“I wasted this whole year, doing everything wrong.”
That’s the sad comment a job seeker made to me last week as we were leaving a WIND-West job search support group meeting in Westborough, MA. She had been an active participant in the meeting, asking many questions, clearly a well-educated, highly- intelligent and experienced professional who had been focused on job hunting since being laid off in January.
What I think she did wrong:
She waited a year before attending a job search support group meeting.
Get help with your job search. NOW!
Doing a job search with no coaching or support is akin to diving off a diving board without knowing how to either dive or swim. For most of us, job hunting is a lonely, discouraging process, with many land mines to trip up the inexperienced and/or unwary.
Since my last layoff 15 years ago, I’ve been studying, teaching, and writing about online job search. I’ve seen first-hand the tragedy that can accompany an extended period of unemployment, and I’ve seen what works.
During that time, I’ve come to three conclusions about why most people seem to “do everything wrong” -
- Most of us do not need to job hunt often enough to be good at it.
- Most of us think job hunting is simple, like going to the grocery store. In reality, it it is decidedly complicated, more like dating than shopping.
- The Internet has changed how job hunting works, just as it has changed many, MANY other things in our culture. We have many new ways to “connect” and communicate with each other which has led to many new ways to mess up.
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