The Joys of Job-Hunting

I haven't yet decided exactly when I will start my next job hunt. For one thing, I won't know for a couple of months yet if my husband and I will be moving. He is waiting to hear back from a couple of law schools around the country, and that might dictate where we go. Until I have that information, needless to say, my job hunt is more theoretical than actual, though I have been trying to build up some connections in the prospective cities.

For now, I've been planning and strategizing how I will approach my job hunt. For starters, I will make sure I join my local HR Association right away, and attend every damn event they have, just to start building some contacts. I will have business cards made up with a link to my about.me, along with my contact information, to make me easily findable on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. (These things take a little doing when you have a common last name, like I do.) Then I will hand out those little suckers until you could practically paper a room with them all, try to make some friends, and start doing some informational interviews, etc. Obviously, finding a job is important, and I hate to be out of work, but it's also just as important to find somewhere I will be a good cultural fit. For me, that means a variety of things. Right now, I'm young, and just starting out on my career- that means I want room to grow and develop my skills. I'm a doer; I thrive on being busy. I get bored very easily. This means I am not much interested in taking an entry-level HR job where I will spend 40 hours a week making up schedules.

You might wonder how that makes me different than any other Gen Y C-Suite wannabe, and I hope that the difference is that, while I don't have any position that had "HR" anywhere in the title, I do have experience developing policies and procedure. My current organization does not have an HR department, and it employs a lot of people. Like, 1500 or more. (I don't actually know, exactly, and would have to ask the accountants to run a report for me in order to know.) I have created and proposed a five year plan for managing retention, increasing quality of hire, and increasing sales. So, despite not having anything with a human resources title, I actually do have experience. To go from being able to do all those things to scheduling, well, you can see why I'm not that interested. This makes networking even more of a must for me; while I have a good resume, it's also the one that gets tossed on the pile of rejects for a job calling for 5 years of direct HR experience- at least when a computer is doing the parsing.

The question is whether to even bother with online applications. It's easier to just sit and browse indeed.com and send off applications- but the results suck. I've never been afraid to work for what I wanted, and it's already gotten me far. Now I just need to network hard, and land my dream job!