The Job Hunt, part IIa: Employee job hunt

Employee job hunts are different from contractor job hunts.  Prospective employees have a far better chance of actually realizing the single paragraph description of what they will do than contractors.  Most employers vastly prefer to have employees in critical development and coordination roles, since there are few restrictions on how the employees are to be managed.  They can be told in detail what to do, when to get it done and how to do it.  The employer does not have to think or prepare as much. W-2 contractors are usually wanna-be employees, and so follow the same rules as employees.

Once a person seeking an employee role is done updating the resume and uploading it to the various job boards, then the optimum path is to create job alerts on all the boards and harvest the results via e-mail.  I also recommend at least weekly manual searches of each job board with various search strings to possibly catch jobs missed.  Apply to every job you might barely be able to do.  Don't worry - let the hiring managers do the filtering at this stage.

Next, go to this list of the top companies in Austin (if you live elsewhere, find the website of your local Chamber of Commerce - there should be a similar list).  Start from the top of the list, and for each company (some are categories like "Federal Government" - where you'll have to dig into the details of which agencies have local offices) find the "job opportunities" part of their website.  Check the opportunities listed, apply to all you can.  Note that government jobs typically have an application that must be filled out first, so you may want to list these for later since each takes more time and is paid less.

This will get complicated, and so you should think about how to keep a spreadsheet to keep track of what you are doing.  The spreadsheet helps you remember what you already did, assists with periodic checks of various sites (how long ago did I check this particular employer?), and, importantly, can help you avoid double submissions to some jobs (they just throw out your resume when that happens, mostly happens with W2 contract-to-hire jobs).

The emphasis in the beginning is to get the word out about your availability to as many prospective employers as possible.  A fraction of them may well decide you don't fit the current opportunity but might fit an upcoming one.  Employers with a costly application process should be done last, since these will take more time.

Several caveats:

1. If they require pre-employment drug testing, they had better be contracting with government requiring high security levels.  Otherwise, this is a pretty intrusive thing to require and means they are likely crazy micro-managers.  Only good for straight-arrow employees who need lots of guidance.  Expect routine pressure bordering on abuse.
2. If they require any kind of psychological or character testing, simply and politely refuse and do not contact again.  NB: there is no such testing that has scientific, repeatable results.  I once had a prospective employer try to have me take an online test that was literally taken straight out of Scientology can sessions.  I had read the questions previously and recognized them.  I sent them a blistering (and quite unprofessional) reply as to what they could do with their job, and never considered the company seriously again.  Don't do that!  Every one of them remembers what I said, and none of them work for that company anymore.  Declining an opportunity is everyone's right, no one thinks twice about it.  Offending someone is not good - that person will remember it forever.
3. If a company ever lies to you about anything important, get out immediately. This happened to me - I asked about gambling at one company, was told firmly by the hiring manager that they didn't do it.  Three days later on the job, I get an e-mail from someone else in the company, including the statement, "now that we are playing for real money...".  I confronted the hiring manager about that the same day, and he went on the attack, as though I had done something wrong. I quit that day. Turns out the owners and managers were slimy casino types with slippery morals.  They cheated me out of pay, too. Again, avoid offending - just leave.
4. If you ever get blamed for something you could not have been responsible for, you have bad management and need to leave as soon as possible.  This has happened to me, too.  I had to suffer 7 weeks of unemployment, and should have been more sensitive to the small red flags I noticed.  Even though I was sure about it a week before the ax fell, that was not enough time for a graceful recovery.
5. "Too good to be true".  My first job out of college was with a well-known semiconductor company as a process engineer.  I was expecting about 35K at the time, got 38.6K instead. That should have been a huge red flag! I found out why after I got there - commodity semiconductor manufacturing is a total nightmare, a terrible place for a beginner.  The extra 3600 per year was no compensation for destruction of my engineering career - I screwed up royally.

For these reasons and more, I recommend continuing your job hunt for at least 3 months after accepting and starting a new job.  Depending on what you find after getting there, you may want to extend that time up to a year.  If you are still employed after a year, you can relax, until the company gets itself in trouble and has to do a RIF.

NB: your only superpower as an employee is multiple options for employment at any given time.  If you cannot walk out the door and start a new job the next day, you are a wage slave and will be treated as such most of the time.  I suspect that means loyalty is a null concept (and it has been for at least 40 years).

The last step in a job hunt, after the previous steps are exhausted, is to continually search for cool, small companies in your area, check out their websites, and apply for jobs that look good.  This is relatively expensive per opportunity, but some of the best jobs (not the best paying) are found that way.

It may be true now that employees must never stop looking for a job.  I know that is true for contractors.  If so, bad employers should be rewarded with difficult job placements.  I suspect this is already happening, but that no one advertises it.