[nylug-talk] getting a job in nyc

[Ajai Khattri]

To whoever was asking about finding work, this is my tale of woe and ultimately success:

After being out of work for about 6 months I got my current job in March.
As you can imagine, 6 months without work was very tough. I consider myself very lucky.

Basically, after September the job market just collapsed. I hit all the
job sites (dice, monster, guru, sologig, freeagent, careerbuilder, etc), newspaper classifieds, and any agencies I could find. Normally, I would get calls the same week within days but this time nada. Very worrying.

The problem is that there are too many people going for too few jobs.

I read somewhere that the Internet is probably the *worst* place to find a job. Referrals from friends, family and colleagues ranked higher. Even cold calling had better chances. After two months I got a few calls from agencies but they cancelled various interviews several times. Then after 3 months of no calls I switched to directly targetting companies. In my case, I knew I wanted to work in Unix systems admin. so I did some online searches and compiled a list of ISPs, hosting and various technology companies in NYC (you can get addresses, phone numbers and other useful info quite easily - 'whois' is your friend ;-) I ended up going door-to-door. Since I had very little money I had to go on foot, so an important part of compiling my lists was to find companies close together geographically so I could plan my route as efficiently as possible. Its funny now when I think about how much meticolous planning I had to do ;-)

Going door-to-door has the advantage that you get to see for yourself what the environment is like. Do they seem busy? Are they quiet? Are offices / cubicles empty? (Obviously not a good sign!) Also it gives you a chance to sometimes meet and talk to the recruitment person face-to-face. Makes you stand out from the crowd a bit. I would make sure I was nicely dressed and presentable with plenty of crisp freshly-printed resumes. Another advantage is that most companies have to pay 15-20% of your salary to a recruitment agency when they find someone - in the economic climate at the time, most companies would jump at the chance to avoid this if possible.

Ironically, after a few months I got an interview with a large Japanese firm. The recruitment agency that got me the interview told me they had over 200 resumes and in the end they selected 4 potentials (incl. me). By the second interview, they had whittled it down to two guys with me as the preferred candidate. But then my door-to-door techniques kicked in - I got a call from an ISP which was one of the first I had visited and liked several weeks before. They had an admin leaving and would I be interested? So I ended up going to the second interview and having a phone interview with the ISP the same day. Eventually interviewed me and so I had two job offers. I decided to go for the ISP - it offered more potential sys. admin. experience (the fact that they used a lot of open-source tools was a major decision factor too ;-)

Those large Japanese companies tend to be very conservative, slow and every major decision has to be approved by head office in Japan. Even if I had taken the job there was no guarantee I actually would keep it. The pay was low. Also I figured promotion prospects would be slim and very slow - most of the important positions were populated with Japanese personnel only. Im not being anti-Japanese but these were my observations. Maybe other Japanese companies are different.


I guess the basic conclusions are that you have to try all of these techniques just to be noticed. You have to maximize your chances as much as possible. I treated finding a job as a full-time job in itself even working 7 days a week for two months.


Surviving on one meal a day and walking everywhere was also a good way of losing weight ;-)

-- 
Aj.
Systems Admin / Developer



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