Living Small: Job Search 2010 pt. II

Your job search is a job in itself - this phrase is often offered as a passing nugget of advice from someone who doesn’t have or want to give the time to really help you out. Its a phrase that isn’t all that helpful and isn’t entirely true. The focus required during a job search is certainly on par with a full-time job, but during job search you are immersed in a much more unforgiving environment without the support structure or compensation that comes with working full-time. When fully employed you work for a pay check, you work to learn, advance, and innovate, you (hopefully) have insurance as well as peers, mentors, and teammates. As an unemployed searcher, you work for another meeting or introduction, with little support structure and no comp. As an employed person, you have personal goals, short-term and long-term, you have the services and growth of the company to consider and further. As a job searcher, you have one goal that is the sum-total of your day - getting employed. 

There is so much advice to be offered on job search, you’d think someone would write a clear, thoughtfully presented book on the subject. Oh wait, Marc Cenedella already has with You’re Better Than Your Job Search, an advice book that tells you what its title states and much more . TheLadders.com founder and CEO gives it to you straight in this Bible of Job Search, covering everything from networking and interviewing, to the resume. There’s a welcome positivity maintained throughout the book that you’d be hard-pressed to find during the ‘pound the pavement’ moments of your actual search. So if you’re searching now, give this book a read, at the very least it will give you something to hold near and dear as you face the challenge of landing a job. 

Before I move on, I wanted to offer two more areas of focus from my own search that I consider extremely important when looking back on it now. 

1). Love Your Alums: When you step off of your college campus and start looking for a job, there are probably a handful of people willing to go to bat for you. These people may be relatives or godparents or friends of friends. Outside of this group, the individuals you should immediately consider in expanding your contact list are your fellow alums, including both university and high school. Get the notion of it being awkward to email a stranger from your school out of your head right away because your fellow alums are the closest thing you have to a support system as you move through job search. Being an alum creates an immediate comfort level with someone who otherwise would be a complete stranger. Before meeting you, an alum will a sense of who you are because you went through similar experiences at a same place. What begins with easy things to talk about - how 'bout that new student center - can flourish into a mentor-mentee or even employer-employee relationship.  People are much more willing to go out of their way to help out a fellow alum, whether that’s opening an email, forwarding a resume to a colleague, or grabbing a coffee with you. In a game that’s all about getting in front of people and hoping that they like you, your alumni base should be the first place you look. So love your Career Resource Center if you are still on campus and don’t be afraid to contact the people there if you’ve graduated. They are unfailingly helpful and will always find time for you. From my small campus in Middletown, Connecticut, I can point to 5 or 6 people who helped me get to where I am, including Mike Sciola, the Director of Wesleyan’s CRC, and John Borthwick and Andy Weissman, fellow Wes alums who I work with now at Betaworks. Without the alumni network, I wouldn’t have known where to start my search or have had the wealth of contacts to return to whenever things looked bleak. 

2). Live Small: I have to shout out Greg Battle for this title and concept, that we talked about after my first post on job search a few weeks ago.  In that post, I stressed the importance of moving to the city you want to work in. Living small is learning how to exist and thrive in a new city on very little when you don’t have job or financial security. This a probably a valuable real-world lesson to learn early on that you can think of as a challenge really. How small of a footprint can make before you are able to support yourself? Here are a few guidelines: 

• Couch = Bed: Do the best you can to find a friend or relative who will let you stay on their couch. When I was searching, I helped a buddy move out of his apartment and in return he let me sleep on an air mattress in the apartment he’d just moved out of until the lease was up. For a few hours of work, I bought myself a month in NYC. Offer to do dishes or housework, watch kids or walk a dog, most people will be accommodating as long as you don't disrupt their routine.

• Don’t Go Out: It might be tempting to grab drinks to blow off some steam, but this can tear your wallet to pieces. If you need a drink, stick to PBRs and don’t go opening tabs at night. Too much booze is your fastest ticket out of town. 

• Cook Pasta: If you can find somewhere to crash, utilize the kitchen if possible. A large box of pasta and some sauce cost only a few dollars and can last weeks if stored correctly. Any city (new york in particular) costs a lot to eat in, so save yourself the bill and cook cheap, non-perishables that will last you the week. 

• Laundry Only When Necessary: This sounds grimy, but its the last major expense that you’ll run into when you first move. Outside of going to networking events or having coffee with contacts, you’re going to be inside, so you can get away with wearing the same pair of sweatpants or shorts. Spare the fresh cleaning for the clothes you wear to meetings and worry about your other clothes only when you can’t stand it anymore.

If you can manage to cut back on the four items above, you’ll be essentially living without any financial footprint from your day-to-day life. This a feat achieved by few throughout their lives. It's a practice that will allow extend your job search and show you how little you can live on and still keep moving forward. 

   - Tim 

Can't Knock The Hustle: Job Search 2010

Tomorrow it will have been 1 year and 1 month since I moved to New York looking for my first full-time job since graduating in 2009. It was a long, long process during which I questioned my reasons for moving, my desire to be in New York, and whether or not I could hack it at all. Ultimately, it has worked out and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on job search. So take it as you will, coming from a 24 year-old with a pretty base perspective on things.

