After over five months of glorious scruff, the time finally came for me to shave my layoff beard. It was truly bittersweet. Each forgetful time that I try to twirl my mustache or brush my chin between my thumb and index fingers is a reminder of how great it was to have a beard. Treasure yours while you can.

The upside is that I’m now employed (which has its perks). I landed a job in corporate strategy by using some of the know-how that I accumulated while researching TheCanned.com. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be working double-time to share more tactics for navigating the job markets. TheCanned.com will continue to be the best site out there for people facing unemployment. And to prevent us from losing our edge, we brought on two new writers this week, Jennifer and Jeff.

If I had to narrow it down, I would say these four things helped me the most throughout my 5 months of unemployment:

1) Staying busy: you know what they say about idle hands…. Helping to build and market TheCanned.com not only kept me busy, but it also gave me a passable answer for the dreaded interview question of “What have you been doing with yourself since you got canned?”

2) Being selective: I took every interview I could get, but I was very selective with what opportunities I pushed on. A good push involves reaching out to your network, and you can only do that so many times.

3) Focusing on opportunities: I kept an updated list of every potential lead that I had. This helped me to consistently feel like I was making progress, and to remember that I had options.

4) Working with headhunters: of the nine or ten interviews that I got, all of them came through networking or headhunters. I’ll post more on working with headhunters later, but for now suffice it to say that the more the better.

More information will be forthcoming. For the time being, I think I’ll go tape over all the mirrors in my apartment so I don’t have to see my clean-shaven face.

Mike Trapanese - February 24, 2009 - 2:03 pm
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