Out of Work Bum

First things first. I am unemployed but I am not a bum (though my wife may not share that opinion.) I have worked in high tech for over 25 years doing everything from engineering to running a $100M business unit. In the last five years I have been laid off three times. Two were start-up companies that that didn’t fare so well. The last was from a privately held company that had one bad quarter and got rid of about 25% of their employees. I started this blog for a couple of reasons. First, over the last several layoffs I discovered that in the internet age job hunting has become a different game. Sure, many of us get a job because we know someone who knows someone – networking. But with the advent of sites like monster and careerbuilder it is clearly a volume business. It is fairly inexpensive for employers and headhunters( more on headhunters later) to post a job and get hundreds of responses. The second is that it is all about timing. The only way you will get a call is if you happen to match what someone is looking for right now. You really didn’t think that hiring managers and HR departments read the hundreds of resumes they get, did you?

If you have comments about this site (not the posts, just the site) or you want to talk to the Bum you can email us at info@outofworkbum.com.