I was the news editor of smaller of the two sister papers from 2003-2006, when I was pushed out by the IT manager (offsite at the other paper). Life conspired to keep me in town, as my fiancee was wrapping her undergrad. I got laid off the next year because the next place I worked shut down. I was able to quickly find a temporary position out of state via networking, but after signing a six-month lease, that job evaporated in only 10 weeks. Next job ran five months before layoffs were threatened, prompting me to find a position at a small weekly in the town I wanted to retire in but turned out to be nominally editorial but functionally advertising, leading to my first panic attack and resignation.
Owing to a lot of other shit happening, I wasn’t in a position worth even putting on a resume for 14 months. On the other end of that was 19 months at the local paper where I’d landed, cut short because I decided a 50% raise to go into marketing was worth the ethical costs (and would return me to where I’d started in 2003). I only had to endure that for 10 months, when our three-year contract was terminated. I quickly found work at an audiobook publisher, but nine months into that, I walked out from a dressing down from my boss, on the production floor, for doing what I’d been told to do (and not in a malicious-compliance sort of way).
A couple months later, a SWAT team rousted my family from our hotel room Christmas Eve, and to my wife’s surprise, before we got to the ground floor, I’d dialed the batphone at the paper. After being a source on A1 for the Christmas edition, I figured I had nothing to lose by emailing the editor. The old IT guy was gone, and they were looking for a part-time, temporary copyeditor ahead of the desk being shipped off to Texas, so I started the new year working across from the city ed from back in the day.
I did not follow my job at first, as it was a pay cut in a far more expensive city, but after nine months of fruitless searching, I got back in touch and took the job here, which I had three roles at over nearly five years.
So I’m seriously considering removing several of the intervening positions and stretching both stints to paper over both the gaps and the instability itself, as there’s no one to call to verify when I worked there. Being midcareer, it’s hard enough to get past software gatekeepers in the first place, but seven mostly nonconsecutive positions in as many years can’t be helping my score.
The two main wrinkles I can foresee are a wholesale refactor of my LinkedIn could be a red flag, and the most basic of background reports would place me in two other states before remote journalism work was a thing.
I don’t like the idea of lying on my resume, but what I’m doing now isn’t working.
Are there other risks I’m not considering? I’d love some stability going forward, but I’m not going to expect any job to last long enough that this could stymie a promotion.
First off, you’re NEVER unemployed. You’re consulting / free lance writing. With your background that’s 100% believable and no one ever checks on that. Even if they did… did you do ANYTHING related to your skillset to help ANYONE (friends, family)? They’ll probably agree to be a former client a potential employer could talk to. Did you do any volunteer work? Get involved in any non-profits? Get references from folks there.
- I shouldn’t say no one checks. I had ONE potential employer in my entire life check on ONE of my consulting stints. I had 3 real clients happy to say super nice things about me and I got the job.
2nd, if you’re working part time somewhere off and on… you’re working part time there the whole time while also working on your consulting business. That’s why you were part time. If you were promoted, you note the dates of your promotions.
My resume says “Consultant at Coyote, ltd” for an 8 year period. Overlapping with that period is 1 year as IT director at a now defunct startup, 1 year as a project manager at a cybersecurity firm and 1.5 years as Cyberoperations Director at a spaceflight electronics startup. The CEO at the space company tried to get me to sign a no moonlighting clause and I flat out told him no. He was a bit of a dick about it (and whined about “this is standard stuff!”) I held my ground and they didn’t fire me. Fuck that noise.
3rd, Don’t hesitate to clean up your LinkedIn. I HATE LinkedIn. It’s intrusive and invasive, it serves corporations while exposing humans to a hypercompetitive stressfest of bullshit career posts to “like” and “engage with” and it exposes your past dirty laundry (or job history at dumpster fire positions) to potential future employers in a way that feels icky. I fucking hate that company, and wish death upon it.
That being said, you DO need to use it and game the shit out of it. Every hiring manager EVER will check your LinkedIn profile to see if it mostly matches your resume. But they won’t spend time to dig too deep into it unless your REALLY STRONGLY being considered for a senior position. They’ll just check that it exists and you have connections with people from former positions. Which if you’re NOT connected to former co-workers… get on that.
Add a “Freelance Writing / Editing Consultant” (or whatever) position to LinkedIn covering the years from your first to your final unemployment period.
