Today I applied for a position with a company that really excites me. This close-knit small company is not just a business that does good, it is a philanthropic cause that established a business thus allowing it to continue serving the greater good. Basically, I’d get paid to raise money for a cause. What’s better than that? Here’s the catch, I haven’t worked professionally in over a year. I have had a couple of short term jobs, but nothing of note and this lapse in the resume seems to be a huge stumbling block. I’m not a HR person so I cannot speak to what this might mean to prospective employers, but I haven’t forgotten how to work, so how do you prove this in an interview?
I know I’m qualified, capable and dedicated, but I guess when you have multiple candidates applying for the same position, you may not want to take a chance on the girl with her backside stuck to the couch. I’d like to put an addendum on my resume saying that I would have preferred to remain employed without a gap, but a major relocation and sudden recession/job crisis pretty much made that impossible. How can you reassure someone of something intangible? It’s like any relationship I guess, at some point there is always going to be a leap of faith involved.
You can meet date and marry the perfect man only to discover he’s the perfect man for a random sampling of sweet young things. Likewise, an HR manager might interview 20 candidates before settling on Ms. Perfect, only to discover that she’s impossible to get along with or sloppy in her work habits. Life is about risk and while we all attempt to minimize the potential for negative risk, we can never completely erase it. I’ve written a similar blog to this one in the past, but at that time I was generally frustrating over my fruitless job search while this time I have the perfect opportunity in sight and even an interview to reinforce that I have a shot at it. What I don’t have, is a guarantee that the other candidates are more lame than me, despite my firm belief that they must be.
Quick personal story on an unrelated topic, but same theme just because I’m in a talkative mood. When I lived in NYC, I moved into a four-bedroom apartment with my friend Carl. We set about interviewing a slew of potential roommates for the other two bedrooms. At the end, we each agreed on separate candidates and one that we both liked. Unfortunately, we opted to each pick the one we liked rather than the one we both liked, thus forcing a compromise on the other. In the end, we lost a great roomie and gained a princess who had never had roommates or lived on her own before and a young crackhead (breaking my absolutely NO drugs policy) who’s only claim to accomplishing anything in her life was doing coke with a famous actor that you all know. Just goes to show, you never know until you do.
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