Day Fifty-One

So, the second day at the "sorry you were laid off" seminar was fairly helpful. I think I have a better idea now of how not to screw up an interview.

Some other tidbits from the seminar:

- Only about 10-15% percent of the job seeking population end up finding a job by searching online, in newspapers, etc. The other 85-90% find them through networking.

- When you're looking for a job, you should be talking to 30 people a week about your job search. Doesn't matter who they are.

- A two-page resume is okay and actually preferable to a one-page, because you can use a more legible font and fit in more stuff.

- It's kind of fun to be by far the youngest person in the seminar.

Oh, and that "positioning statement" from a couple days ago? Want to see what I came up with? The ridiculous levels of corporate BS and buzzword-ness that I've been driven to? Okay, fine. Here it is.

"I am an administrative professional with four years of experience in a variety of office environments, including business & legal and motion picture development. My primary skills are in writing and computing, where I consistently exceed expectations in both the speed and quality of my work. My communication skills, reliability, and good sense of humor ensure that I adapt well to virtually any setting. In my last position, I developed and implemented online filing systems and greatly increased efficiency in gathering important information."

Yeah, I'd want to strangle me too. Believe me, as soon as I get a job, I'm deleting that steaming pustule of verbiage and scraping out the part of my brain that wrote it. And yet, everyone in the group thought it was awesome, and a few people even asked if they could borrow phrases from it. I don't get it.

One good thing that came out of the seminar was that I learned it may be possible to avoid going to the State of California's unemployment session thing next week that I was really dreading. This other guy in the group said he called and got out of going to it by saying that he was going to another seminar and had already posted his resume on CalJobs, which apparently is the primary reason for the session. So tomorrow I'll give it a shot. That would really be cool.

Also, I finally got a response from the girl I emailed about exploiting her agency connections. I think she would have gotten back to me a lot sooner if I had known her work email address, instead of her AOL one which she never checks. She happily offered to read whatever I had and, in her words, "pass it on to whomever." Sweet! I sent her my Gilmore Girls script, so now we'll see (a) when she gets around to reading it and (b) what she says about it.