Job hunting

[rowyn]

A topic near and dear to all of us, I'm sure. :/ I haven't looked for a job in seven years, and am looking for some advice on how to go about it nowadays. (I never was all that good at it). There are a lot of Internet job search sources available, I know, and my local newspaper posts its classified section online. And I know networking is the best way to get a job (out of ... um ... the ten or so jobs I've gotten, seven of them were by networking -- and I'm pretty bad at networking to boot, which ought to show how useful it is.) Anyway, what I'm mainly wondering about is:

Are there any offline resources that you've found useful? (Or Internet ones that you particularly like, for whatever reason).
Are there any advantages to snail-mailing resumes over emailing them? Is there a point to "following up" on a resume if you don't get a response to it, or is it pointless to expect a response to most resume submissions nowadays?

General suggestions also welcome, naturally. Thanks!

Comments

When in doubt, think big

[telnar.livejournal.com]

If I were you, I wouldn't limit the search to jobs very similar to the one you're doing today. Part of this exercise could well be to identify what types of jobs are worth considering.

Some Random Examples

[telnar.livejournal.com]

Just to toss out a few random examples of areas where your skills might be helpful (in some cases, after getting a little on-the-job training):

Software Testing
Insurance Adjusting
Proposal Writing
Corporate Accounting

Of course, these have nothing to do with each other, and use very different subsets of your skills for good measure, but that gets back to my original point about avoiding tunnel vision. I think that I can defend the claim that you might be good at each of these (feel free to drop me a line if you want to call that). Besides, you're not nearly (well at least not quite) as old as geezers like myself. You'll be working for a while longer, so it's probably worth the effort to make changes if they will make you happier.