unemployment

I am really loathe to do this.  I didn’t at all the last time I was looking for a job, not once.  I would just send out as many resumes as I could and do my
best not to think about where or how many, then wait for the calls to start coming in.  But back then, I had some idea of what I was looking for, so I never doubted that I was staying appropriately focused.  Thanks to the magic of the gmail sent mail box, I can objective audit my job search and see how I’ve been doing.  All right, so here we go - day by day, let’s see how I did:

Monday:  It looks like I only got 3 resumes out that day, but there were a few jobs throughout the week that involved forms online rather than sending an email.  I have no way to account for those, so I’ll just keep in mind that there may be a few more for any day.  As for the 3 there, one of them is to be a Directors Assistant, which would be cool, but not so socially conscious.  Another appears to be at an Agency of some kind, which is really a step in the wrong direction.   The third doesn’t even count - it’s some online writing thing, not far from this blog concept.

Tuesday:  Another  3.  This time, two of them appear to off target - a talent agency, and Ad Trafficking (whatever that means), but the third seems like it’s potentially in the right direction.  I actually had a phone interview about this third one today, and I’m not 100% convinced that it would prove satisfying in terms of helping people, but I’m still open to it.  The advantages of it would include a jeans and t-shirt dress code, and getting out at 5:30, so this alone makes it pretty desirable.

Wednesday:  Ouch!  Only 1!  Here’s what I think happened here.  I started looking at Idealist.org, and got way too intimidated to actually send anyone anything.  None of my cover letters as of yet were related to those types of jobs, and I don’t really have any specific nonprofit experience.  Also, my computer has been running really slowly, and that website in particular seems to really slow things down.  The result was hours spent looking at things or waiting to look at things, with nothing to show for it.   Just yesterday, though, I started hitting a groove with some of the posts from that site, and sent out a decent handful.  Maybe now that I got the ball rolling for that, it will prove to be a valuable resource.  the one job I applied to was a music industry job.  I don’t know how right it would be for me or vice versa, but I do love music, so why not at least find out, right?

Thursday:  All right!  This is what I like to see - 8!  Two of these are Music Industry jobs, but both of them seem possibly questionable.  It’s easy to be mislead into something that sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is.  Of the rest, I would say that 3 of them could broadly be consider on target for jobs that might be satisfying from a moral point of view.  The other three, I think, were vague in the ads, but seemed like I’d be qualified for them and that they would be sufficient for one reason or another, even though it was unclear what the actual companies were.  I guess once you get into a rhythm of sending out resumes, it’s easy to just keep going, and throw them out there, even if the job offers only the slightest glimmer of possibility.

Friday:  Busy day -  3 interviews, if you count that free-haircut-reality-show thing (which I haven’t heard back about yet), so it’s understandable that I only got 1 resume out.  It was to PA for a feature shooting in NY soon, but I would have heard by now if they wanted me.  Oh well.  I don’t really want to PA anyway, that’s sort of the exact opposite of what I want, considering the ridiculous hours that it requires.

Overall, I would say not the best week.  It would be a little disheartening to look back at all of those very weak prospects, except for the fact that I know I had a really big day of resume sending yesterday (10 at least), so I can chalk last week up to getting some momentum going.  I don’t want to give myself a grade, that seems really stupid now.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll go into a little bit more detail about which jobs I’ve been applying to and why, and which ads I skip over without even looking at them.  I think that would shed some like on all of this.

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