent my way that I need to investigate and respond to. I have yet to subscribe to the job boards (I have an old agent still running on Yahoo that needs review as establishing myself on others). Kreblog sent me some tools to scan the boards and turn the results into RSS feeds:
http://www.indeed.com/
http://www.simplyhired.com/
http://www.jobster.com/
I'll be trying these out.

Busy life for the first few days. Catch you all on Monday.