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#JobSearch : Lost Your Job?  First Steps First. Great Ideas to Get Through the Unemployment Period.

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Nothing is more worrisome than being out of work and dreading the bills coming in the mail that you can’t afford to pay.  Scarier yet is not having funds for job shopping (gas money or interview clothing).  Here are some ideas to help you get through the unemployment period and make time without a job work to your advantage.

Your full-time job while unemployed is applying online for jobs. Once you lose your job, you should immediately research your state’s unemployment benefits options.  In some states, a two-week waiting period must be reached before application; in other states, you may be eligible on the first day of unemployment. You must file for the benefits. In most states, you may do so online via an Internet-based application. The state will require forms completed pertaining to the circumstances leading to the job loss. Be truthful. If you were fired, state the honest reason. Not all states deny unemployment benefits for being fired unless the termination was for extreme reasons (e.g., embezzlement, equipment destruction, theft, avoidable OSHA-related safety incidents, or vandalism).

 

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We here at FSC want to thank each of corporate partners in the opportunity in serving & moving each of their transitioning employee(s) rapidly toward employment !

 

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Regardless of the waiting period, the employment commission in each state is one of the best places to search for a new job.  Many companies post job openings to comply with the EEOC mandate for the 3-5-day public posting of positions, and they can do so for free. The state also supplies job listings within an easy commute to your city and surrounding areas.

Apply directly to public job openings – some companies will allow resume uploads into their Automatic Tracking Systems (ATS), even if there are currently no job openings (this is called ‘resume farming’  by recruiters). Alternatively, apply online by uploading your resume to proprietary resume databases, e.g., Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Indeed, or USAJobs.gov (resume loading for the job seeker).

You don’t want a blank space on your resume where you were unemployed if you can avoid it. Recruiters are not fond of seeing extended periods of unemployment (the UNNA syndrome – Unemployed Need Not Apply). However, after the 2009 housing crash and the COVID pandemic, they are more used to seeing these phenomena of long periods of unemployment. The good news is that there are two rich opportunities to add content to your resume, allow you to meet new people, and network for new employment opportunities.

First, offer your time or assistance to non-profit organizations or obtain training to enrich your job skills. Many small non-profit organizations (NPSs) are desperate for grant writers, volunteers, mentors, and specialists. There is a shortage in these skills for many small NPOs who can’t afford to pay salaries for these job skills – your local paper may run lists of NPOs needing assistance.

Second, if you can’t do the education or training and can’t offer assistance as a volunteer, the next best activity is to go into business for yourself as a consultant. Shop the market for companies needing your skill set as a 1099 consultant (a local city business license may be less than $50).  You never know when your skills sets may turn into a more realistic method to replace that lost salary.  Recruiters will note you didn’t let the dust settle after a job loss and view you as a more viable candidate.

While you are unemployed, get the training (or education) you didn’t have time to take while you were working, and add industry or trade certifications to the achievements on your resume. Take classes to advance your education beyond the courses or degree you last achieved.  There may be inexpensive adult education classes in your city that provide insight into a fresh new topic for you. Computer skills are one of the hottest training needs in any industry. If you gain insight into how software or a process works, it will move you ahead of the job’s competition.

As you achieve the training, education, or volunteer work, add it to your resume as the most recent ‘employment’ activity.  The longer you are unemployed, the more obvious the non-productive activity and the less viable a candidate you become to recruiters.  Filling that gap with volunteer activities, education or training, and/or part-time consulting work demonstrates you are still a viable and highly qualified candidate.

FSC Career Blog Author:  Dawn Boyer, Ph.D., is an associate of First Sun Consulting, and the owner of D. Boyer Consulting – providing resume writing, editing, and publishing consulting services. Reach her at: Dawn.Boyer@DBoyerConsulting.com or http://dboyerconsulting.com.  

Bio: Dawn D. Boyer, Ph.D., manages and operates a consulting firm in Norfolk, Richmond, Colonial Beach (Dahlgren), and Gloucester, VA.  Her background is 24+ years in the Human Resources field, of which 12+ years are within the Federal & Defense Contracting industry.  She is the author of 940+ books on business, human resources research, career search practice, women’s studies, genealogy lineages, and adult coloring books.  Her books are listed on Amazon.com under her author’s page for Dawn D. Boyer, Ph.D.

 

FSC Career Blog | September 19, 2022

 

Your #Career : Do #Employers Care About College Grades? … The Short Answer: Yes. Companies see GPAs as a Threshold to Manage their #Recruitment.

