Did you forget your: Username / Password ?

Microsoft

TechWell

Home

CM Journal Articles

HR Corner: What We've Learned About Job Hunting...

Written by Bob Aiello

Sunday, 30 November 2003 16:00

Job Hunting always brings up feelings of great success and, more often than I care to remember, a heavy feeling of pain at mistakes that I have made. Job hunting is certainly stressful especially when you feel that you are about to be unemployed. The emotions of fear and frustration can either motivate us to achieve success or paralyze us beyond hope. I have known people who simply have never gotten back to work after an extended job search. Their situations were often complicated by health problems (often related) and family crisis. Some have learned to cope and achieve against tough odds and above all to hope and attack the job search effort with conviction and tremendous personal efforts. Lessons learned from job hunting are important to us all and I hope that you will share your lessons with me as I discuss a few points that I have discovered from my own job search efforts and those that I have observed from friends and colleagues. Above all I get excited during a job search. The possibilities are endless and only limited by the practicality of what tactics work and which ones need to be avoided!

My Personal Nightmare

I was about five years old when my mother explained to me that many people who were blind did not have to work in regular jobs. Making brooms, selling pencils or running newspaper vending stands really are “career” choices (even today!) for people who were born with my visual handicap. My parents had decided to let me “try” going to a regular school (with sighted students), but they weren’t sure that I could keep up with the required work. If not they would look for a School for the blind to send me to. We had this discussion as we were walking to school on my first day in the first grade. I was scared and wondered if I was smart enough to keep up with the other students. I am sure that this vivid cognitive memory has been overwritten by other fears but this is exactly how I remember it. I paid attention in class because I was scared about not being to stay in a regular school. With congenital cataracts, I could see some shapes and shadows, but reading regular print was almost impossible (usually I used tapes and “talking” Books). I could read large print until the letters would fade away as my eyes tired (eye fatigue can be worse than poor acuity). I could not write down notes very well and copying from the blackboard was an exercise in total frustration.

Encourage and Support

All this time my teachers and my family cheered me on like spectators would cheer an athlete running a 100 meter race. With math I could listen and do the problems in my head and then write down the answers. I started skipping grades in math and eventually started college as a math major (switching to Computer Science with a math minor).

Handicaps Can Make You or Break You

I was lucky because they made me wait until lasers were safe to use. Many of my friends are “totally blind” today because they had the laser surgery while it was still experimental. I waited until the end of high school/beginning of college (then the doctors knew more about repairing the retina). Today I literally drive police cars and ambulances. But the experience of being blind defined many aspects of my life, including how I handle my job searches (and other challenges). I have always accepted the fact that my vision could go away again as I get older. This means that I have looked for work that could be made accessible if my vision started to go again. I also have a few scars in that I sometimes forget to give sighted people a little credit when they claim that they can’t do something. My initial reaction is always “why not?”. Blind people learn to be a little over-determined.

Job Searching is Tough…

Being turned down for a job can be extremely frustrating and upsetting. It often seems that the hiring “process” is bizarre and unpredictable. It often really is! Candidates have no idea what is going on inside the company. Recruiters often provide misinformation either through incompetence or because it suits their goal of making commissions. It’s no wonder that candidates can find themselves getting depressed and discouraged. My father-in-law used to remind me that job hunting is the best employment test that anyone can take. How you approach job hunting often says a lot about who you are as a person and may very well “predict” how you will do on the job itself. I’m not sure that my colleagues in Industrial Psychology would agree the point about “predicting success”, but approaches to job hunting definitely tell us a lot about ourselves.

Are You Organized?

Many candidates approach a job search as if the job is supposed to come gift-wrapped with a guarantee of success. Many candidates knock themselves out of the running for jobs even before they get started. Getting organized is essential. Your agent is unlikely to remember what he told you during your last conversation. Do you keep notes on what your agent “promises”? Do you even know where your resume has been submitted? I have taught job searching classes where I suggested keeping an ABC list. The A jobs are your most desired positions and the C jobs are the low level jobs that you are sure that can do, but are looking to avoid. B jobs are somewhere in between. On Mondays you work on the A jobs, Tuesdays the B’s etc. But most of all job searching is a job that requires being organized and lots of hard work.

Job Searches Are Tough

Networking with colleagues and working hard are key ingredients to a successful job search. But frankly there are no easy answers. Many leads just don’t turn work out and candidates can interview for weeks only to find that the company has simply “passed” on extending an offer of employment. Most of us will never know if we made some mistake during the interview process or the hiring manager never intended to really fill the position anyway (many managers play a game of keeping an open slot to use if the company decides to downsize). There are factors that are beyond our control and many more factors that require persistence and solid determination. We’ve learned that job searching is tough work and truly test each of us and our ability to achieve!

Encouragement and Support

We all need help and support during a tough job search. Your colleagues here at CM Crossroads are proactive at offering tips and advise on what works and what doesn’t. We’re here for you and hope that you will participate in our HR forums and share your energy and determination. In a sense we are all on the same team - running that 100 meter race together!

Please share your suggestions for successful job searches!

Bob Aiello is a Senior Editor for Crossroads News and an Associate Director at a major financial services firm in NYC, where he has company wide responsibility for Software Configuration and Release Management best practices. Bob is on the Steering Committee of the NYC Software Process Improvement Network (CitySPIN), where he is also the chair of the CM SIG which meets in Midtown NYC. Mr. Aiello has a Masters in Industrial Psychology from NYU and a BS in Computer Science from Hofstra University.

You can reach Mr. Aiello by email at raiello@acm.org

Set as favorite

Bookmark

Email this