Job Loss on the Slim Part II: Winning Some Bread and Finding a Job

This is the second part to my guide on coping with joblessness with no backup plan. If you haven’t read the first part, you should go do that first. It deals with stopping the free fall and making sure you are set to correct course. This installment is going to be focused on using the tools you acquired to make sure your unemployment stent is as productive as possible. It shouldn’t be a period of high stress and a frantic search for work. Think of it as an unexpected vacation–except that you still need to be active.

So, you’ve got yourself a Google Voice account, a place to rest your head and enough peanut butter and bananas to last you for the first week, right? Let’s get ready to find some income.

Your Friends Have Jobs!

Right? Well, some of them should. A friend is much more likely to get you a job than classifieds and résumés (not to say those aren’t an important part of your strategy). If you have a friend that bartends, waits tables or cooks at a restaurant, they’re going to know about a job opening right away, and if they know you’re looking for a job, they can chime in with an immediate, “I’ve got a friend looking for a job,” when someone quits or gets fired. Hey, this probably happened to your old position!

Don’t be ashamed to be out of work, and let your friends know about your situation in a non-gloomy manner. Finding work for friends is great. You generate a little social capital, improve the likelihood that a friend will help you when in need and you get to work with someone you like.

Fix Your Résumé

I know, it seems silly to have one when you’re target is every pizza joint and coffee shop within walking distance, but it does help. For one, you can print up 50 of these things relatively easily and instead of writing your info down on applications 50 times over with a borrowed pen that hardly writes, you just introduce yourself and give them your résumé. Kind of. You might want to do more than that, but we’ll get to it in a minute.

You should know how to make a résumé, but if not, you can find a million templates online. Try to make it clean and professional, and since you’re not going to be giving to any fortune 500 companies, you don’t really need to focus on adding “pop” words. The local bar manager isn’t going to be impressed that you synergized the towel folding operation at the car wash you worked at when you were sixteen. If anything, it will make you sound worse.

Demonstrate that you can communicate well in writing, that you have a goal in mind and a sense of structure and you’ll be fine.

Check The Listings

Craigslist is king for job listings. You get to wade waist high in spam and crap listings for the few good ones every day, but it’s a great place to look. A great way to use Craigslist is in conjunction with Google Reader. you can import a feed from a specific section, like jobs, or more specifically the “food / bev / hosp” page, for example. You can also import the feed from a search. This is great. Custom tailor what you’re looking for with keywords like “web designer” and even exclude listings including certain words with a minus sign like so: “-advertising.” Play with the search until you start getting just the results you want, and then import the feed into Reader using the “RSS” link at the bottom of the page.

Instead of clicking through all of them, you now get all the listings streamlined and you can just flick through them, star the ones you like and then go to your starred folder and contact the poster.

Get the local classifieds paper and circle the likely candidates and make a list of places to visit or call. This is nowhere near as effective as the friends approach or even Craigslist, but it may yield some results.

Hit The Streets

It might sound wrong to use the term “mass apply,” but that’s certainly a good method. I don’t mean to go drop a résumé on the counter in every restaurant and walk onward, but you do need to look up every establishment around within your target industries and try to pick five or so at a time in close proximity to one another and hit them all in a day.

This is when the clothes you scrapped together come in handy. Look clean and cheerful. Every place you go to, try to talk to a manager. If you can’t get to them, ask whoever is there if they are hiring. Explain what you’re looking for and why you’d be good for it. Don’t complain about how awful your last job was, even if it truly was. A hiring manager isn’t going to take your side of the story at face value and believe that your last boss was really an unreasonable dick. It’s just going to make you sound like you had a bad attitude, poor work ethic, etc.

Even if the place isn’t hiring, ask if they’ll take your résumé and give you a call if something opens up.

Hustle in the Meantime

Transferable skills can come in handy. For example, I earned a little cash to live on doing things as simple as formatting harddrives and reinstalling Windows, despywareing and even implementing Google Checkout in some dude’s shopping cart site. If you have any skills at all, try to use them. They might not be enough to “make a living” with, but when you’re making nothing, $50 is a lot for a week.

Craigslist is great for this; check out the gigs section. There’s all kinds of easy-to-do stuff that someone will pay for. Jailbreak an iPhone, edit a paper, you might even be able to get stuff on the free section and sell it, or buy stuff and resell it on eBay for a bit of profit. Be creative.

Odd jobs are key. The little bits of money here and there help a lot. You can probably make enough to eat and still have some to offer the person providing you a couch utilities or a bit of rent.

I hope this second part helped you with the job hunt. With some persistence, you will eventually get an interview and land a job, even if it’s not one you want, you can keep searching for the one you do want without starving.

In the next section, I’ll be writing on a nicer topic: enjoying the vacation. How to be personally productive, relax, have fun and not put your life on hold just because you’re out of work–living on the cheap or free.

• Job Loss on the Slim Part I: Landing Without a Safety Net
• Job Loss on the Slim Part III: In the Meantime