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Old 06-27-2011, 08:59 PM
 
1,392 posts, read 2,125,827 times
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I haven't posted in this forum for a while but I guess I should since this is probably the best general forum on unemployment and job searching. I have been unemployed for close to 2 years and have had close to 50 interviews since I was laid off. I just wanted to take the time to share my experiences and thoughts on the job search process. Also, all the interviews I have been in professional positions requiring college degrees and some work experience in finance.

Background Check/Reference Checking:
I usually see a lot of questions on the forum about background checks and reference checks and I wanted to share what my experiences have been with this. In my previous job, the company (a large F500 energy company) performed a very thorough background check on me using a third party source (think ADP/HireRight). One thing that was interesting about this was when they contacted my previous employer to confirm employment. My previous employer was contacted over 20 times and did not respond to the background check company. Afterwards, the background check company gave up on contacting my previous employer to confirm my resume/application. Surprisingly, my new employer (the large F500 energy company) did not even bother to confirm employment there and I was cleared to work for them. If you are wondering how I learned about this, I received the background check report from the company after I was cleared to work for them.

Basically, third party background check companies aren’t very thorough and in fact they often don’t even contact your references (they confirmed my previous employer through my taxpayer information). My experience has been that when hiring managers ask for your references that is when the traditional reference checking is more likely to happen. Basically, hiring managers are more thorough with references and are more likely to ask tough questions. Essentially, I am saying you have nothing to fear with background checks if you have been honest in your job application.

Resume Gaps:
I also see a lot of questions about resume gaps. My experience has been that the less experienced you are, the less likely your resume gap is going to affect you. I have landed a ton of interviews lately even though I have a large resume gap. The reason why is that I only have two years of work experience and most of the jobs I have gone after are entry level positions. In most of my interviews, they don’t even ask about the resume gap until I bring it up. Even when I bring it up, they don’t ask a lot of questions about it. Unfortunately, this is not true when it comes to more experienced people. Some of my friends who are unemployed and are experienced Wall Street bankers have had to deal with very tough questions about their resume gaps. One of my friends was on the verge of tears when a recruiter would not budge on this question and kept asking more and more about the resume gap. The recruiter was not satisfied with his explanation (even though he did some pretty interesting things during that time) and thus continued to press on. Despite having a long resume gap, I know a lot of experienced people who have landed some great jobs despite having a pretty long resume gap. Most have landed temp to hire positions and became full time that way.

Online Job postings:
Generally people are right when it comes to online jobs. You will not hear back from the vast majority of online postings. That said, half of my interviews that I have had have come from job postings. One way I maximized my response rate was to go on LinkedIn and look for a recruiter and then decipher the recruiter’s email address and then email my resume and cover letter with the requisition number of the job posting. I have landed quite a few interviews this way. I have also landed interviews without doing this although the response rates were not as high. That said, online job postings are not the only way you should search for jobs although the response rates aren’t as bad as people think if you have a resume with the keywords and a resume that fits the posting.

Networking:
Networking is usually considered the best way of searching for jobs and I would agree this was the case before the recession. After the recession, it has not been as effective as it used to be although all job search methods have become considerably less effective. I usually networked by cold calling and cold emailing people I have some kind of connection to. I used my alma mater’s LinkedIn network to find a lot of people in certain industries and companies and connected with them. I have landed a few job interviews this way although none have panned out. I think the fact that I am a stranger probably contributed to my low success rate. The most effective networking happens with colleagues and through people you met through business/work. A lot of my older colleagues tend to rely on previous colleagues and they have been successful in landing jobs. Since I am not as experienced, I have had to rely on strangers for the most part. It can be quite demoralizing but it is a pretty effective method in many respects although the success rate is low and I have landed only a few job interviews from the many people I have met.

Recruiters:
Recruiters have not been helpful to me in my job search. In fact I landed no interviews through recruiters. That said, they are crucial for finding contract/temp work. A lot of my friends landed contract to hire work from recruiters and have become full time employees.

Temp/Contract/Intern:
My experience with this is that temp/contract/intern work is very competitive. This recession is so bad that even unpaid internships are very competitive. In fact for an unpaid internship that I applied to, the interview process was incredibly difficult. Prior to going to the interview, I had to construct a financial statement model using Excel and had to forecast the income for the company. I also had to write a 3 page report detailing what is going in the forecast model and what may impact the income of the company. After I did this, in the interview I had to answer a lot of technical questions about the work I had just done. This interview was also three stages with many different interviewers that I had to meet. I didn’t get an offer since I decided to quit the interview since I didn’t want to put all that effort for an unpaid internship. Temp and contract work is just as competitive and most of my friends have told me that they had to go through many multiple and difficult stages to get an offer or a rejection (for most). Bottom line, temp work (even something that is unpaid) is incredibly difficult to obtain.

The Interview:
For the most part, most of my interviews have been relatively easy and for the difficult interviews I have had such as those requiring very technical finance questions, I have usually performed well in them. That said, doing well in an interview does not mean much anymore because of how bad this economy is. My experience has been to not trust what the interviewer tells you about how well you performed. In an interview I had in which I was told I was the top candidate and that I would have a good chance of getting an offer, I didn’t even get a call and I had to follow up on my own to find out my rejection. In every interview my friends have had, anytime they waited over a week for a response, they ended up getting a rejection. My experience has been that even offer letters don’t mean much since I have seen people get their offers pulled due to the company pulling the job out. Unless you actually start a job, it really means nothing and that has been the experience my friends and I have had from the interview process. Interviewers are also incredibly rude and I can tell you in most of my interviews in which I did not land the job, they didn’t bother to contact me and I had to take the initiative to find out whether I got the job.

I hope this long post has been helpful to the posters here. My experience probably isn’t very different from most of the posters on this site but I wanted to share what my experience has been.
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