30 Days of Boundaries: Day 12 - The Buffalo Bills of Job Searches

Yesterday, I talked about my job loss back in 2009 and how after 17 weeks of recovering from my heart attack, losing my job during the time of an economic recession is not exactly the best time to be unemployed, so I had to do a job search.

I was in the Windsor, Ontario area, which was a sister city to Detroit, Michigan, which at that particular time was definitely going through some challenges. The auto sector was on its last legs. Houses, and mortgage collapse, and banks, and all of that stuff. It was not the ideal time to be without a job, so I started going on interviews. Now, with my background, accounting, IT, management, healthcare, pretty diverse background, I have a lot of transferable skills.

I was able to use those skills to land a lot of interviews. I probably had 35 to 40 types of interviews and I was looking in the area that I was living as well as closer to London, Ontario. I had a pretty big footprint as far as where I was searching, even as far as the Kitchener Waterloo Region.

For those you that aren't aware of that area, Blackberry was huge in that particular area back in 2009, but they were soon to be running into some challenges, too, that we're all well aware of. How many of you are using a Blackberry device now compared to an Android or an iPhone? iPhones only came out in 2007, so do the math.

I was going on job search, after job search, after job search, and finding interviews, and getting interviews, and getting second interviews, and even third interviews. But one of the problems I was having is I kept coming in second place. The organizations would hire somebody else because they had slightly better experience or there was something else that in particular was a better match for those organizations.

f you recall, back in the 90's the Buffalo Bills went to four straight Super Bowls and lost every one of them. I was feeling like the Buffalo Bills of job interviews, always coming in second. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

I kept going on interviews and I was getting a little frustrated, but I was spending nights and weekends in hotels trying to find work. I was looking anywhere between Waterloo, Ontario and Windsor. I was looking in the Detroit area and there was absolutely nothing there, again because of the economic problems. I'm sure many of you have lost your job before, and I know that looking for a new job, especially when you're not prepared for it, is not a fun adventure. I'm curious as to what did you do to keep yourself motivated, as well as what did you do to keep your spirits up?

Because there's a lot of pressure that we put on ourselves when we don't have a job we tend to assign our self value to the job that we have and we need to quit doing that. We are more valuable than what our job title is. Yes, it's how we make money, it's how we earn our living, but too many of us associate ourselves with what we do instead of who we are. That was definitely an issue that I did as well, a personal boundaries violation, as I like to call it.

Have you had job nightmares? How were you able to overcome not having a job, and finally landing a job, especially if you were out of work for any particular part of time? One of the things that I wish I would have done during my job search is expand it a little bit further and by further I mean Toronto. Toronto is an international city, it's one of the largest cities population-wise in the world, and I ignored it during my job search. I didn't want to live in Toronto. I'll talk more about that in the blog. When I finally did look at Toronto things changed, and changed for the better.

Until then, enjoy your day.

Cheers.