I’m in tech; senior level. But I’ve been looking for work for over 3 years. I’ve been getting advice/tips/tricks from other people, but nothing has worked so far. These are things I’ve tried:
- Blindly applying for a job through the job form
- Working with a recruiter to get me a position.
- Asking to chat with someone on a team with an open position.
- Asking to chat with someone on a team with NO positions.
- Working to establish myself as an expert on social media.
- Asking friends if their company is hiring.
- “Slow networking” (not asking for a job directly, but trying VERY hard to be patient and get to know someone first)
- Fast networking…taking the direct “hey, you hiring?” approach.
- Lynchpin networking (connecting people w/ other people)
- Giving talks at conferences
- Guerrilla tech support (providing my 2 cents on a post even if no one was asking for it).
- open source contributions
- Temp agencies
- state jobs
- looking for “hiring” tags on social media.
- connecting with high-profile people and asking if they need help.
- developing a complete MVP that would help someone (yet I couldn’t quite market effectively).
- Leveraging previous employers to see if they have anything new.
- Offering “low hanging fruit” gigs on social media.
- Putting my resume on job boards.
- Getting a role well below my pay grade and working my way up (if I try this I get automatically disqualified for being too overqualified).
- Providing free consultation to businesses.
- Hosting a podcast interview with someone from a company.
- Writing a guest post for an article (I’ve kind of done this, I think).
Edit:
- I’ve also had my resume, LinkedIn profile, and other social media, looked over by professionals and nonprofessionals alike. I’ve even gotten coaching. I’ve probably gotten more coaching than interviews at this point.
Another edit:
- The only think that’s worked lately (as terrible as it sounds) is groveling and telling people the severity of my situation. And that’s just gotten me very very small dead-end projects in someone’s back pocket. I’m definitely trying to leverage these as best I can.
Any other strategies people have found that works? How did you get your job? I’m running out of ideas.
That must be the problem. I am VERY nonlinear in my problem solving. If you let me go about my task without question you’ll see me come up with a solution (and at least ten ways to improve it), but if you look at me doing it you’ll wonder what the heck I’m doing.
Not sure how that can be trained out. Or faked. Or explained. Any thoughts?
And, yeah, I’m not sure what compensation would help. In college when I was diagnosed with ADHD (during like my last year) and got additional time on tests, but still struggled to pass them.
I think the compensation would just need to be a crazy messy situation–like a problem the company has been working on for a long time and can’t find the answer to, or an open source bug in the wild. Maybe my ADHD brain just get bored in the sterile interview environment. Anyone else have any take?
It’s all about how you word it. For instance I’d call this out of the box problem solving or lateral thinking. ADHD can often give you hyperfocus on whatever you’re interested in which I would describe as passionate and creative engagement with projects.
I’m in the opposite end from the tech industry (people industry) so I could be wrong here. But I do have ADHD and have learnt a thing or two about how to frame certain traits.