Job Search Struggles and Anxiety

Patience is a slow virtue to come upon. At least it appears this way when one desires a job and has only his fruitless efforts to show for it. Having graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), I had the vain conceptual understanding, like many recent college graduates, that a viable career path could easily be paved through an adequate job search and a few weeks of selection sifting. Yet while perhaps this core belief will be vindicated in due time, I am proudly humbled to declare that I have been enlisted into the ranks of the unemployed as member for 7 months to date.

After 79 resumes, a stack of business cards an inch thick of people who can not help me, and several tanks full of wasted gas, it has become relatively clear to me that a prosperous education can only take you as far as the first impression it leaves in a person's mind. Needless to say, it's doubtful that I would be hailing a high salary had such an education been bypassed altogether. Yet at the end of the day, a tuition fee of $50,000 has brought me 5 inches closer to what I had 5 years ago the day I graduated from high school. I'm often taunted by the cliché saying that an "education is the key." While I admit this to be true, I am compelled to add however that the door will necessarily remain shut by the deadbolt of job experience.

As an avid user of Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com, the amount of career opportunities available to recent college graduates appear sparse apart from the minimum 2 years of job experience demanded by hiring companies. Entry level sales positions appear to be the only available career path eligible for those lacking experience in a particular field. Yet there are rays of hope at the end of the tunnel. Having posted resumes on Monster and Careerbuilder, the minions of recruiting agencies have attempted on numerous occasions to come to my aid.

With the recruitment process becoming a heavy burden in terms of time and opportunity costs to small business and large corporations alike, agencies like Ajilon, AppleOne, Wollborg/Michelson, Select Staffing, and etc. have thrived on the inefficiencies of businesses lacking functional human resources departments. Whether it be on the basis of an overbooked HR department or the missing of one altogether, recruitment process outsourcing has come to grow in this temporal society in which people move from job to job more frequently. As a result, such agencies become uneasy friends for anxious job-seekers looking to breathe their first breath of fresh air in the real world.