Now, what else to discuss but what has consumed the past months free time? So here I am in my description of the current ways that I and my peers are searching for jobs.
First one has to create accounts on such websites as Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Washingtonpost.com/jobs and the no brainer for my major, USAjobs.gov. After spending a weekend completing those tasks, spend an evening sitting with my old childhood neighbor , who is the career counselor at a university I never attended, going over my resume. Now some may think that that is not a daunting task, but let us look at it. I created a resume for going into the education field because a year ago that was my plan. A year before that I created a resume for going into various government jobs because that had been my plan most of my life. SO now, lets take both of those resumes, get the good stuff off and put in the key words necessary to even get looked at. I am also a big fan of respect and therefore spent unnecessary time letting my neighbor figure out my new version of Microsoft Word that here university had yet to upgrade to. After all of that effort, here are my steps that I perform every week.
1. Go to USAjobs every 3 days to advance search jobs near me that have been posted within the last 3 days.
2. Scroll through all of the 300 jobs in the Greater Washington, DC area and find maybe a few that I can apply to.
3. Read the descriptions of the jobs and realize that I don't have the prior federal service experience but get hopeful when it states that a combination of education and experience is also acceptable.
4. Spend some time applying to the federal service jobs (For anyone who has yet to try to do this, please be warned that almost every government agency has their own employment website, which you need to create an account for and put your contact information in each time. On top of that each has different password requirements. Someone could own my life if they ever found my little black book of passwords for applying for jobs.)
5. Next I visit the websites Washingtonpost.com/jobs, Careerbuilder.com, and Monster.com (in that order) and try any combination of the keywords: government, research, education, intelligence, analyst and as a last resort since I have 3 years of admin experience, administrative assistant. I save jobs in these three sites to come back to them on the weekend.
6. So Saturday comes and I now go back to the 3 aforementioned sites and search again for jobs and save them. Next I weed out the ones that are not exactly what I thought they were or that I know I do not have the experience/degrees they want through further research of the job post.
7. Now I spend my day applying to the jobs that I think I fit well into.
So, to most that may read this you may think, "okay, that's what everyone who is applying to jobs right now is having to go through." You are right and I agree. It is just difficult to think that I put myself about $50,000+ in debt by putting myself through college to get a degree that would automatically make me a better candidate for jobs. When I graduated high school I was told get a degree of you want to get a good job but now that I have that degree every email I get back from USAjobs is saying I am eligible for the position, have the qualifications but do not rank high enough against other applicants to be referred to the selecting officer. At this point I'm not sure if anyone has seen my resume except the few companies that have called me through monster that once googled, they have the reputation as being a scam.
So, here is my plea, if you are reading this, I hope you got a good laugh and no know that I can be a fun person, but also that I appreciate you going to the effort to do so and please email me back, even if you don't want to hire me. A job would be awesome also but it really depends on how you might take this post.
Oh, and by the way, I can write academically as well. I figured this might be more fun though.
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