The Move From Hell
John McKay of archy is trying to finish his book on mammoths and sell it to a publisher.
Earlier this month he came to the decision that he would be better off moving back to Alaska where he had a network of friends and family to help him find work to pay his bills.
The path to Alaska was not an easy one.
The only way of finding work in this economy is to know someone who can recommend you to the right people. Resumes and CVs are worthless for almost any job that opens these days.
I wish him well.
3 comments
But that has been true for a couple of decades now, that mailing resumes is useless. I have never gotten a job by mailing resumes to people. Never. Not ever. Not once in the past 30 years. It’s always been word of mouth, a former boss, or a headhunter who harvested my resume out of the state database or off a job posting site or, more recently, my LinkedIn profile. I am quite baffled about the job hunting advice I was given in college and which is still common today even being pushed by state unemployment offices, because in my experience no one ever gets a job that way. All that happens is that postage gets wasted.
One of these days someone needs to write a book on how people *really* find jobs, as vs. all this bull***t that is always pushed by colleges and state unemployment offices…
What Badtux said. The last ten years I was working, every single contract I got was through a personal reference (usually from a colleague or former colleague) or by a referral of one manager to another in another company not in competition with the first. If I had had to depend on resumes, it would have been bleak indeed. And as for agencies, I got one contract, ever, through an agency, and I lived to regret the decision to accept it.
Unfortunately, all my regular client companies shut down, either just before or just after the Big Collapse in 2007-8, and after about a year of looking, I packed my kit and retired. Yes, I miss the work, and of course I miss the income.
The most I’ve ever done with resumes is handed a copy to HR after I was hired, so they would have one on record. Everyone knows that most of them border on works of fiction.
In any professional field, personal recommendation is the only way you are going to get a job.