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Before the Great Recession, it was uncommon to have long stretches of unemployment time on your resume. Nowadays, it is more common to see resumes with some employment gaps. Some gaps last a few months, other gaps can last a year or more. How can you go about filling those gaps? Should you fill them at all? How can your unemployment period help your future career?

Unemployment is usually associated with doom and despair. People imagine that they will lose all their worldly possessions, their houses, their cars, etc. They worry that their bank accounts will empty and their credit cards will max out. Your unemployment period can actually work out differently. It can help you build yourself for the next job.

It’s not that you don’t have a job. Your job is to find a job. Creating a game plan during your unemployment period will make your unemployed days pass by quickly and make you feel better about yourself.

The first thing you should do as an unemployed person is to file for unemployment, if you have not already done so. Next, it is helpful to create a schedule of things you will do each day to find a new position. For example, you can contact your local government official for discounts and support programs. Your local state senators and city council representatives may be hosting local job fairs in your area. Mapping out 3 hours a day to online job searching and 2-3 hours a day to face-to-face networking and job searching can help you create something similar to a normal workday.

Update your LinkedIn.com profile to reflect your change of employment, leaving “Experienced [Your Field] Professional” in the headline. Work to meet new people through your connections online and don’t be afraid to make an introduction. You never know who you might meet online or at a networking event. Joining groups on LinkedIn is also a good way to meet new contacts.

Cutting back your spending and selling items you don’t need can help you during your unemployment because it will take away some of the doom and despair of not having enough to get by. If you have old instruments, gold coins, old books, and even some antique items that are not particularly important to you, consider selling them. Also, old college textbooks can sell for quite a sum of money. Over the course of a few years, I sold back most of my college textbooks on Amazon.com, making over $1400. You never know, selling things online might even help you start a business.

You may wish to start your own business or begin consulting. If your family or friend has a business, you might be able to work for them for a while, even if it’s only part time or for free. These are all great resume-builders.

Next, volunteer. Volunteering is a great way to build up your resume while you are unemployed. If you are an experienced professional, look for pro bono work at an organization you believe in. For example, if you have a degree in Marketing but do not have Marketing experience, you can accept a volunteer position with a non-profit organization. If you work to spread their cause and network for their organization,your experience could transfer over to your next job.

Contacting your local religious organization such as a church, mosque, temple, etc. is also a good way to find help during your unemployment period. Your local religious community might have outreach programs to help those in need of food, clothing, shelter, and jobs. They may also host networking events, career coaching, and counseling.

Probably the most important thing to remember during your unemployment period is that you are not alone. There are millions of unemployed people in the world. Finding support groups online can help you cope with your worries about not having a job. Dailystrength.org, experienceproject.com, and meetup.com are great websites to help you meet people who might also be struggling to find work. Stay strong and stay eager, and you will find a new job soon.

This guest post was courtesy of freeresumebuilder.org

Social media has really changed the way job vacancies are now advertised and is definitely becoming the new medium in which to find jobs online. There are two reasons for this:

1. Job vacancies can be much more targeted

2. Job openings can be announced in real time, and therefore positions can be filled more quickly

The skill though, is knowing HOW to find relevant jobs using social media.

In this graduate job tip, we actually look at how to find jobs using twitter, by using a simple social media tool. This tool is called twitjobsearch.com

Twitjobsearch aggregates all the jobs posted on twitter. Twitjobsearch makes it super-easy for you to find the jobs that directly relate to your field of interest because you have the option to filter jobs using the following fields: “tweeted on”, “job title”, “country”, “tweet frequency”, “salary”, “skill”, and “job type”. This is nothing revolutionary, but when this is done in real time, the job search becomes that much easier. Furthermore, you can upload your CV and also get email alerts for when a relevant job posting comes through.

Most importantly twitjobsearch allows you to leverage social media engagement across multiple platforms:

As you can see from the screenshot above, beneath each job is a set of tabs. Some are rudimentary, but others are cool and current:

 1. Allows you to retweet the job, and get twitter exposure in this field

 2. Gives you the option to get the recruiter to Skype call you

 3. The “I can do that’ tab. Click this and first box that comes up offers the option to either make this public or private. I would advise going with private just to avoid spamming. Then it takes you to a page to which logs you in trough twitter. (So get a twitter up and running if you do not have one). You then have the option to put in a contact phone number, LinkedIn personal URL, and also a URL for an online CV you may have. Also make sure that your twitter profile is up do date, as this is what recruiters may at first.

This is basically cutting out the whole ‘email CV and cover letter process’, through a complete online CV viewing process, which I have spoken about in previous posts. The main advantage to doing this is once again, TIME SAVING. Once you have set this, you can just click this tab, and you’re done! Simple as that. They will have the all the information they need.

4. This means you can save the job to view it later

Have you ever used this tool before? What are your thoughts?

One person who decided to take a stand, and disengage with the whole corporate ‘thing’ is Marianne Cantwell. Marianne up until 2010 had a few jobs in the Media and consulting space before deciding to break the shackles of the corporate world, and go it alone. She simply had had enough of working for somebody else, and felt the effort she was putting in could be better spent on her own venture. What initially started out as a path to create some sort of business, soon transpired into a community driven blog and consulting service known as Free Range Humans.  Since starting out, Free Range Humans steadily attracted a loyal following, and as a result Marianne now gets to travel the world and promote her concept lifestyle.

I recently got to catchup with Marianne for a chat to find out more about Free Range Humans, and what graduate job tips she had for those who perhaps are looking for an alternative to finding a graduate job. This is truly an unconventional look at the graduate job search.

In this video interview you will find out about:

• Free Range Humans
• How Marianne made the move and started working for herself
• How to take an idea to the market
• How to build a loyal following online
• Her book

Here it is:

Marianne’s Links:

http://www.free-range-humans.com/

@FreeRangeHumans