Adventures in (F)unemployment
Well, it’s finally happened. I’m delighted/happy/thrilled to announce that after 9 months of (not-so-f)unemployment, I have finally found a full-time goddamn job that I’ll be starting this week. Halle-fuckin-lujah.
As a bit of postmortem examination, and because I’m the kind of person who likes to document these things, here are some noteworthy teachings and takeaways that I’ve gained from my experience:
---
First, re: getting laid off, if you’re an obsessive note-taker like I am, do yourself a future favor and keep them on a platform that you control and can’t be locked out of after they boot you from their OneNote!
---
My final count was 80 applications in total. I know that this is amateur numbers compared to some of the folks I’ve seen posting on Reddit, who are in the hundreds or more somehow, but I chose to be selective and strategic, staying in two particular fields that my experience can best translate to. I limited my search to field-specific job boards, LinkedIn (more on that later), and Idealist.org, a less terrible Indeed but for the nonprofit sector.
For the most part, this approach worked; over a third of my applications resulted in a hit, which is a really good rate. A job coach I was assigned to as part of my old employer’s severance package noted that he had clients who have been unemployed longer than I have who haven’t received a single callback. The downside is that my selectiveness resulted in more than a few days, even weeks, in which I had nothing to apply for.
That being said though, there are only so many organizations in New York that do what I do, so I was faced with contemplating what strategy to take if I went through them all without success. (I still might have to face this down the road.)
---
Since I began looking, I kept a detailed spreadsheet to track my progress with each organization that I applied to, with links to the job listing, the salary range (thank goodness for NYC’s salary transparency law, something which should be universal), key contacts, and other helpful bits of information, mostly for metrics and so I don’t forget what I applied for if someone comes back at me for an interview request.
---
I’ve had multiple people tell me my cover letter game is ass backwards. Sure, I’m guilty of writing too much, sometimes over a page. Also, I always interpreted cover letters to be an explanation of how the skills listed in my resume can be tailored specifically toward the role I’m applying for. In other words, my resume has a broad description of my skills, and the cover letter describes how those skills fit with the employer. Maybe this is the wrong approach, I admit, but it’s always worked for me in the past, and I haven’t seen any indication yet that it’s a bad strategy.
The only thing about my cover letter that I tailor to the individual organization was one sentence: “With my strong background in [SKILL] and [SKILL], I possess the experience necessary to make a meaningful contribution to [ORG]'s mission to [BLANK].” Everything else was rather modular—I drew from a bank of paragraphs to plug in as I saw fit, describing my experience and how it complements the specific role, one for a particular database, another for comms experience, etc.
My resume I kept pretty static, because it was already tailored to the roles I was applying for, with the only change I would make bumping a bullet point up higher for emphasis. I will note that for years I had used a two-column format (with tables!) that I had heavily adapted from a Google Drive template years ago, which I know is frowned upon, but I never had a problem with it. I did change it to a more traditional one-column version, but I didn’t really notice a difference in my callback rate. Is the ATS something to worry about if I’m still rewriting the whole resume into each company’s special little portal?
---
A note on AI: A lot of folks suggest using AI to write a cover letter and tailor your resume, but when I’ve tried it, I’ve found that it didn’t really save me any time or effort. I’d plug into Gemini something like, “Write me a professional, detailed cover letter for XXX position at XXX. Here’s the listing: [PASTE LISTING], and here’s my resume: [PASTE RESUME].” It would spit out something serviceable, but I would often have to edit it to add more detail or to sound less robotic. Sometimes it would pull phrasing verbatim from my resume or the listing itself, which I cannot abide. Maybe I need to explore more refined ways to use it (maybe a prompt asking not to repeat language?), but given the amount of time tweaking the AI output, I might as well just stick with what I had.
---
That job coach I mentioned, while he was very pleasant to talk to, didn’t offer much advice that I could use, but one of the things he often insisted was that resumes and cover letters would soon go the way of the dinosaurs in favor of social media. If that’s truly the case, yikes.
On the whole, I found LinkedIn to be only semi-useful, and honestly I could write up a whole separate essay on this one point. I did get some hits from it. Hell, I found my last job from it, and my new one even, but more often than not I had to wade through a swamp of typical social media junk. Spammy recruiters, grifters, and bots take advantage of an #OpenToWork banner, some the second I make it visible, which in particular I'm still skeptical on whether it is useful or rather a scarlet letter of desperation. The stupid Easy Apply button I ignored completely, which I know for a fact is a total waste of time having been on the hiring side once. Why is LinkedIn suggesting applying for the same three jobs I already applied to, and marked so in the system?
I get the need to compete and justify its existence beyond what I and many others use LinkedIn for: A static resume clone people can search me on and a job board. But does anyone actually appreciate the faux-spirational influencer posts in my timeline? Why do I need Facebook-like games? Instagram-like reels? It’s like it’s trying to be everything at once, rolling all the worst parts of social media together.
---
On networking, in my entire career, I have never landed a job from a connection. Each one was from a cold application without any referral or “in.” That’s not to say I didn’t try, despite the feelings of desperation that it often elicited. Any little bit helps I guess.
On LinkedIn, I often got positive results from messaging folks after I applied, either via a comment on a post announcing the job or through a DM. I used to think that seemed tacky or too Pick me! but that largely evaporated after I started actually getting interview requests.
For the referrals I got from my connections—for six different organizations, a few from high-level directors or VPs—they either never panned out in an offer or didn’t result in a call back. There was one crushing example in which I knew the VP in charge of the department, skipped a round of interviews because they knew me well enough that it was unnecessary, only to get to the final round and not make it. I don’t know what to make of that, except that I should remind myself never to get too excited for a role, not after a referral, not after a good interview, no matter how closely I might match with the job, because there might always be some subjective thing I can’t account for that they’ll make a decision on. Or some unicorn person that fits their bill better.
---
As for recruiters, they have been completely useless. In one instance, I got contacted on behalf of a company that seemed great for me on paper that I had no idea about. We did a phone interview, he indicated they already reviewed my profile and were interested in me. Great. Except I didn’t hear back from him in weeks, and when I did get in touch, he said that they already had a queue of folks lined up. What was the point of this interaction?
Another reached out to me to schedule a preliminary interview, which actually turned out to be a 5 minute call to see if I was human before she invited me to complete a one-way video interview. I swear if I wasn’t unemployed and desperate I wouldn’t have bothered.
---
After all of this, minus derailing my career trajectory and the hit to my sense of self-worth, I came out of it alright, without any significant monetary suffering. I still have a tiny bit of my severance monies left, and I never pulled out of my savings or my 401K. I never struggled to pay rent nor have I had significant debt to worry about. (I even used a portion of my severance to pay off the last bit of my student loan, given that relief from the government wasn’t likely to come any time soon.) As trying as this whole experience has been mentally, I know I’m pretty fortunate. I mostly spent the past 9 months regressing to my youth, watching a lot of TV, going on a lot of walks and bike rides, and playing a lot of video games. I have a lot to be thankful for, not the least of whom being my partner, for his support and, well, splitting living costs with.
---
Finally, a special shoutout to my old employer, who posted a job very similar to my own a month or two after they let me go, but for a different department and for higher pay. Probably against my better judgement, I reached out to the hiring manager, applied, all was well. They even acknowledged my (re)application with a personal email, which was encouraging. After all they said I was eligible for rehire!
I found out months later that they hired someone else without so much as a rejection. Never again.
