Desperation Smells

A while back I was unemployed and running out of cash (and credit). I didn't just want a job, I needed it. Unfortunately, DesperationSmells, and prospective employers can smell it a mile away. In several circumstances I missed good chances of getting hired primarily because I was acting desperately. This is when I realized that the analogy between hiring and dating is very strong. People have an instinctual aversion to desperate people, and an equivalent but opposite attraction to confident people. Because of my financial situation, my confidence was way down when I applied to moderately challenging jobs.

The solution in my case was to JustGetAnyJob, regardless of how low the pay or how mindless the work. This was just the ticket. I was so overly-qualified it was quite easy to get the job once I got into the interview. Finally with a source of cash-flow and steady work, my confidence started to rise again and I was no longer at risk of going bankrupt. This stepping-stone job gave me the confidence to get a more rewarding job and I'm finally back on my feet again. If I had persisted in getting a 'good' job, I probably wouldn't have been able to get one.

Unfortunately, if you apply for a low-paying job full of mindless work, and the prospective employer finds out how much education and experience you really have, then they usually declare you overqualified and refuse to hire you. Maybe it's because, despite any outward appearance of confidence you may have, you appear desperate on paper. So unless you're able to lie convincingly and self-effacingly in order to conceal the very things you'd normally be most proud of, and do it on paper, this will not work. Then again, maybe the manager at McDonalds will have pity on a poor soul who has two Ph.D.s, one from Princeton and one from MIT, and can't find work...

I tend to agree. I got stuck in the desperation cycle after the Dot-com crash in California, and being overqualified for a position also prevents you from getting hired. One does feel stuck between a rock and a hard-place. My legacy experience saved me, as the glut web newbies didn't have such, but I had to work for sleazy contract head hunters and it took me away from my family.

Another possible problem is that the low-paying job might become a black mark on your employment history. It might pigeonhole you. If your current job is McDonalds, that might stand out more than your actual qualifications. I read one employer joke, "Hey, we put out an ad for a marketing director, and received a resume from one person who was currently working at a gas station." Well, what if that guy had a Masters in marketing, and couldn't find a job, and so went to work at a gas station? Now he's stuck there...

Incidentally, Desperation is a novel by StephenKing, and it smells.

How can one hide desperation if there is a fairly long gap on their resume?

One can't. Same boat. Sympathies. (If the gap is less than a year though, consider just removing the starting and ending months from the work history...)

Try freelancing. Even if you don't get any business, at least you can put something fairly decent on your resume.

Similarly, start a business. Make it one that doesn't actually cost you anything but time (you should have some to spare, being unemployed). It may take off, in which case, YAY!, or it may not, in which case you'll have something nice on your resume.

Does it help to start a project on SourceForge?

It might be impressive if you could give concrete, specific examples of open-source project success: You programmed a tool that's being used in a handful of major companies, for example, or you know that your cool piece of desktop software has 5000 users. But anybody can start a project on SourceForge, so that in itself won't be impressive to anybody.

It might take years for a project to become popular. I was rather hoping that it might be a good way to let employers see your code. If other people happen to contribute, then you can also show employers that you can work well with others, or that you can lead a team. If it becomes wildly popular, that's great too, of course, but I would think that good code might count for something. (I would agree, though, that if you don't have any code there's probably no sense in starting a publicly-visible project.)

If you can get a couple of freelance contract jobs (even just making simple dynamic websites or the like), you can put down that you were an independent consultant during that time, and just mention those few jobs that you do manage to get when asked about that time. When you're asked why you want to go back to a steady job, you just tell the interviewer that you'd like a more steady income, and that for a reliable income you'd be willing to take a pay cut.

Getting a job requires two things. It requires you to present yourself in the best light possible, and it requires the employer to decide to hire you. It is only productive to worry about the first half of that: presenting yourself in the best light possible. If you know you have done that, then you have earned the right not to give a damn about the latter. If they decide not to hire you, it's their loss; they don't deserve you. After all, if you presented yourself in the best light possible, then you did all that you or anyone else could have done.

Most job-hunting anxiety comes from trying to second-guess how the interviewers are going to make their decisions, and then trying to make them decide in your favor somehow. But you can't really control their decisions. They make their decisions in their own minds, and their minds are unavailable to you. They can make any decision they want, on any basis they want. Your particular interviewers may reject you because they don't like your tie, even though anybody else would have liked it. Or maybe they disagree with you about one of the finer points of English grammar and they didn't tell you. Maybe they're even wrong. Or maybe they burned the toast for breakfast and weren't in a hiring mood that day. In many companies the decision of whom to hire is nothing but a popularity contest. But whether it is or not, there is absolutely nothing you can conceivably do about it. So the only solution is: don't worry about it.

Keep looking for want-ads, keep sending out resumes, keep going to interviews, keep in touch with your contacts, and play the numbers game. If your presentation is good, eventually somebody will notice.

But learn not to care about what you can't control. You'll find self-confidence, because you'll know that in every way you could have, you excelled.

This reminds me of a very good website called AskTheHeadhunter.

In my experience the most important thing to do in an interview is to make a connection, of any kind, to the person that has hiring authority. This requires superior ListeningSkills? and the willingness to let the interviewer do the vast majority of the speaking. Making a connection will immediately persuade the interviewer to think of you as <insert your name here> instead of as just another candidate. By demonstrating that you are listening you demonstrate that although you may have more important concerns, such as paying for food, you are still a functioning member of what the employed consider to be normal society.

See HowToSurviveInaJobMarketThatSucks, WarningSignsOfCorporateDoom