Update on the Tail End of Stay At Home

Happy Tuesday, Dear Readers. I hope you all had a good week, and a good time with the prompts I provided for creative writing during the last five weeks. Time to go back to regularly scheduled programming, and since I haven't posted a real update in the past five weeks, I will use today's blog to catch up.

Classes have been going well. I signed up for two more grant writing classes, and a project management class. All of the classes are self-paced, and I spent the time to download all the reading material for each class. I downloaded everything first so that I don't have to log in to the online classroom in order to study, and so far I have enjoyed the material.

Job hunting is mostly the same, though I have noticed a significant jump in applicants via LinkedIn for remote positions, which is in no way surprising. I am waiting for restrictions to ease in my county before contacting my agency to ask if the positions I interviewed for prior to lock-down are still interested in hiring me. In the meantime, I have applied to many positions, some of which let me know they were happy to get my application and resume, but they were freezing hiring until further notice.

I took some time at the beginning of quarantine to hand-sew myself a mask, and then a headband to go with it. The headband has buttons sewed onto it, for the elastic of the mask to loop on to, and works well. I wear glasses, and having both the stems of glasses and elastic loops was proving to be too much pressure on the cartilage-filled skin-ridges that help me hear. I also made a mask and headband set which I sent to my sister, who also wears glasses, so that she could be more comfortable when she went out.

I used to consume a lot of news, but since the Stay At Home order, and everything that has happened in the last month-and-a-half (and I had to check a calendar to make sure it has only been a month-and-a-half, because Yikes), I had to cut down on how many hours I spent consuming news for my own mental well-being. I have invested the time into my classes and some de-stressing measures, to keep me on an even keel.

That is the basic round-up for me, Dear Readers. I hope you have a good week!

-A.M.W.

The Importance Of Career Consultants

Following up from my last blog about keywords, I went to the Larimer County Economic and Workforce Development Center in Fort Collins. I had been able to contact a Career Consultant there, whom I had sat down with before, and had the good fortune that somebody had cancelled an appointment with her that I was more than happy to take on. 

My Consultant has been and continues to be friendly, helpful, patient and an example of what more people need when looking for a job. She was able to go over recent job listings I had applied to and helped me better identify keywords. She then went through the couple different resumes I have when I submit to a lot of different places for the same job title, and suggested style upgrades and where to place keywords. She even read through a cover letter that I had sent and showed me what was fine and what needed work. She did this all in one hour, and she was explaining the why and how of this the entire time so I fully understood why it mattered.

So now I have a better understanding of where I need to work on my resumes and cover letters, and I've been working on the upgrades. I have a better grasp of how to identify keywords (because it turned out I wasn't as good at that as I thought), and how to better integrate them into my resumes and cover letters, which I am also working on.

Would I have been able to look all this up online and figure it out myself? Maybe. Would I have been able to look all this up online and figure it out myself in one hour? Absolutely not.

Career Consultants are working with people every day from every walk of life to do one thing: help those people get better chance at getting employed where they want to be employed. They know the trends of resumes for certain career types, and know about resources that are at their fingertips but would take you an entire day of careful googling to find. They also can make suggestions that, in your stressed state of trying to find work, would not readily come to you.

If you have gone to Career Consultants before at you county office, make sure to thank them for all their hard work. If you haven't gone there, and you are looking for a career change, or just need some help with your resume, or your cover letter, or your interview tactics, I encourage you to make an appointment. They are there to help.

The Anxiety of Radio Silence and The Keyword Game

Being in the job market is stressful. There are companies to research, job listings to comb through, applications to fill out, people to contact for follow-ups or more information about the company, emails to set up interviews, phone interviews, in-person interviews, and thank you notes to fill out. Along with that, there are resumes for various positions in the career track of interest to tweak, cover letters to write, and practice for interviews which may or may not ever happen.

The worst is, after all that work, all that effort, to be met with radio silence. Apply with your best foot forward, with what you think is your strongest resume and cover letter, send the follow-up inquiry a couple days later, and yet...nothing. No response. The anxiety of what wasn’t good enough swiftly follows if you can’t shake it off and go to the next job.

I keep thinking of search engine optimization in relation to job application systems, fueled by keywords, which HR departments use to “help” them whittle down which resumes they actually look through to determine who gets an interview. As far as I understand it, have all the specific keywords HR has programmed in for that particular job, and the resume is sent to the department for consideration. Don’t have enough keywords, and your resume could be categorized as unfit for the position and HR doesn’t even see it.

