Whatever It Takes

When I go for a job interview, I try and anticipate what they’ll ask. Then I not only think about the answers, but rehearse if I can, usually in the car. With speaker phones, who’s to know you’re talking to yourself? Read more »

As a newlywed, one of the first things I remember tackling was budgeting. Not sure where to start, I voiced that to our good friend Rhonda.

She and her husband had been married two years by then and she showed me the system their parents had taught them: a ledger book and envelopes. In the book you write your list of monthly expenses, she said. You label the envelopes — electric, phone, rent, etc. Each time you get paid, you put money in the envelopes so that by the end of the month, you have enough for the bills. Read more »

Note: A version of this appeared in the Detroit Free Press in July 2009.

There’s a man driving around town with cardboard taped to his car doors advertising his job availability and skills — the “Will Work for Food” guy on the street corner gone mobile.

I didn’t resort to putting handmade signs on my car. But in a few months of actively looking for a job, I tried just about everything else. Read more »

A few weeks ago, I got to sit in on a how-to seminar for job seekers put on by Todd Palmer. He owns a Troy-based staffing company, Diversified Industrial Staffing, and saw a niche for coaching people who are struggling to find work. Read more »

Nearly every job I have applied for requires proficiency in PowerPoint and Excel. I never had to use either, beyond updating spread sheets my former boss used to put together.

Still, when I filled out job applications, I would say that I knew how to do these things. A friend said she could give me a crash course. Meanwhile, I’d bought the software and had begun teaching myself on my home computer.

But in this unemployment world of being proactive and doing whatever it takes to make yourself marketable, I knew it would be best to take  a class. The community college offered some, but they weren’t for another month or two, and they cost money.

Then an out-of-work friend told me about a learning lab where you can learn it free through the state. I called and made an appointment. Read more »

Until a few weeks ago, the 43-year-old Michigan father of two was unemployed. When he lost his job seven months ago, he also learned that his mother had breast cancer.

It was a roller coaster of a winter, looking for work at the same time countless others are, too, then worrying about his mom.

But a few weeks ago, Torrey started a new job as operations manager at a roofing and siding company. Read more »

For years, Janet did the hiring. 

As a human resources director, she handled screening candidates for jobs, conducted interviews, gave people the good news when they were hired, and delivered the not so good news when they weren’t. Then she was laid off. Read more »

“Whatever it takes.“

Just three little words, they came to me in a department store.

I was talking to a saleswoman I’d come to know because she recognized me from a weekly column I’d been writing for years in the local daily newspaper, where I was also the features editor. She knew I had left my job at the paper a year before to start a restaurant, and wondered how it was going. Read more »

This is the first of what I hope will be many posts tying in with a new column I am about to introduce titled, “Whatever It Takes.”

Unemployed and in the job market for the first time in 17 years, I realized that I could draw on my skills as a journalist to write about what it’s like to be looking for work in these not so great economic times. Combining my own experiences with input from experts, employers and readers, I’m hoping that this becomes a sort of mutual support system.

I’ll be posting a new column weekly, blogging about things that come up along the way and hoping for reader interaction. There is comfort in knowing that we’re not in this alone — and we’re not. Together, maybe we can help each other. Look for the first column on June 15.