Application process

[Flutterguy]

So I'm a person of reasonably sound mind, fairly happy, and in need of cash. Yet if I wake up with the intent of finding a new job on my days off I'm lucky if I get 1 application out.

I've no quarrel with working in fact I tend to enjoy myself more when I am working. I just come in accepting that I'll be stuck there for 8+ hours, smile, and enjoy every bit of it. When I'm home I'll either feel I'm wasting time attempting to have fun and I should be learning/improving, or that I am wasting my time trying to learn/improve and I should just play video games, get drunk or do something fun.

Anyways, I enjoy working, yet I cannot apply for jobs. Anytime I go out with a handful of resumes I become extremely socially paranoid and I want to go home immediately and jump off my balcony. Looking for jobs online I tend to discern them all as things I'm not going to get hired for, then I rewrite my resume and don't send any out.

Any tips for the whole process?

 

[Bellvedere]

Just tell yourself "courage my boy" and push through it until you accomplish your goal, whether that's filling a quota of submitted applications or whatever else is involved that you feel awkward about. It's what I do. I hate it too and just can't wait till I get to crawl back home and do something mindless to take my mind of having put myself out there. When you've done what you need to do, assign yourself guilt-free leisure time as a reward and to relieve some stress.

Just carpet bomb everywhere your looking for work at with resumes. Employers will get plenty of suitable and unsuitable resumes, let them decide whether your qualified or not. You might be able to find an employment agency to help you if your doubting the quality of your resumes or anything else about your approach to finding work. Alternatively if you think it's just you being self conscious, tell yourself that it's in your head and just go for it.

 

[PoolCleaningRobot]

A fast easy answer would be to sign up for LinkedIn, post a resume, and try to connect with people you know. Employers often browse LinkedIn for new hires

Anytime I go out with a handful of resumes I become extremely socially paranoid and I want to go home immediately and jump off my balcony. Looking for jobs online I tend to discern them all as things I'm not going to get hired for, then I rewrite my resume and don't send any out.

Any tips for the whole process?

Here's the part you not going to like: talking and making connections = job. I'm lucky because even when I graduate my college, as an alumni I'll still have access to the school's career department so long as the school is still standing. Since I'm graduating, I've been given a lot of job search advice. One thing I've been told is to arrange for one on one interviews with an employer or senior employee in a field you're interested in. Shockingly, people like talking about themselves and how great their accomplishments are. You can give that person your resume and then ask them for the contact information of someone else in that field and schedule another meeting. Supposedly, most people find a job once they've done this three times. The head of our career department also got his job there by doing this interview thing for months

Other tips:

>Be fancy. My uncle once told me he was heavily impressed by an applicant because he had his own business cards (his contact information was on them and his position was "student")
>Look up background info about company before hand (usually their own website). People are a lot more impressed when applicants actually know what the fuck they're applying for
If an application uses specific words, use them in your answers. Sometimes they feed applications through a scanner and throw out resumes that don't have certain keywords ("team player", "strong morals", bla bla)
>Print your resume on resume paper. Why the fuck not? Its cheap and fancy
>Look up questions before an interview. "What's your proudest accomplishment?" "Where do you need to improve?"

If it boosts your confidence, people a lot more idiotic than you have probably applied for these positions. I can't believe some of the tips they have to give us. "Don't go to an interview with wet hair" "Brush your teeth and wear deodorant"

 

[Lilani]

Along with what everyone else has already said, don't turn in the application or resume and then just wait around for them to respond. Pursue them--call them up in a week or so and tell them you want to follow up on the application and want to know if the position is still available. Keep doing this until you get a straight answer. The worst they can do is say no, which is at least a lot less suspenseful than silence. This shows persistence and self-motivation on your part. A lot of my friends are also in the job application phase of life (and so am I, sort of) and it baffles me how many of them just throw applications and resumes at companies and NEVER make any effort to contact them a second time or check on the status of the position. Companies get applications and resumes all the time, my boss will pour through applications 70 to 100 at a time. They're never going to remember any of those names, but perhaps even if you went into the "no" pile at first if you call and check up on it then you're going to force them to dig your name back out and give it a second look. So just keep pestering them, annoy the shit out of them if you need to.

Also, for the interview, Google common interview questions and start thinking about answers for them. The most common ones I've ever gotten are what are your strengths and weaknesses. Try to be sincere in both of these, don't have a five-mile itemized list of strengths. Pick perhaps one strength and elaborate on it a bit (perhaps you're good at being organized, because you feel that being organized keeps you grounded and focused on what you're doing, or what you said about feeling better about yourself when you work is also very good). And don't do that thing where the weakness you choose is really a strength, like saying "Oh, I just work too hard!" They can see right through that and it isn't really genuine, unless the direction you go with it is "I sometimes get fixated on certain aspects of work which distract me from other things."