Ragged Riches

I remember when I got laid off from Jerrick. When I got out of the “meeting” with people from my so-called “tenured” position, my coworker Parag burst into tears. Everyone’s morale, from what I heard later, was shot to shit.

While I was the office punching bag, I was also the unofficial emotional support animal of that office. (My coworker’s Cavalier Spaniel was a close second, but he wasn’t at work as frequently as I was.)

I wasn’t upset. I figured I would find a job, easy peasy.

That was six years ago.

And now, after about six years of job hunting, I finally found a job that actually works pretty well with my needs and skillset. Here’s what I learned from that experience and why it matters.

First off, trying to find a job for six years made me humble.

Nothing made me more humble and more aware of how close everyone is to poverty like the situation I was foisted into when I suddenly lost my job at Jerrick. When I hear people say, “Just get a job,” I no longer nod my head in approval.

It’s hard to nod your head like that after eating a six-year supply of humble pie.

Rather, I realize they’re probably telling that to someone who is desperately trying to get something, anything. And I also realize that, unless they are retired Baby Boomers or Silent Generation members, the person telling me that is likely only two paychecks away from homelessness.

Oh, and I also realize the people telling others to “just get a job” also likely don’t know what it’s like to go for months or years without a job while they do everything in their power to keep their finances afloat. Getting a job is not always that easy.

It took me thousands of applications to get a job. That’s brutal and I’m not alone in that respect. When people say it’s hard, they are not just whistling Dixie. It’s awful out there.

Nothing makes you more humble than having to hit rock bottom, get tons of rejections, and struggle to get back on your feet for six years straight. Trust me when I say it was a deep lesson in humility.

Finding ANY job is hard, but finding a job that’s the right match is even harder.

Whether people realize it or not, getting the right job for your situation is not always easy or possible. The market is terrible, wages are low, and half of the time, the job postings in question are fake.

People also forget that most people cannot get all their problems solved with any job, either. If I had to be financially responsible for my kid, the job I got wouldn’t even cut it. I would quite literally be on the streets with no housing and no food.

Being unemployed for this long (with only a brief stint in sales) was an eye-opening moment for me. Most people don’t realize how close they are to a financial calamity until they’ve actively tried to find another job before they need it.

After experiencing that level of work, I’ll never look down at a person who is struggling to find a job or get money again. If people bitch at you for putting food on the table, I guarantee that says more about them than it does about you.

People don’t really appreciate how much your self-worth can be linked to a job, money, or wealth.

It’s normal to be defined by what you do for a living. It’s also normal to (sadly) be defined by how much you make. It never becomes so viscerally obvious how much of that can be who you are until you no longer have a job or no longer can make ends meet.

It hurts.

And it’s a leading cause of divorce, mental illness, and more. In fact, financial woes have been increasingly linked to suicides and deaths of despair. As someone who lived through that, I get how damaging it is.

Losing a job (and not being able to recoup that money via a business) is akin to losing your own identity, for some of us. It feels like losing your purpose. That feeling of not being worthy or a fully functional person might be the worst part of being jobless.

Unemployment stigma is real.

The worst part isn’t just losing that purpose; it’s the way people treat you after you’re jobless for a long time. If you keep applying, a lot of jobs won’t hire you because you have that “long-term unemployed smell” to you or something.

If you tell people you don’t have a job, they give you this side-eye that makes you feel like you need to justify yourself. If you’re unemployed and not a stay-at-home mom? Oh man, you better believe people will look down on you.

When you’re stuck trying to make your own business work without a day job, the hate people throw at you is palpable. Here’s how the hate tends to show itself.

People didn’t think my time was worth anything, even though I was constantly working to try to launch different businesses.

If I had a dollar for every time people assumed I’d do something for them just because I didn’t have a 9-to-5, I’d be a wealthy person.

“Ask Ossiana,” they say. “She doesn’t have a job, so she can do it.”

This isn’t true. I busted my ass, even when unemployed, because I wanted to launch my blogs and businesses. I would have to remind them that my lack of W-2 work didn’t mean my schedule was free to pander to them.

People don’t take your business as seriously, especially when it’s clearly underfunded.

All the work you see on my blogs? That’s 100 percent me. I write my own posts, I handle my own social media, I edit my own YouTube channels, I record it all myself, I research everything, and yes, I created my own WordPress blog. That is all me. I’m grossly underfunded, though I have a lot to show for myself.

The problem? It still sometimes becomes clear I’m underfunded and people don’t take me seriously as a result. If I had a day job, a lot of the “rough around the edges” aspects would likely be explained away as me being burnt out from my regular work.

Since I was unemployed, people often assumed I was incapable, inept, or lazy. I was none of those three. I was stretched thin!

