I did the being jobless part right this time

I was laid off in March 2024 with one day’s notice.

5 Months, 200+ applications 25 interviews and 3 offers later and I chose one with better prospects and salary than the previous job.

Context: I was in Research and development team for a fortune 500 manufacturing company and have a decade of experience.

I’ve been jobless in 2019 for a year and totally messed myself up, depression, started smoking, putting on weight and it took me 4 years to undo the damage I did to myself physically and mentally. This time I had the “experience” of being laid off and though this might help somebody who feels lost.

1) Assessing the immediate needs and long term needs

The first time I lost my job in 2019 I had almost no savings and so my immediate needs was money so I did food delivery, teach kids, flipped burgers and every odd job I could find. Don’t wait until savings runs dry to swallow up your pride and do a “lesser” job, there are none, being and feeling useful is dignity in my opinion.

This time I had some savings so I decided to use this money to buy myself some time and upskill myself.

2) Be kind to yourself, take care of your physical and mental wellbeing

You might have to cut cost and give up gym membership or other sports activities depending on the situation but remember to keep moving, walking and hour or two every day, some pushups and body weight exercises doesn’t cost you anything.

Tell everyone you trust and know about your situation , ask for help, there’s no shame in that, don’t shut yourself down and try to fake it until you make it, I did this in the past and almost didn’t make it and had to be resuscitated in a hospital. This also helped my find people who really cared for me when I was at my lowest.

Keep your social life alive, whether it be some board games nights, movie nights, biking group, dancing, running, whatever sailed your boat, keep it alive.

3) Spend time sharpening your CV and your story

Fix your CV, have a killer resume and a story, I cannot overstate how important this is, pay for it if you could afford, ask someone in your industry for help, get feedback, revise and repeat. I made a habit of spending one hour each day improving my CV and this made a huge impact.

Tailor your CV for the target market, I had a mixed experience of product development and sales, I can’t have a one CV fits all strategy, so I had 3 versions of my CV, the third one was for other parallel industries with transferable skills such as banking.

Tip: I used chat gpt to bounce ideas, I wrote down a list of all significant tasks I did in the past jobs and asked chat gpt what skills each task highlighted and what are the transferable skills. I made an excel sheet with Skill/Story+Achievement/Target job profile. After this I rewrote my CV and had multiple versions.

Get recommendation letters, endorsement on LinkedIn, this is something good to do regardless of whether you’re actively job hunting or not. Find every possible way to add credibility to your résumé.

Practice your story, find a concise way to tell your story, this might feel odd to practice but besides being able to tell your story clearly to a recruiter, it reinforces your trust in yourself that you’ve been useful in the past and silence that inner critic. Tip: some use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) I personally use Conflict/Struggle/Resolution, whichever suits your style of speaking (First gives a context before going into your story and the second jumps straight into conflict which I like better, keeps the listener engaged)

4) Identify all possible channels of finding job postings

I used to rely only on LinkedIn and Indeed in the past but found out that so many jobs don’t make it there, depends on what you do your strategy might vary but I searched for all possible companies in the country that is in my industry, visited their career portal and signed up for job alerts based on keywords, most job portals allow this option and it’s more useful than it’s annoying. I first setup daily alert but realized weekly was more than enough.

Local and industry specific headhunters are useful as well, reach out to them on LinkedIn, many may not respond some will, I got some 6 interviews by reaching directly to hiring managers or hr on LinkedIn and the one job offer I took was actually through this channel.

Don’t have a tunnel vision, identify parallel industries & roles that you can transfer your skill to and apply regardless of how confident you feel about the role.

5) Have a routine

All the things I said might sound like a huge task while all I want to do when feeling sad and depressed about being jobless is watch TV and do nothing. I am not the super motivated and organized, my kitchen sink avalanche last week will tell you a different story. I’m a mess, I can’t be that organized and keep finding motivation to do all this shit. But I realized I can push this through without “motivation”.

I said to myself no matter what, I would spend 15 minutes on my CV today and apply for atleast one job with complete effort (reading job description, having a targeted CV etc) I didn’t over extend myself (this lead to yo-yoing in the past: hyperactive days with like 100 random shotgun applications, then crash and burn and do nothing for days.)

I added more and more structure to my day as time progressed and not without days where I (or the piled up dirty dishes) would slip but I make sure to be kind to myself and get back on track.

If you made it this far, hang in there, you will make it and I hope this helps, even if in a very little way.