I still have anxiety when I think about the three-year ordeal and the hundreds of applications submitted when I was looking for a job after returning from a dozen years in Tennessee. The idea of going through a job search again at this late stage of life and so-called career is terrifying. But I must power on, through, over the obstacles.
There were a couple weeks invested in updating and spit polishing the resume after the announcement in December, just in case the news delivered to me about my place in the new bank order was bad. Last week, the news arrived and it was bad. The casual browsing of job postings shifted into stressful panicked mode.
Among the jobs with appropriate titles are far too many job descriptions requiring the skill sets and experience of three distinct roles in most organizations, for a fraction of the usual salary of just one role. The wish lists from some organizations are strong, indeed. "Dear Santa, we want an experienced marketer who is a graphic designer who is also a writer for every word we might ever need to utter and who will also run multiple social media platforms and monitor the data and analytics. For slightly above minimum wage."
Recently, I saw a listing with my preferred job title that sounded really interesting, I am qualified for, and has a reasonable salary. Time was spent analyzing the listing and crafting a cover letter.
Tonight, after work, the job posting was revisited on LinkedIn. The cover letter was proofread and tweaked. There was an attempt to combine the cover letter and resume into one file which didn’t go well. After fighting with it for too long, it was decided to just load the resume as requested. The “apply now” button was clicked and led to a multi-screen process involving name, contact info, the area to upload the resume file, and more screens of allegedly optional demographic information.
Instead of a message declaring that the application was loaded, there was an error message informing me of the error of my ways, “There was an error while trying to submit your application, please try again.” There were several rounds of this aggravation before I gave up. Ugh. And not even surprising.
After supper and a White Lotus and Netflix break spanning several hours, the application thing was tried again, this time on the living room laptop. That required going to the silver computer to email the resume and letter to myself so I could retrieve it from the red laptop. Yes, I know there are Cloud solutions that would allow retrieval from any device. For whatever reason, the application submission finally worked from the red computer.
Overall, between seeing the job listing, psyching myself up to apply, attempting to apply, and finally applying with success, it was about six hours of effort over multiple days. One application down, and lord only knows how many more to go. Dang, it feels just like old times. Yay.
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