the pain of job hunting

Since i have been forced into early (temporary i hope) retirement by the oil price fiasco i have been spending a lot of time job-hunting on the internet.
A lot of the time is actually wasted due to some companies crappy websites, today alone i had 3 failures due to,
1. being asked to pick a category from a drop down box that had no categories.....
2.being asked to pick my school leaving date from a drop down box that only went as far back as 1975, i left school in 72.......
3. and last but not least the captcha, for those of you that don't know the captcha is a method some websites use to prove you are not a robot (why a robot would be applying for a job i don't know) the captcha has squiggly letters and numbers sometimes the same colour as the background and lines through it to make it practically unreadable, to prove you are not a robot you have to copy this into another box, after 5 attempts at this i felt like smashing my laptop into a 1000 pieces so i gave up.
What annoys me is that companies actually pay people to create these interminable websites, sometimes i think it is maybe some kind of test.
As i am not applying for a job as a computer programmer does anyone know of a recruitment agency where you can simply send a cv ???

 

There's more to this, applied for one today and of course have to register with them and have a password.....
First password not acceptable as cannot have 2 consecutive characters the same.
Second password not acceptable as must be at least 8 characters long.....
Third password not acceptable as must have letters and at least 1 number............
WHY don't they state all the password requirements at the beginning ?
Just as well i don't have a job or i would not have time for this......

 

Hi Charlie, i am not from the US i have just never figured out how to change the flag below my photo.
I am living in Dumaguete and used to be involved in the oil & gas industry but now i am looking for any type of engineering work, marine etc...
I would appreciate if you could PM me any contacts you think may help me.

 

I have been on linkedin for about 6 months (because someone I respect invited me) and while I have found it useful for tracking someone down, facebook would probably do about as well.

 

I have been on linkedin for years and find it quite useful but because my cv is on there with contact details over the last year or so i have had an increasing amount of vultures e-mail or even call me offering to improve my cv for $150 or inviting me to invest money in some can't fail scheme.

 

The whole idea of LinkedIn is connections. That's FB also but FB for most people is worth about as much as their traffic is to FB (fractions of centavos).

Aside: I think the secret of FB is to use it strictly for business. Outside of that it's a 100% waste of time and even worse, a problem for privacy, security, wasted time, etc. Everyone who doesn't have an focused use case for Facebook for making money should kill their accounts. I'm still working on following my own advice on this one.

If you don't have connections already, you are dead in the water. If you have to resort to applications via their crap websites, you are dead in the water. As you suspected, you're probably wasting your time with those applications. You probably should be directly contacting people who can give you a boots on the ground assessment of the gig environment and leads on snagging one for yourself.

That's how I have operated as a hired gun for the entire time I have been doing this.

Where's your Rolodex? LinkedIn is at least something if you don't have anything else. Google for articles on how to research a company through LinkedIn to find out who you should be contacting.

In my experience, LinkedIn isn't the most optimal. The people I need to contact are relatively easy to find due to the nature of the work. I always go through more productive channels. LinkedIn has never done anything for me. But your people might be different.

Different groups tend to generate chatter through different channels. Some groups are highly active in one channel and other groups are non-existent there. Some groups may not even have a presence in internet based channels. Another example, I have received tons of work through Twitter, but I wouldn't even bother with Facebook. Again, it's just the nature of the communities. Do people talk to each other? If yes, then where?

I might be talking out of my @ss on this one, but if you must send applications, then you're probably better off going through job sites such as www.indeed.com, Monster or similar. At least if you see activity there then you can be decently sure there is someone going through the effort to post this stuff. Anything on a website could just go to a black box somewhere. Do the pages even get updated?

 

The Dude said, "I have operated as a hired gun the entire time". No need to worry about finding a job after June 30. El Presidente will recruit you.