How to shake yourself from the daze of a long job search and start getting conclusive results.

Although most of these tips are useful for any job seeker, all of them are intended for people who’ve been job searching for much longer than they expected, possibly even a year or more.

My own long job search story

In December 2001, I started looking for a career job in Israel for the first time, having taken a few months to relax after resigning from my managerial position at Amazon.com in France.

In July 2002, 8 months later, I didn’t have much to show for my job hunting efforts and with my savings dwindling, I was starting to feel a little desperate and more alone than ever on my job search. However, I made one major change to my job search strategy and within a few weeks, I entered the recruitment process that resulted in my starting a new job on October 1st of that year.

That major change I made is #25 at the bottom of this list of tips for others like myself who know too well the frustration of a prolonged job search.

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Thinking of doing a startup or going out on your own? Get inspired.

I’ve tried and failed twice, but they were both terrific learning experiences.

How to Enter

* Simple – at the bottom of this article, leave a comment about startups.

Some suggestions of what to comment on are:

* Tell a crazy story from a startup you were in, or just heard
* Which recent startup (or founder of) impressed/depressed you?
* What’s your favorite job-related startup?
* Tell us of who you’d like to offer the book as a gift and why (you don’t need to mention their name)
* And/or- impress me with constructive feedback about JobMob and how I can make the site better for you.

Don’t be shy…

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Use your laptop to pay for travel, while you travel.

You might just discover a new career while you’re at it.

Background

In a recent posting to the Digital Eve Israel Yahoo Group, a group member asked the following question:

“Any leads on how to find a job that can be done on my laptop, here and there, so that I can still pay my bills while traveling?”

This reminded me of the time when I was still a programmer at Amazon.com back in 2000.

Living in Paris but working daily over the Internet with people in Seattle, I wanted to visit my family in Montreal without taking a lot of vacation time either. Luckily, Amazon’s computer systems allowed people to connect from outside the office and that made it easier to convince my boss to let me go.

In the end, I only took off 2 days for traveling purposes and otherwise worked full days from my parents’ house, basically paying for my trip and expenses. A side benefit to Amazon was that having me in a middle time zone (6 hours behind Paris but 3 ahead of Seattle) made some projects easier to finish on time.

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Have I ever told you that I get job offers every year?

Wouldn’t you love to have companies bring you job offers instead of having to go searching for them?

You can get the same results with your own blog.

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The best of the worst, you might say.

Thanks to failblog.org and Flickr for these.

If this gallery makes you laugh – and it should! – please cheer up your friends by sharing it with them on Twitter and/or Facebook. Thanks!

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