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Employers Want to see a GPA of 3.0 or Higher, & Many Put the Floor at 3.5.  Checked in with Dan Black, the Director of Recruiting for the Americas at professional services giant Ernst & Young, which Hires thousands of new U.S. grads every year. He says, Absolutely, he expects to see a GPA on a résumé. “Grades Certainly Do Matter when We’re Recruiting Students,” he says. “It’s really one of the only indications we have of a student’s technical ability or competence to do the job.”

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At the end of my son’s freshman year at UCLA, his grades are not what I would have hoped. I won’t print his average here but suffice to say it’s not a 4.0. He did get an A in a history course but his performance in two required science classes was sub-par. This summer he’s making good money teaching tennis at a local camp where he’s worked before, a job where academic performance doesn’t matter. But what about next summer or the summer after that, when he may try to land a paying internship at a consulting firm or ad agency? More important, what effect will his GPA have on his job prospects post-graduation?

I talked to career services directors at four schools—New York University, Brandeis, Rochester Institute of Technology and Purdue—and they all agree: Employers do care about grades. Students shouldn’t think that just because they’ve mounted the admissions hurdle, they can slack off in class. To be sure, many small employers won’t expect to see a GPA on a résumé, but most large companies will. According to a 2013 survey of more than 200 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 67% of companies said they screened candidates by their GPA. NACE, A Bethlehem, PA non¬profit, links college placement offices with employers. Its members tend to be big companies with an average of 7,500 people on the payroll, including Kellogg, Procter & Gamble and Bank of America.

 

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I also checked in with Dan Black, the director of recruiting for the Americas at professional services giant Ernst & Young, which hires thousands of new U.S. grads every year. He says, absolutely, he expects to see a GPA on a résumé. “Grades certainly do matter when we’re recruiting students,” he says. “It’s really one of the only indications we have of a student’s technical ability or competence to do the job.”

The career services directors I spoke to all say that Employers Want to see a GPA of 3.0 or Higher, & Many Put the Floor at 3.5. But Black says there is no hard cut¬off. Even a student with a 2.1 could get a job at Ernst & Young if he had a good reason for his lagging marks, like being called up for military service in the middle of a semester. Or a student with a 3.2 could beat out an applicant with a 3.9 if the student with the lower grades were working 30 hours a week to put himself through school and at the same time serving as class treasurer. “I’m always looking for people who can juggle multiple responsibilities,” says Black. One thing Black says that startles me: he has gotten to know the schools where he recruits, like U. Penn., so well that he can evaluate what it means for a student to get a B in a class with an especially tough professor.

According to Trudy Steinfeld, head of career services at NYU, the companies that care the most about grades are investment banks, professional service firms like Ernst & Young and pharmaceutical companies. Even if a student is not applying in one of those areas, if he has a GPA over 3.0, she recommends he include the average on his résumé. Do include honors like cum laude and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, she adds.

Manny Contomanolis, head of career services at Rochester Institute of Technology, agrees. He also says it’s important to be honest because at least a third of the time, employers request a copy of a student’s transcript. Black of Ernst & Young agrees. “Nobody gets hired at EY from campus without an official transcript.”

At Purdue, career offices head Tim Luzader says many large manufacturing corporations like General Motors, Ford, John Deere and Caterpillar, recruit on campus and they all want to see grades.” They see GPA as a threshold to manage their recruitment,” he says.

What should you do if your grades are lousy? There are a few possibilities. At Purdue, students have the advantage of some 30 career fairs a year, where they can stand face to face with company recruiters and sell themselves. “They can tell their story, whether they were working while going to school or whether they had a disastrous freshman year but have done better lately,” says Luzader. Steinfeld agrees with Ernst & Young’s Dan Black that students can compensate for bad grades with a compelling story that they can put on their résumés, like describing an internship where they did an analysis of workflow issues and improved productivity by 20%. Another fix, suggested by RIT’s Contomanolis: If the GPA in your major is better than your overall grades, only list that, or list both numbers.

What about small employers or startups? Do they care about GPA? Not as much. But if your grades are good, go ahead and list your average on your transcript. Dean Iacovetti, director of recruiting at Apprenda, a software company outside Albany, NY, says he doesn’t expect to see GPAs on résumés, but if he does, and it’s a strong one, he takes notice. “If there’s an individual graduating with a 3.5 from Cornell,” he says, “that’s someone I’d like to see.”

 

Forbes.com | July 8, 2015 | Susan Adams