4rth, You’re applying in a field where a gajillion liberal arts / humanities grads are competing over jobs that are being replaced by generative AI at companies that are being looted by vulture capitalists and repurposed for propaganda by right wing billionaires. I’m SO sorry about that. It sucks.
Realistically, it’s time to ask what ELSE your background qualifies you for…
- Lots of small businesses, including high tech ones and consultancies will hire project managers with diverse backgrounds. I just hired an old friend of mine with NO tech company experience to be a project manager to help me wrangle a bunch of programmers working on different consulting gigs. Because I KNOW him and he’s gonna kick ass and take names at that. In the past month of having him aboard, he’s made ME significantly more productive. His back ground: High school teacher turned Whole Foods dept. manager, who spent a bunch of time trying to make a living hand forging swords and knives.
- Lots of successful business folks need personal assistants / executive assistants. It’s often a shitty stressful job for a dickhead you don’t like or respect, but it can also be an awesome job for a sweet decent person if you get lucky. My clients are small businesses. EVERY SINGLE ONE has one of those to help the big boss, and they have, like I said, a diverse set of backgrounds. One of my clients is a medical cannabis manufacturer and the CEO is a super sweet old lady. Her executive assistant is a guy in his 50s who survived cancer and whose background is in patent writing.
- Start ups and small businesses of all kinds need operations directors.
- With your back ground, you could consider roles in PR / publicity.
- You could also consider roles in technical writing.
- Government departments need case managers and supervisors all the time. A BUNCH of my friends with a wide variety of professional backgrounds work for the Colorado dept. of Unemployment, for example. None of them are rich, but they’re not starving either.
- Your profile page claims you were a tech enthusiast before you got burned out (is how I read it). Are you enough of a tech enthusiast to help some boomer middle managers trouble shoot their printer problems and deal with scam popups locking their work computers? If so, an MSP may be willing to take a chance on you. It’s part time and it’s never enough money, but it’s some income while you figure out your next steps.
- Your profile page also says your a van dweller. High five… I did that for 8 years and it was mostly awesome. Apply in any city you’re willing / able to drive that van to.
- Dust off the old Reddit account (or make a new one) and just check all the job subreddits (r/DenverJobs and r/SFBayJobs are the two I’m most familiar with). If you get a call back, tell them you are in the process of moving (also say that on your initial application).
- Get in touch with recruiters. If you have a good looking resume, they will WANT to sell you. Look for recruiters that specialize in the industries you want to work in. Contact recruiters in cities you’re willing to live in and tell them you’re looking to move there.
Finally, your timeline makes me think you’re in your 40s or 50s maybe? These are your PEAK earning years. Don’t waste them.
Want to make a point clear here – never put anything on your resume that you aren’t prepared to answer questions about. That means if you’re lying about freelance (whether the above commenter means to imply you should), then you should be ready to answer questions about your freelance lie.
Same goes for any projects. For CS, if you have a pet project you wrote 12 years ago, but it’s interesting enough to note on a resume, glance over it enough to know what it’s about. You might be surprised by your interviewer installing your app on their phone or something.
I don’t think you should lie about freelancing and 100% agree about “not putting anything you aren’t prepared to answer questions about”
If you’re thinking about it as “lying” you’re doing it wrong. You should think about it as “explaining what I was doing professionally, to learn, grow and strengthen my skill set during these periods of less active employment.” Is glossing over the vast majority of your time that you spent living your life instead of hustling lying by omission? Maybe… but “I wasn’t doing shit professionally because reasons” is not a message you want a potential employer to hear.
Wow … lots of good info here. You’re correct that I’m in my mid-40s, but I’m not applying for any journalism jobs. What’s left of the field isn’t hiring people with more than a few years of experience anyway, and what’s left of my network has moved into fields like PR that I’m not categorically against, but I’m extremely picky about where I’d be willing to do that. My marketing position was the apex of my earnings ($45K in 2012), but the culture was mocking our customers for buying our products when we weren’t actually writing copy.
I’ve done a fair amount of automation coding in previous positions, and I did a full-stack bootcamp a few years ago that did not move the needle in terms of getting an interview. I’ve gone to networking events, all of which featured two types of people:
- not hiring: “You can think in code, so you should have no problem finding a job. My company isn’t hiring right now, but send me your LinkedIn.” (Narrator: They never got back to him.)
