The Cheap Job Search

If you are constantly telling yourself that you cannot afford this or that, you may be right. However, you may be wrong. If you are wrong about what you can and cannot afford, you may just be cheap, and in a job search, you often just cannot afford to be cheap.

Let's say you graduated from college two years ago and you have been in an unsuccessful job search ever since. You have sent out resume after resume. You've mailed out dozens of cover letters. You have even made many calls and you have received little to no response. You noticed some sites that recommended professional resume editing for a price of about $200.00 and you scoffed.

You can't afford that. If you could afford something like that, you wouldn't need to be looking for a job, and truly you cannot afford it. You only have twenty dollars in your bank account, and your cell phone bill, the phone you will receive calls on about your resume, is past due. You are in a job search, and you need to hold on to every penny that you can.

Two hundred dollars must be a scam anyway you think. Whenever someone asks you to pay for anything, it's a scam and a half. Everyone knows that, right? Therefore, you ignore these types of pricey services and continue to pay thirty-nine cents for stamps, two dollars for boxes of envelopes, and five dollars for the late night calming icecream habit you have developed during your depressing job search. After all, it's easy to find a few extra dollars here and there to pay for those types of things that may eventually get you a job.

However, your unconscious mind is doing something that you do not even know about. For some reason, you do not have your resume on all of the online job boards across the web. You are in a job search, but you still have not gone full speed ahead in marketing yourself. You haven't faxed your resume to everyone you know. You may have done it one time, but you stopped for a reason unknown to you. You just assumed that you had a lack of enthusiasm. Really, you are not satisfied with your resume and that is why you have not broadcasted it all over the place.

You can't afford the resume makeover you tell yourself. You just graduated from college, and you have no savings. You don't even have health insurance. Why should you pay someone to rearrange a few job function phrases for you? It's your job search. You can do things by yourself, right.

While you are considering the expense of two dollars for envelopes versus two hundred dollars for a professionally written resume, you may want to consider the price of 30,000.00 a year for a college education versus the type of job your own hand-written resume might get you. You might also want to put that hefty 30,000 price tag up against the job at Macys that you are working while trying to make ends meet, but still not being able to pay all of your bills on time. That interest is racking up on your credit card bills and student loans while you are struggling to pay the minimums, but two hundred dollars is something you cannot seem to come up with.

The solution for you is to ask yourself whether you are being broke or just cheap. You may just be cheap. If you really put your mind to it and try hard, you can get two hundred dollars from somewhere whether it be from your mom or from your tax return. When you spend that "borrowed" or "last" two hundred dollars, who knows what kind of possibilities might open up. Now you might have the confidence to do a resume blast or post your resume on the hundreds of sites across the web. Who knows how your job search may begin to develop then.

Now your mood might pick up because you can say to yourself, "No one can say that I did not give it all that I had." Before you know it, you may find yourself taking a few more risks in your job search such as looking in the thrift stores for a nice black briefcase. Things like resume makeovers are not purchases. They are what are called investments. Investments don't really have a price tag on them because they have a high chance of earning money for you in return. Try to tell someone with two pennies to rub together that they should apply to Cornell with its near 40,000 a year tuition. They will say, "I can't afford that." They can afford it. College is not a purchase. It's an investment. Therefore, next time you find yourself checking your bank account when you observe that you may need to pay for something, ask yourself if you are just being plain cheap and how you may be hurting yourself in the end.