Get Up, Shower

There’s nothing more depressing then waking up and not being excited that you don’t have anything to do all day. That’s job search from day 1. Weekends aren’t as fun because you don’t have a reason to relax; spending a Wednesday afternoon watching a replay of last night’s Knicks game loses its appeal quickly. This is the awful Catch-22 of a job search. You have the free time that everyone wishes they had when working, but no ability to enjoy it as you’re unemployed, penniless, and probably pretty stressed. 

There’s no magic solution here, just get up out of bed and take a shower. One of the most routine processes during a normal, busy day can often seem unnecessary when you aren’t working. As in, who cares if I smell awful or look like a scrub? No one’s going to see me anyways. I was often told I should get up and shower because its more akin to a normal working day and so you should treat your job search the same way. The problem with this logic is that your job search day simply doesn’t function like a normal working day and so you shouldn’t try to emulate a working day when searching for a job. You should get out of bed and shower for much simpler reasons - its energizing and it will help keep you sane. The day-to-day of job search takes small steps. If you can get out of bed and dump yourself into the shower, you’re much more likely to get something done that day. 

E-mail Constantly

Outside of going out for coffee to network or sitting down for an actual interview , your ability to email is the basis of your job search and your most powerful tool in getting where you want to be. There’s no shame in emailing any and every contact you come across. That’s why you got them right? Email early in the day, email often and absolutely do not hesitate to follow up in the same fashion. My goal was to email until I heard back and always respond to emails as quickly as possible. It might seem insane buts its not. Put yourself in the shoes of the employed people you’re emailing about a job - when they get a response within a minute or two to an email they just sent you, they see initiative, desire, and drive. Also, you stand a much better chance of getting another prompt response as they are probably still in front of their computer. Its often difficult to get responses, meetings, or interviews but as long as you email as quickly a possible, you’re doing your part. Faster emails = earlier employment. 

Move Where You Want To Work

This is perhaps the single best piece of advise I received early on in my search. Immediately after graduating, I was living at home in Washington D.C., but I wanted to be in New York. Financially, it would have beeen difficult for me to up and move without a job in place. My mom said it was a terrible idea, my dad was lukewarm. Ultimately, I sold my car, crashed on a friend’s air mattress for a month, and signed a lease on an apartment with the money I made from the car sale. Seven months later, I was still unemployed and my back was against the wall financially - a month or two longer and I would most likely have had to move home. But moving made all of the difference. If I hadn’t moved, I wouldn’t have been able to make half of the meetings that I did, wouldn’t have been introduced to the majority of the people I was, and wouldn’t have been able to start my job a few days after I heard I had an offer. 

Being in New York for several months before I began working let me continue the job search in a way you simply cannot when you’re in a different city. Yes, the transaction cost of a job search has plummeted with email, cell phones, and real-time job posting. But you can’t interview and can’t have a 1st day without actually being there. When an employer calls back and asks you if you can start tomorrow, you have to be able to say yes. Say you can’t and you’ve lost a job before you even started. If you have any opportunity to move to the city you want to work in, whether that means sleeping on an Aunt and Uncle’s couch, crashing on a friend’s floor, or taking a chance on a month-to-month lease, to do it. You won’t regret it.  

Don’t Stop Believing

From November 1st, 2009 to March 27th, 2010, I had my fair share of detractors and settlers. People who, at one point or another, said: why not come home? why not starting looking for a short-term job? or a job’s a job man just take whatever you can get. I never listened. I’m happy I didn’t. Its common nature for those who care about you to suggest faster or easier solutions for you - that doesn’t have to apply to job search. Stick to your guns. Sometimes, they’re all you have. Unequivocally, a job is not a job. You and only you know why you are pursuing what you’re pursuing and you’ve got to hold onto that, particularly when days or weeks are bleak. During this time, you might discover that there are other jobs/careers/positions you are more interested in, but don’t let anyone knock you off the path you are laying down for yourself by looking for a certain job. 

Can’t Knock The Hustle

This above phrase is my twitter bio and essentially one that I live by. A lot of people just thought I was a hardcore Jay-Z or Common fan when that started popping up on my away messages and stuff. To me, it’s just the way that I am. It also applies to any arduous job search. There’s nothing easy: being told no, in so many words, over and over again can be incredibly depressing and sap away any desire to get up and do it all over each day. There’s nothing fun: a job is the end goal and there’s not much in between that can brighten your days and make you smile. There’s nothing you can spend money on: pasta, coffee, and an internet signal are your best friends. So hustle, because you’ve got nothing else. As long as you hustle, you’re going to stay afloat. Your hustle is probably what got you where you are and as long as you keep hustling, you’re going to get where you want to be. 

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I’m planning to do a few more posts on this subject, because I generally think that the whole process is too opaque for newcomers. The real world is daunting enough, so I hope my experiences can shed a little light on navigating the world of job search. 

- Tim