- hiring: “Yeah, you need to learn X, Y and Z before anyone will look at you.” (X, Y and Z were different every fucking time.)
Most of my coding has been accuracy focused, from a tool that automated the auditing of hundreds of audiobook tracks to client-communication, productivity tracking and item placement in InDesign. But I’ve come to realize that I’d be miserable writing code on a team, given that everything I’ve done has been an unsanctioned project I’ve brought to the higher-ups after determining obvious deficiencies and having a functioning prototype directors begrudgingly accept solves problems. Generally, that’s when the wheels start turning to get me to quit.
I’ve been looking nationally (remote jobs for now) since getting frustrated by Austin’s employment scene. But in talking with others about the issues I’ve run into, it sounds like it’s the same bullshit no matter where you are: If you don’t have inside connections, there’s no point in applying.
As to LinkedIn, I hate it with the passion of a million burning suns, but it’s a necessary evil. I paid for resume assistance both in 2020 and earlier this year, and I’ve got bullet points with specific department savings that go all the way up to 83%, and it’s still crickets. I’ve had a couple of conversations that weren’t initially work related that ended with them putting in a word for me about not-yet-posted positions, but both ghosted thereafter.
I have about 100 connections from my career and several recommendations from former directors that all touch on my ability to see the big picture, anticipate problems and solve them before they become production issues. I’m not sure if anyone even scrolls down to those, because they don’t seem to be doing me any good.
I did do some consulting here and there, but it’s been a while. I’ve got a couple of former colleagues that would happily vouch for me doing “projects” for them, but I’d of course need to give them a heads-up about the role I’m interviewing for should it ever get to that step. But adding it back in as a line item couldn’t hurt in the meantime.
Ultimately, it’s absurd that looking for work involves wondering how many lies I can get away with. But that’s the game employers are playing, and honesty is not rewarded.
I have no idea what I want to do, just a short list of things I know I don’t want to do. This is what led to the upcoming appointment, as I’ve done lots of online tests that are supposed to give me direction and without fail bin me into journalism, marketing or PR, the last of which would need to be for an organization I genuinely believe in. Having designed and built a 24V solar house system, renewable energy is certainly a field I’d consider, but I’ve not seen any PR jobs posted in that area.
Though my background is in writing, that’s really not an area I want to pursue both because I do not enjoy being assigned a topic and that’s where LLMs are coming in hot. I’m much happier creating and manipulating datasets, the latter of which is 90% of editing (the other 10% being qualitative – determining things like voice and wording choices).
Conversations and research have led me to think QA, prompt engineering (I was a linguistics major after ditching CS) and data science are my best fits, but with no titles in my history to suggest competence, it circles back to already knowing someone, which goes back to networking, and I cannot stomach another fruitless couple of hours where everyone pretends to love working.
Overall, from your feedback and what I’ve received on Reddit, I’m leaning heavily toward blowing up my resume and LinkedIn (definition of insanity and whatnot), essentially making sure to keep positions with recommendations and ditching most everything else between 2006 and 2014 in favour of longer stints at the two shut-down papers. I have no belief that these wholesale changes alone will move the needle (I don’t know what the algorithms are looking for, but every little bit helps).
While this may sound like I’m not implementing many of your suggestions, I’m looking at the resume as a starting point for how I change my approach, and focusing on that may well make some of your other suggestions seem more feasible.
Thank you for putting so much thought and experience into your response; I will be returning to this as things progress, and there’s a lot of useful, actionable info for others who come across it.
Ultimately, it’s absurd that looking for work involves wondering how many lies I can get away with. But that’s the game employers are playing, and honesty is not rewarded.
Don’t think of it as lies. Think of it as “explaining what I was doing professionally, to learn, grow and strengthen my skill set during these periods of less active employment.” Is glossing over the vast majority of your time that you spent living your life instead of hustling lying by omission? Maybe… but “I wasn’t doing shit professionally because reasons” is not a message you want a potential employer to hear.
The other poster who said “never put anything on your resume you aren’t prepared to answer questions about” is 100% right. Definitely think about what you’re going to say, focus on the things you DID do, don’t make up shit you DIDN’T do… resumes are supposed to be quick summaries anyway.
I definitely view it as the only lie being where I was employed when. I’m certainly not adding things I couldn’t talk about in depth, including setbacks and how I overcame them.
