What Color Is Your Parachute

What Color Is Your Parachute is a classic for job seekers, equipping you with the tools, tips and strategies you need to quickly find the right gig in today’s fast-moving market.

It might be the hardest element to deal with in finding a job: the uncertainty of when it’ll happen. At the end of her second month searching, a friend of mine recently told me the rejections started to eat at her. I get that.

At the same time the last thing you want to do is to get cold feet, because eventually, you’ll take any job, just to have one and probably end up unhappy and underpaid. To calm you down and give you some perspective: it’s normal for your job hunt to take a few months these days.

In a pre-2008 world, unemployment turnover was high, meaning it took only five weeks on average for half of all unemployed people in the US to find a job again. But after the big crash of 2008, employers have continued to hold the upper hand and hire much more conservatively. Now it would take over a year for just 20-30% of unemployed people to find a new position!

What’s more, most people, even in older age categories, have been at their jobs for less than a year or less than five years. Freelance gigs and part-time jobs are on the rise and if you don’t want either, you’ll just have to shop around for a while.

So don’t worry, don’t panic and definitely don’t lower your standards.

Keep calm and carry on.

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned in my two years of freelancing is this: You don’t need a resumé to get a job. Because I’ve built such a huge body of work on the internet, I’ve gotten multiple, unsolicited requests for paid work along the lines of “Hey, I like your work, can I pay you to write some articles?” Though I rarely take them, it’s incredibly reassuring to have the market approach you. That’s also why Dick Bolles suggests the first step to take in your job hunt is to google your name. What comes up? If you were an employer, what would you think of your LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profile? First, eliminate all red flags, like drunk pictures, angry comments, racist jokes and potentially false info that doesn’t match your actual resumé – or just plain isn’t true. Once you’ve cleaned up your online presence to make sure potential employers won’t run into any negative surprises, you can now flip the switch in the other direction: start leaving a trail of positively surprising breadcrumbs on the web! This could be a blog, a…