Not long ago, my friend, Raymond, was living through a personal crisis. I bumped into him recently. The last time I met him, he was with a well-known local company bringing in impressive sales. He is still in the sales line but now with a different company.
So what was Raymond’s crisis? According to him, he was without a job for seven months. He had chosen to leave his previous company for some greener pastures but unfortunate for him, the new company that he had initially agreed to join suddenly underwent a change of management. With that, he was laid off after nine days.
“It was a very trying period,” he told me. At first, he could not come to terms with being jobless. He had mouths to feed and bills to pay and his emergency fund – assuming he kept to his previous lifestyle – was good enough to last three months.
The sudden shock of becoming jobless hit Raymond very hard initially. It was a wild coaster-roller ride of emotions through anxiety to anger to denial to sadness. But he had a very supportive family.
“Above all,” Raymond related, “my wife and son gave me a lot of emotional support. We changed our lifestyle to suit the changing time. We sat down to calculate our finances, agreed on the expenses that were essential and those that were not and then adjusted ourselves. The first thing I did was to lock up my credit cards. I couldn’t afford to live on borrowed money.”
“After that, there was hardly time to continue grieving over the job loss. I keep to a busy routine and stayed active or otherwise I would’ve sunk deeper and rotted,” he continued. It was time to look for his next job but first, he had to ask himself some real questions, such as:
- Was he prepared to relocate and uplift his family?
- Was he prepared to accept a lower salary in his next job?
- Was he willing to change careers?
- Was he open to running his own business or doing some freelance work?
Raymond decided that running his own business was not a viable option yet as he needed some stability in his life. But if necessary, he was prepared to relocate and work for a little less than what he earned in his last job.
So he settled into a routine. He tried to fix interview appointments for the mornings and then used his afternoons to scour the Internet and newspapers for job advertisements, prepare his resumes and cover letters and send them out.
“The Internet was my best resource, better than what most newspapers could offer. What I liked best was that I could get a list of the latest jobs without flicking from page to page and looking at advertisements that did not concern me,” he said, adding: “And sending them my application by email was easy.”
But there were challenges, Raymond acknowledged. He had to re-write his resume to keep it current. “It had been a few years since I last took a good look at it and so much had been achieved in the past three years. I almost had to rebuild the document from scratch,” he said.
Raymond also shared an advice with me: “A cover letter is very important and I learnt the hard way that the cover letter should, as much as possible, be addressed to a person. Find out the person’s name and position. One company commented on my lack of courtesy when I addressed them as ‘To whom it may concern’ but luckily, I was still called to the interview.”
In fact, he was called to several interviews. He had the experience and the qualifications for the jobs but always, there was someone else who outperformed him at the interviews. But he managed to strike lucky two months ago.
“Job hunting is hard work. Even for people with the experience, it can be quite a challenge. I was forced to grab at the first opportunity that came my way. Now, I am beginning to look elsewhere again. That’s how working life is. You don’t leave for the next job until you can secure it. I was unlucky but I managed to survive,” he concluded.
About the writer
Quah Seng-Sun is the Content Manager at JobStreet.com, a leading on-line recruitment company in the Asia-Pacific region.