Six weeks ago, my position got eliminated, and since then I have been job hunting – I have to admit, half-heartedly at times. Recently a friend of mine who is a manager at the Tennessee Department of Labor said, “Hey Pauly, shoot me a resume when you get a chance. I’ll get it in the hands of my specialist and we’ll see if we can find you something.”
I never thought about going through the Tennessee Department of Labor to look for a job, but my friend knows what he’s talking about, so I emailed him a resume.
Two days later, a specialist from the department contacted me and introduced himself. He asked me to create a profile on jobs4tn.gov because that was where employers would contact me. I did, although it took me a little while, because for some reason I had the “tn” and “jobs” part of the website address transposed in my head. The specialist also asked me to specify the minimum salary I was looking for, so he could weed out any positions that did not meet my requirements. He was real friendly and told me he looked forward to working with me.
I replied back that I was looking for a minimum of $_____, although I might be willing to come down off that number a bit if there were unusual perks like the ability to work remotely part of the time. “Gotcha!” he replied.
A couple of days passed by, and he emailed to ask if I’d ever worked with Azure. I told him I had not, although I knew it was a cloud computing platform and I had worked with Amazon’s AWS before. “Argh,” I thought. “Looks like he only had one job I might be qualified for, and now I have to tell him I don’t have the skill set for even that one.”
Then about a half hour later, I had another email come in. “Notice of Job Referral(s) Made.” Maybe he referred me for that one job, I thought, and told them I have cloud experience, not just Azure.
I logged into jobs4tn.gov and found the Message Center – which took me a minute to find. They offer a lot of services! They can help you with resume writing, a career plan, all kinds of stuff. I was very impressed.
I clicked the Message Center link and found that my resume had been referred to TEN companies! The positions for which those companies were looking to fill were good positions too. In addition, my specialist when looking over my resume picked up on the fact that I had experience in marketing in addition to IT, and referred my resume to several hiring managers looking for skills that cross over between the two fields.
I have to admit, when I’ve been looking before, I never thought of going to the Tennessee Department of Labor. I thought, that’s where people with GEDs go to find a job bagging groceries or paving streets. I was wrong! Well, I’m sure those kinds of jobs are there, but there are jobs for people like me with a Master’s and 10+ years of experience too. I got more leads from working with them than I have the entire 6 weeks I have been looking. If you ever find yourself hunting for a job, don’t hesitate to go to jobs4tn.gov and fill out a profile and upload a resume. They really look out for you there and are serious about wanting to help Tennesseans find work.
I can’t resist a side note before I go, an idea I had as I was typing about “unusual perks” above. There needs to be a job hunting website where employers post photos of the workspace in which the person hired will be working. To me, and I know to many others, it matters a lot. Show me a photo of a cubicle with walls at least 6 feet high on all sides (glass panes and other transparent materials don’t count toward the height) and that’s a plus. Show me a photo of a private office and that’s a plus-plus. Tell me my office is my home, a coffee shop or wherever I choose and that’s a plus-plus-plus.
Show me something that looks like the recent GEICO commercial where the meerkats are all popping their heads up in their cubicles – I’ll still apply, because that’s how most offices are these days, but I’ll be a little less enthusiastic.
I know some Start Co. people read this blog – if any of you entrepreneurs want to take up this job hunting site idea and run with it, feel free.
Anyway, just wanted to pass this info along. Back tomorrow with more news.