How to Find the Right Link for Your Next Job

Though struggling for over a year to find a job, this 50 year-old sales expert explains that resiliance is often key to land a job. Plus it never hurts to try a new resource.

I work as a sales manager for a retail department store and have five years of experience in the field. I actually came across the opening for this job through a networking contact that I made on LinkedIn. At the time, I'd been hitting Craigslist and CareerJobs and Monster — all without much success. I was also using Facebook and Twitter, having heard there were job opportunities for people who knew how to use those platforms, but I really didn't find any useful leads there.

Before landing my current sales job, I'd been searching for at least eighteen months. I'm an older worker (in my early 50s) and I quickly discovered that many of the companies with employment openings were looking for either someone younger than I was or someone who was willing to take substantial cuts in salary — or, as I suspect, probably someone who was a little bit of both.

One of the first things that I knew I had to do when looking for a job was to dust off my resume and update it. For one thing, many companies accept online resumes, which meant that the old resume I had that was printed on impressive 24-lb. bond stock were useless. I wound up having to make my resume digital — and in the process, I had to make myself more current and contemporary.

When I updated my resume, I went online to find out how to improve my resume without lying. The way I saw it, there wasn't any point in exaggerating my talents or abilities to land the job if I couldn't perform those functions if I worked at the company. However, I did find ways to “spin” my various hobbies and outside activities to give them a more professional sound without fabricating anything.

Once the resume was updated, I posted it everywhere that would conceivably look at it — including sending it as an attachment to companies that I thought might be interested in me. However, after the second company sent me a brusque email telling me not to send attachments unless requested, I decided to forget about that particular approach.

During this process, I definitely began to get depressed about my prospects. It seemed like every time that I turned on the news, there was another economic downturn story coming out, telling me that more and more Americans were looking for work and that the job pool was getting harder and harder to swim in.

Naturally, even though my background is in sales, I was looking for every possible entry level job. After all, my unemployment had run out and I hated having to live off of my savings while I continued to look for employment. I quickly discovered that giving out a resume to convenience stores employees was a total waste of time, as I twice saw my application immediately get thrown into the garbage.

During one particularly depressing period, I heard about LinkedIn. A friend of mine described it as a sort of cross between Facebook and Monster, so I thought that I might as well give it a try. At this point, I was ready for any ray of light at the end of the tunnel — although I was beginning to think that any light I saw would probably be an approaching train.

To my surprise, I found that LinkedIn actually was a business-oriented website. I had been skeptical when I first heard about it, thinking that it was just another forum for people who were out of work to talk about what it's like to be out of work and to try to cheer each other up. I'd been on enough of those sites to know that the only thing that was likely to cheer me up was to get myself back into the sales arena — but I didn't know that was ever going to be possible again.

Shortly after joining LinkedIn, I started getting messages from small business owners who actually needed advice about sales questions. Although I've never been much to give out advice to people, I thought that it probably wouldn't hurt for me to share some of what I've learned in sales through the years.

One thing led to another, and one afternoon, one of my LinkedIn contacts called me and said that his brother-in-law worked for an advertising agency about twenty miles from my house that was looking for a sales professional to help them get the word out about their services. He asked if I was interested and when I told him that I was, he set up an interview for me with his brother-in-law.

When I saw the brother-in-law, I was immediately worried. The guy was in his early 30s, and I thought that my age would be a factor working against me. So, I braced myself for the inevitable letdown and just went ahead with the interview. At some point, the brother-in-law mentioned a British television series called “Blackadder,” which happened to be one of my favorites. We immediately started discussing Blackadder episodes that were our favorites and somewhere between thinking that I had no chance at getting the job and the time that we shook hands at the end of the interview, I realized that I had landed the job.

If I had any advice to give someone looking for a job, I'd have to say that having a current resume is important. Next, I'd say that keeping a positive outlook is vital. If you don't get out of bed and think that today might be the day that you land the job you've been looking for, you'll find it harder and harder to slog ahead. Lastly - and most importantly, I think - you need to try every possible avenue in order to land a job. Don't ever write off any avenue as being useless, since there is a chance that something might come out of it, no matter how unlikely.