Never Thought I'd Be Looking

Before you touch the résumé

If you got laid off two weeks ago after fifteen or twenty years, you're probably being told to update your résumé and get on LinkedIn. Do that. But not first.

Here's what I did in the first week the last time it happened to me, in the order I did it.

Day one: call the people you owe

I got a decent severance, which is the only reason the next part wasn't a crisis. Whatever you got, the first job is making it last.

I called every lender I had that day. The car loan had payment protection, and I got a ninety-day deferral. They tacked the three payments onto the end of the loan, so nothing piled up on me. The mortgage didn't have protection and I couldn't get anything there. But I asked. Call everyone and ask. The worst answer is no.

Day one, still: file everything

The same week, I filed for unemployment and for every state assistance program I qualified for.

Not because I needed them that week. Because they take time to start. My unemployment had a problem and I didn't see a first check for five weeks. If I'd waited until I needed it to file, that would have been five weeks of nothing. File now, while you still have a cushion, so it's flowing by the time the cushion is gone.

I know how that reads to someone who's had a paycheck for twenty years. File anyway. It's what those programs are for.

Day two: cut, then count

I went through every bill. Anything that wasn't necessary got cancelled: streaming, subscriptions, the stuff you forget you pay for. Even with money in the bank, because the question isn't "can I afford this today." It's "when is the next job coming?" A month? A year? You don't know.

Then I did the math. Monthly spend, divided into what I had. That gave me a number: how many months until things get hard.

Write that number down. It's your deadline and your permission slip at the same time. It tells you how hard to push, and it tells you when you can afford to breathe.

What I'd skip

The one thing I did in the first weeks that cost me more than it gave me: sending the résumé out before it was clean.

I was on a clock, so I pushed the first batch out fast. No matter how many times I'd read it, there were spelling mistakes and paragraphs that started in present tense and ended in past. Some of those had been sitting in my older job descriptions for years. I didn't catch them until I finally ran the whole thing through an AI and it flagged every one. I'm sure some of that first batch went straight in the bin over a typo.

Get a second set of eyes on it, human or otherwise, before it goes anywhere. (It's why the résumé builder in Bridani checks spelling and grammar in place; I built the thing I wished I'd had.)

The other big time-waster was applying to the wrong kind of company. That one gets its own post, next.

The days you don't want to look

They're going to hit you. Often. The day you just don't feel like searching. The day you'd rather watch TV or play games for eight hours.

Take those days. You need them. You cannot spend every day applying and getting ghosted and getting rejected without it wearing you down. It's a kick every single time. The polite "we've decided to go a different direction" on the one you thought was a lock. The one where they said an offer was coming and they were just waiting on someone who was out of the country, and then he came back and everything changed.

That's why the number matters. If you know you have six months, you know a gaming day doesn't cost you the house. Take it, and get back to it the next morning.

Why you keep going

Since 2023 my salary has gone up, a lot. Two searches, one of them two years long, one of them ten weeks. I'm in a job I'd call the best I've had. It's out there.

And when you see the one that pulls at you, the posting where you think "that's my job," put everything into that one. Figure out exactly why you want it and hold onto it. They'll feel it in the interview. It's the difference between you and the person for whom this is the fiftieth interview and just another job.

Next: where to aim. Which postings are for you, and which ones will never call back.