I have filled out hundreds of job applications so far, and I’ve had over a dozen interviews, either in person or via phone. Some of these interviews went well (though not well enough to be hired), some interviews did not, but I was happy for the experience they gave me all the same. The anxiety I can’t shake, the thing that makes me wonder, late at night as I research yet another company, is this: if it wasn’t for the keyword system that HR departments have adopted, how many more interviews would I have been offered? Followed immediately by: if it wasn’t for this system, would I have gotten a job already?

Then the last, most pressing question: if that is the game HR managers are playing via keyword system, what is the best way to game that system to my advantage? After all, if I’m going to have to play by these rules, then I should figure out a way to consistently win and acquire an interview. The ultimate win state is to acquire an interview that lands me full-time employment.

Let the games begin.

-A.M.W.

Dress for Success

‘Dress for the job you want’ is a motto that, via fashion and business changes throughout the years, has become significantly more fraught than the last time I was looking for work. There are plenty of places that still do full professional dress as their standard for everyday wear. There are also a significant amount of places that fully lean into business casual for everyday wear, so nice slacks or dark jeans with a polo shirt or blouse is acceptable.

Of course, interview outfits have rarely changed, even if the in-fashion style changes from year to year. I made an effort to acquire up-to-fashion-date interview clothes recently. I found a retailer, Torrid, that carries the most comfortable business slacks I have ever worn. As a bonus, they have varying leg-length sizes so I could get the short inseam version and finally stop having to worry about scuffing my leg cuffs if I don’t wear heels to an interview or meeting. It helps that Torrid has multiple colors too, so depending on how dedicated one is to color coordination between items, there is plenty to choose from both in-store and online. 

At this point I feel I need to say that this blog is not sponsored by Torrid. I named them because I appreciate the fact that they finally created a suit pant that I don’t mind wearing all day because they stay comfortable. In addition, their selection for plus-sized women really is amazing, and keeps up with current fashion trends, which I also deeply appreciate.

In a perfect world, I wouldn't have to worry this much about fashion in order to be perceived as a good candidate for a job when I'm at an interview. Unfortunately, the world we live in is far from perfect, and to that end I have had to critically assess my clothing choices, both past and present, for the past several months. I feel decidedly more confident in my clothing choices as they are now, and my closet is more organized than it has been in years.

So, here is to the New Year, to new job interviews, and to new jobs. I hope that everybody has exactly what they need to get what they want accomplished in 2020!

-A.M.W.

Learning As A Hobby

I enjoy having hobbies. I love reading fiction and crocheting, just as much as I love reading non-fiction, learning how to code, and speak German. But when it comes to learning and also trying to find full-time work, how can I know that what I'm studying on my own time is worth it?

The answer for me is surprisingly simple: Just as much as job searching and applying to jobs is stressful for me, learning things I'm interested in helps me unwind from all that stress. This is because I use the act of learning the same way I use the act of crocheting as a hobby. It is a calm time, a time where I can shut off the stressed side of my brain and dive head-first into things that interest me and I want to know more about for a couple hours.

I started learning German via Duolingo starting in January, as part of my resolution for growth. Progress has been nominal, and I am nowhere near close to start having conversations yet, but I'm having fun learning words and small phrases. I know that a large part of my family tree has roots in Germany, so I thought it would be an interesting language to learn, and I was right. Learning German has given me a greater appreciation for compound words, and it has also proven to me that English is just seven different languages stacked on top of each other and wrapped in a trench coat.

More recently, I started up basic coding lessons via Codecademy. I have always been a nerd, and taught myself a lot of HTML when the internet became available in my town when I was 12 years old. I've learned more over the years, to the point that I was using HTML every day at work, and I would like to delve deeper in coding. What I've learned so far about the basics has been interesting, and I look forward to learning more.

So what is next for what I want to learn? Nothing so long-term as languages, but there are some very nice, short, learn-at-your-own-pace classes I can take about grant writing. Taking a few of those would look good on a resume and my LinkedIn profile, as well as be a nice challenge for me to stretch my writing skills again.

I hope that whatever your hobby is, it's something that keeps you happy and helps you unwind.

-A.M.W.