Sacrifice and a real de-motivation! The joys of a job search.
A close friend asked me to go out for happy hour tonight. I strongly considered this and initially planned on meeting up with him for a few drinks. Obviously one night of not applying to jobs or focusing on my goals wouldn’t hurt. But as I thought more about it I realized that one night, especially so early into this endeavor, could prove catastrophic. This plan and goal is about accountability to myself and achieving the campaign my wife and I have set out on. I would be failing myself if I gave in so soon. Granted, going out would have been much better fun then adjusting my resume and writing cover letters in attempt to say exactly what I perceive a hiring manager wants to hear. Unfortunately, this action would not have brought me closer to my ultimate goal. Obviously, I cannot expect to shut out every other aspect of my life and have zero fun, but it’s too early in this process to forego a productive night for fun.
On the de-motivation front, last night I was going though Monster.com and decided to look at the jobs I have applied to over the past several months. Bad idea! In just under 5 months I applied to 48 jobs on this site and of those 48 jobs only 6 were viewed by the hiring manager. In that time period I probably applied to a total of 100 jobs and if I extrapolate the average viewed from Monster to all the applications I can assume that only about 15 have actually be viewed by anyone. Maybe I need to completely rethink my approach and abandon applying through job boards and focus entirely on networking and building relationships in Chicago…
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As Jasques would say "Woo, You have to keep on keepin' on"
ReplyDeleteI agree that you should rethink your process. Just think about it, you are currently in sales. What would a productive sales person be doing? He would be calling clients and figuring out how to get past the gate keepers. You can be shuffling papers all day and not be one step closer to making that sale. You need to be making contacts.
Josh Bulloc