Your job campaign is gong extra innings when you’ve been out of work over six months. That’s when interviewers start making statements like, “hmmm you’ve been out of work for awhile.” It’s like some of the HR types and hiring managers haven’t a clue that it can take a long time to find a job these days, and that it’s no fault of yours that job offers haven’t been made.That’s why you need to have a cover story to cover those extra innings in the job marketplace. Depending on your situation, here are some cover stories to tell hiring managers:
If you’ve been working hard on a job campaign and have some prospects, tell it to your interviewer. But don’t reveal who those prospects are-especially to headhunters. They’re likely to send some of their clients to compete for the same job.Or, let’s suppose that after being canned you just didn’t feel like looking. You can explain that after working for so many years, you decided to take time off to reassess your skills and now you have a clear idea as to where you’re headed.You can also take interim work. Then your cover story can be that you’ve been working part time while looking for a fulltime job. The nice part about part time work, other than being able to pay rent, is that you can list companies where you worked as a temp and tell what you did for them in your resume’s bullet points.And when you don’t want to show part time work on the top of a resume, take a temp job outside of your industry-a job that’s not on your regular career path. Then you can keep that job under the radar by listing it towards the end of your resume under the heading RELEVANT EXPERIENCE.
When your job campaign goes extra innings, it helps to remember two things:There are ALWAYS jobs out there waiting for you. All you have to do is to find just one of them.And you’ll eventually find that pot-of-gold at the end of many interviewing rainbows. Getting job offers is always the result of having lots of interviews.So consider your job search as a full time job in itself. This means you’re working for You, Inc., and you must show up for work each day. You need to spend least four hours daily working on your job search.