things are in fact going extremely badly but we’ll see if they pick up starting tomorrow night for reasons that will preclude me being here for about a week (seeing my SO)
I just started a new job not too long ago after a year of being unemployed…
It’s hard and the whole recruitment process is soooo bullshit 90% of the time.
You can’t force someone to give you a job and most of the time that you don’t land a job it’s not because of you. I know I blamed myself for not having a job many days, but in reality the circumstances are not in your control.
Some HR take months to move their arse on a requisition, stringing you along with boilerplate responses to followups for months. Some months I got no bites, other months I got 3 interviews.
Get references, study (whether in a school, books at the library in areas of interest), figure out what kind of jobs you want, apply to whatever jobs you think you want, get people you know to refer you to their work, take certifications, go to industry conferences of your interest, join professional groups. Get a recruiting agency to help you. Go to employment counseling.
It took me a year despite doing every single one of these things. Some days it was easy for me, other days it was hard even without any specific disability. Do your best, be the best yourself you can be, don’t let being without a job define yourself. Look more towards the person you want to be, and start with changing the things you can change rather than what you can’t.
Very good point about it not being about you. I didn’t really understand that until I was on the other side and doing some hiring. Sometimes we’d have no qualified applicants for months (like, we had a junior dev position and got people applying that knew nothing about code), and other times we’d have 10+ applicants that were perfect and we wanted to take all of them.
I used to think if I didn’t get a job it was on me. Turns out it’s a numbers game (assuming you’re not applying for something like a junior dev position with only cust service experience).
The real problem I have with conditions embedding themselves in how I define myself is with the depression rather than the unemployment. I’ve only been unemployed a little over thirteen months. The depression is a chronic problem I’ve experienced on one level or another for roughly twenty years. Between the two, the depression definitely strikes deeper to the core. It’s just that the current episode is pretty tough to deal with as long as I am dealing with the isolation created by this unemployment.