That said, I’m going to be shit at a technical interview, should that ever come to pass, as I don’t really have a preferred language. I determine the project first, then look at options and learn or brush up on whatever’s going to be the best fit (or only option) for desired results.
From talking with friends and colleagues my age, I’m scarcely special in terms of the roadblocks I’m hitting. A couple of decades of experience and switching fields seems to be “irrelevantly overexperienced” to ATS.
Wow, quality post here, with tons of tips, care, love and tough love.
Thank you thebardingreen, you are a credit to all of Lemmy.
deleted by creator
Regarding wage stagnation. I do not disagree. That however does not change the basics of managing ones carrier. OP is trying to work in a dying field. Really questionable if that is a good idea. We have family that are writers and they have had similar issues to OP. The way to get paid well is to either be a specialist preffereably in short supply, be management, own your own business, or be in a union. Working in a growing not a dying industry is important too.
I should have been more specific that when I left Gannett, I was done with corporate journalism. I’m not against the field as a whole, but the job insecurity is just mayo on the shit sandwich of selling entertainment as news. The thing is, finding jobs through negative filters really doesn’t narrow things down.
On the plus side, I’ve never had any interest in writing what someone else wants me to write. It’s hard to start off as a columnist and then get news assignments.
I have no great answers. My wife likes to say find the intersection of your skills and passion and the world’s greatest needs. I prefer to also add and for which you can get paid for, preferably at least 2X median income if possible.
Of the writers I know one did freelance for awhile then wrote a book after getting out of news. The other ultimately switch to being a producer of radio content. Think both were difficult. I had another writer friend that did technical writing for a large company. Something in the medical R&D area. Another person I know did creative stuff in video production and gave it up to be an executive assistant.
I did not mean to guilt trip anyone. Nor am I spinning some “personal responsibility” conservative Boomer shit. Everything that you say is absolutely true.
But the reality is that those are peak earnings decades and the fact that the economy is an utterly unjust dumpster fire and 100% of the fault for that lies at the feet of rich conservative old people and idiots who get conned into voting against their own best interests, doesn’t make that not true… And also doesn’t change that being old and broke is gonna suck balls.
That’s just meant to be a motivator. It is for me, I wouldn’t be doing as well as I am (which is not nearly as well as I want to be) without that exact motivator + the fact that I have a family that depends on me.
deleted by creator
No. I am encouraging him to do everything he can to proactively make his life NOT suck later. Those aren’t the same thing, but it sounds like you have an ax to grind. I get it, I have a similar ax but I have to wonder if this ax is really serving you or are you just impotently angry at a world that gives zero fucks?
I don’t think your ax is with me. I empathize with your position, The last thing I want is to guilt anyone. And reality is not your, not my, and not OPs fault. We don’t have to like reality, but we do have to deal with it. Now the reality is that we live in a system that will reward us for maximizing our peak earning years and punish us for not doing so. I want to be clear that I am not a fan of this system. Not even a little bit. But that doesn’t change the system, and sticking your head in the sand and yelling at people that try to pull it out isn’t helpful for anything.
deleted by creator
Your premise is that using reality to encourage people to do the hard things that they need to do is a kind of violence?
I think I’m done with you.
Enjoy your axe. I hope it keeps you warm at night.
deleted by creator
I’d dialed the batphone at the paper. After being a source on A1 for the Christmas edition,
Ok I need some help understanding what this means
I think I have it. OP was staying at a hotel when it was evacuated by SWAT. This evacuation event was notable enough that it wound up on the front page of the paper (A1), so OP wound up being a source for a front-page story. As a result of reconnecting with people at the paper, they decided to try emailing the editor about any job opportunities.
Wow, I had to reread this thrice. Your critical thinking skills are better than mine.
I kinda now wanna see this story, OP, lol!
Sadly, the website is just gone. I kept a hard copy, though!
You get a cookie! 🍪
Sorry! End of the night is not ideal for recognizing inside-baseball wording.
Batphone: The unpublished number that rings in the middle of the newsroom and is used by reporters when breaking news is witnessed. Likely no longer a thing most places since everyone has cellphones now, but that got a reporter and photog to the scene in 10 minutes.
As this was a SWAT situation, it landed on the front page (A1), and because I called it in, I was quoted in the story.
