Wait, I thought I was jobless…

Lately it feels as though I am running down the information super highway with one of those walking billboard over my shoulders that says ‘Looking for Work’ on one side and ‘Please Hire Me’ on the other as I yell out my credentials to anyone who will listen and staple my resume to every open wall available.

Looking for a job has turned into my full time job and I do believe it is harder than my last job was. Here I am on a Saturday afternoon continuing the hunt. No rest for the weary.

It’s kind of ironic that I worked for a place that developed HR software in that I know all to well how this process of major companies sifting through tons of applicants works now, and it scares me. However, I am apparently not scared enough as I still refuse to pay for job search services. I have been approached so many times with offers to ‘gain more access to who’s looking at your resume’, ‘pay us to get introduced to the top hiring companies’, or ‘let us write your resume/cover letter for you’ since I have started my employment search that I have to truly wonder, especially right now in our current economic climate, how these people make money.

While I realize that those with jobs do indeed perform job searches, I’m willing to take a wild guess and estimate they make up only about 10% – 20% of those currently looking for work these days. This means that the other 80% of us who are looking for work are actually out of work and therefore, at least for me, our funds are finite. This makes me feel that people have found yet another way to capitalize upon the desperate, playing on our fears of not being able to find suitable work quickly enough or at all.

I imagine I could be very far off the mark here, so if you have a story where you paid for a service such as these and it was worth it to you tell me about it!