Hello my fellow residents of the unemployment line! Happy Saturday! I'm back with a little update on my unemployed life. First things first, I quit smoking, so no more posts about how to find cheap cigarettes, I know you will all be disappointed with that but it has been five days, and I feel great! What that means is the ten dollars I get to cut the neighbors grass or the thirty bucks I get for moving my friends furniture out of the house gets saved up for better things like a trip to interview in another state.
Now as far as the title goes, learning new things, well what have I learned since I last posted? I learned the value of the cover letter. You see in all of my years looking for work I had to figure out on my own how to write a resume and how to apply for jobs. No one ever told me what was good, what works, and what doesn't. Through my adventures into networking, I learned that a good cover letter can make you or break you when the HR department receives your application. When they are getting hundreds upon hundreds of resumes, a cover letter serves as a snapshot. It is a short blurb that tells them why they should bother looking at your resume.
I am still learning as I go, so right now I have just a few general cover letters, two tailored to the job fields I really want to get back into, either security or telecommunications, and one general letter that can fit the odd jobs I have been applying to. I used a form template from monster to write mine, and as I learn more, I will write a personalized letter for each application, but something is better than nothing!
Well that is all from my corner of the Unemployment office for now, but I would love to hear your feedback. Tell me and the other folks what works and does not work for you in your day to day adventures in the job hunt, I look forward to hearing from each one of my readers, so leave a comment, shoot me an email, or find me on twitter!