Socially speaking, being unemployed is a major stigma.

I’m in an open relationship. Even finding a sidepiece as an unemployed person was hard. People just assumed I was a loser or desperate because of my unemployment and bankruptcy.

Bad as it was as a person who presented female, I would have been terrified to try dating as an unemployed man. It would have undoubtedly been far, far worse.

Finally, the unemployment stigma really showed with potential employers.

If you are unemployed for a long time, employers and other professionals assume there’s something wrong with you. It’s a feeling that is absolutely palpable when you have recruiters ask why you’ve been out of work for so long.

Even if you “do the right thing” by showing investment in your own business or your education, there’s still that unspoken judgment that comes with unemployment. The longer you’re unemployed, the harder it is to find a job in your field.

Sadly, employers all tend to prioritize people who have already been selected by others for work. Does this make sense? Somewhat, but it doesn’t actually help most people who just want to hear the words “You’re hired.”

Wilder still, I’ve been rejected for jobs for trying to start up my own business. The employers kept claiming I’d be “too busy” to work for them. So what was I supposed to do to get cash instead? Just sit on a street corner and wait?

LinkedIn sucks for job hunting.

Yeah, it did nothing for me.

The people on there are insanely self-serving, and frankly, I’m over it. If I start another business where I need to hire others, I might use it. Or you know, I might actually go through the network of people who supported me while I crawled out of hell instead—because they deserve that from me.

If you are hoping to connect with your future employer on LinkedIn or Indeed, I wish you luck. So far, I tried those routes and I can say with fair certainty that I would rather light myself on fire than use LinkedIn to find a job again.

I wrote about it on Ragged Riches, if you want to hear my full review of that site.

The need to start your own business is real these days.

I want to point something out: I had no reason to need to start my own business when I was hired at Jerrick. I had a full-time salary and was supposed to be tenured. I should have been getting a raise. Instead, I got laid off.

Had I not already been freelancing, I would have been absolutely, totally fucked and on the streets earlier. It happened so suddenly and it was so insanely uncalled for. I had even asked before if I was going to be laid off and they said, “We will shuffle you around.”

Jobs come and go, but only you can have businesses that will never lay you off. They may not always pay the bills, but they can come in clutch at the 11th hour. In a world where nothing is certain and secure, everyone needs their own side hustle.

If you see a hirer or recruiter who views a side gig or solo business as a red flag, keep moving. Trust me when I say that there’s no benefit in being totally reliant on a company that can fire you in an instant.

What got me a job was not what most people would advise.

In today’s job market, it’s not what you know, but who you know. Networking remains the biggest reason why some folks have no problem getting hired. Most of my friends found their jobs by knowing someone who had a job at a company.

There were several people who put in a good word with recruiters and others in my field, but due to the stigma that came with my past, I don’t think I really had much of a chance. I never heard back from a single recruiter.

Applying to every job on Indeed didn’t help either. Indeed has a lot of automated filters that filter out candidates that don’t have the right keywords or right experience filled out. I don’t think the majority of my applications ever saw a pair of human eyes.

Needless to say, I’m not shocked to see those same ads come up time after time. Indeed, and sites like it seem to be broken. On a similar note, I’ve never gotten a callback from a recruiter either.

What worked for me? Here’s what got me my job and job interviews:

• I went on sketchy bulletin boards and replied to wanted postings.
• I went on local social media (such as NextDoor) and posted what I was looking for in a job.
• I also started to look at “Help Wanted” ads in the area and called those numbers.
• Every time I saw a “NOW HIRING” sign, I would apply there.
• At one point, I also started to cold-call companies and somehow got a couple of bites for work.

A lot of people are sick and tired of trying to impress software and HR reps who don’t seem to want real people. I am one of those people. The vast majority of the time, the biggest issue people have is actually getting their talents in front of the eyes of decision makers.

Your goal as a job seeker in today’s economy is simple: you need to figure out how to get to the person in charge ASAP. Cold calling, networking, and even local outreach groups work well with this. Indeed and recruiters? Not so much.

You can’t give up.

Let’s be honest. If it were ANYTHING but a job hunt, most people would have advised me to quit after year three of bitter failure and rejection. Most of the time, people will drop something if they don’t feel they’re seeing progress.

I was ready to just shut everything down and try to hit the streets. I was that burned out. And that’s when the phone call came. Within an hour of that call, I was getting ready to work at my new W-2 job.

Nothing worth a damn is ever going to come easy. If something really matters to you, you can’t give up on it, no matter how much adversity you face. For me, a job was worth that six-year search.

So if you’re going through that recruitment hell? Keep going. You never know which opportunity ends up yours.