What It Takes to Get a Job

The last time I was on unemployment benefits was 2001. I was laid off in August and didn't go back to work full time until March 2002. I had to put in job cards every week to show I was actively looking for work during that time in order to collect my unemployment check.

Tonight I found the notebook where I kept my job search records. It is an interesting saga of what it takes to actually find a job. Here's where I applied.

1. Pamunkey Library
2. Style Weekly
3. WHAN Radio
4. Virginia Department of Emergency Management. I had worked part-time here from 1997 to 1999, and a couple of months after 9/11, my old part-time job opened again, so I went back for awhile. Even so, the salary and hours were low enough that I could keep applying for and receiving reduced unemployment benefits.
5. Hanover County Sheriff's Office
5. Randolph-Macon College (I was willing to be a receptionist, but no.)
6. Cavalier Telephone
7. Some mysterious "marketing specialist" ad in the paper
8. Department of Conservation and Recreation
9. Henrico County Schools
10. Hanover Department of Social Services
11. Henrico County Leader
11. Christian Children's Fund
12. VCU - the position advertised was director of Alumni Relations. I was an alumni.
I could direct. But no.
13. Richmond Times-Dispatch - The job was taking in the wedding and engagement submissions. I had a degree in journalism. Didn't even get an interview.
14. Hanover County -- anything they had
15. Hanover School Board - anything?
16. VCU Health Systems -- position was public relations practitioner IV
17. Kwick Kopy -- Yes, I will make copies and I will make them quick, but didn't even get an interview.
18. Time-Life Customer Service - I have applied here at least four times in my life and gotten interviews, and even though I have done customer service by telephone for a bank and a mail-order pharmacy, they still refused to believe I could service orders for the complete World War II series.
19. Channel 12 - the position was assistant to the vice president
20. University of Richmond - anything
21. PharMerica
22. St. Joseph's Villa
23. Diamond Springs Water
24. Richmond Coliseum
25. James River Associates
26. Bon Secours Memorial Regional Medical Center -- admin associate in the Surgical Care Center, unit secretary at Meadowbridge Transit Care. I even applied to work in the gift shop, but no
27. Copier Care Company
28. Northside Magazine
29. Richmond Voice - I can do newspaper page layout better than anyone they have ever had in the past 15 years. I know how to size a photo without stretching it into distortion! But no interview.
30. City of Richmond, Office of the City Manager
34. Virginia Department of Fire Programs. I got an interview here, but no. Years later I would work with the guy who got the job.
35. Virginia Department of Health
36. Supply Room Companies
37. VCU Department of Student Affairs
38. March of Dimes - I got an interview here and if I am not mistaken, the person vacating the job had been hired as the new editor of Style Weekly. They had loved him, and his shoes were going to be hard to fill. And not by me. It was a no.
39. Virginia Community Policing Institute
40. Bankruptcy Court
41. Hanover Herald Progress
42. Capital Mac
43. Richmond Metro Visitors Center
44. Virginia Blood Services
45. New Kent County Planning Commission - I remember driving out there and thinking this would be a very long daily commute. I guess the no was a blessing.
46. Tobacco Company -  Got an interview. They had a position that marketed their nightclub events. "Sex and the City" theme nights were big then. Are you a Carrie or a Miranda! But no.
47. County of Henrico
48. Inside Business
49. University News at VCU
50. Girl Scouts of America
51. Salvation Army
52. Valentine Museum
53. Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Administration
54. Glen Allen Cultural Arts Center

One of these places, I applied for the job in November and didn't get an interview. But in January, I got a call out of the blue about another job in the same office. They had kept my application on file. I know they always say that, but you don't really believe it. That was a part-time job, so I worked downtown in the morning and rushed over to VDEM way down Midlothian Turnpike in the afternoon, grabbing a $2.25 hot dog and soda along the way. I paid $10 a day to park in the Coliseum deck just in the mornings, which was crazy, but the only way I could make it work.

In March, I had to interview for my own job when it was upgraded to full-time. I recognized some of the other people who were interviewing from other job interviews or from working with them in previous jobs. I pretty much knew I had a 99 percent lock on getting the job because I was already doing it at the place. I was sitting in the chair. But the other five candidates didn't know that. I felt sorry for them, as I saw them come through, so hopeful. It dawned on me that many, many times, I was just one of the people Human Resources was interviewing as a fake-out, to look like they were actually trying, when all along, everyone already knew who was getting the job.

The journalism/public relations field for a long time was the same crowd of people who just kept rotating around. Several of the people who got the jobs I didn't get during that time ended up working where I am now. We all go 'round and 'round.

About four years later, the job I had originally applied for in November opened again, and I interviewed for that and got it. Again, I was already in the office. I was actually doing that job and my own and had been for months. And yet they interviewed five other people along with me.

So that was a very long trip to my current position.

Since then, there's been hiring freezes and no money in the budget for raises and I've been stuck in 2006 career-wise, except for completely recreating my job to be social media managing since the rest of it went extinct like dinosaurs hit by meteorites. Public relations and marketing in the 2000s was what journalism was in the Woodward and Bernstein years of the 1970s. Everyone and their grandmother playing Farmville on Facebook is now a social media expert.