A recent Trailing Spouse blog post by the Trailing Geek caught my eye for a number of reasons;
1) it wasn’t just the ever so common re-statement of the problems we all face as Trailing Spouses
2) it offered solutions to problems
3) it was posted by a Trailing Spouse from academia, who is not an expatriate
4) it specifically addresses job search issues
The Trailing Geek has moved with her partner to “Smallville” after leaving “Metropolis” so her partner can pursue her Ph.D. at “Pleasant U.”
She embraced the Trailing Spouse situation and immediately did 3 things:
1. A sprightly happy dance.
2. Informed her employer at that time, Company X.
3. Started looking for jobs in Smallville.
The point here is – immediately! So many Trailing Spouses leave their action for job search until after they arrive. Job searching takes time, it requires relationship building so it makes sense to start as soon as you know about your impending move…even if you don’t know where you are going. In the case of the Trailing Geek he knew where he was going and he knew what he needed to do.
More specifically, notifying your current employer gets them on-board allowing you to work openly on your job search as well as maintaining credibility – never burn a bridge! The Trailing Geek immediately set herself to work on updating her resume’, created a personal website and portfolio, updated her LinkedIn profile, contacted references and started brushing up on technical and non-technical interview questions.
Trailing Geek listed the places she used for job searching in his order of helpfulness:
- Pleasant U’s Employment Page – A lesson here for any potential employer – a helpful employment page on your site can help attract talented people.
- Craigslist – Not as helpful in some regions as others but still an active and helpful resource.
- Dice.com – I haven’t heard of Dice.com before but apparently it returned more job listing suitable for the Trailing Geek than other sites.
- Indeed.com & SimplyHired.com – Job listing aggregators…see my comments later.
- Government Sites - some are better than others in my experience
- Word of Mouth – Networking always helps – Often direct contacts don’t lead to opportunities, but introductions once or twice removed from your original contact sometimes do. Network constantly.
- Monster.com – I tend to agree with the Trailing Geek’s comments on Monster.com that their day has passed. In fact I question the wisdom of any of these ‘post and hope’ resources and the noisiness of job aggregators as useful job search tools.
As of writing this I don’t know the outcome of the job search only that it took about 4 months to locate 4 potential jobs and involved actively pursuing the employers, periods of silence and periods of phone and on-site interviews.
I look forward to hearing about the “The Decision” in part three of the blog series. Or will she be like so many others that neglect the Trailing Spouses issues until they are next faced with a move?
Read about the Trailing Geek’s job hunt starting at: http://www.trailinggeek.com/a-trailing-spouses-job-hunt-part-one
