This is a guest post by Bobby Governs, a long-time reader of the MDM Blog. He emailed me last week about his story in the industry, and I asked if he would write something that could be shared with all of the readers here. Please feel free to leave comments for him!
I lost my job after 15 years in enterprise data management when it was revealed that the company I worked for was a scam, wrapped in a hoax, inside a conspiracy. My wife, always sensitive to fluctuation in her material comfort, immediately launched an escape plan that involved scooping up a steeply discounted condominium and leaving me with a single-family house hopelessly under water. One has to whistle at her cunning.
For one year I barely avoided the state unemployment line by working a part-time help desk gig at the local community college. I have to say that this interlude turned out to be beneficial. It put distance between me and the scam accusations that dogged my previous employer, and now I’m the Master Data Manager for a Fortune 500 company.
Eventually, after many late nights of web browsing, I stumbled on a website called Jobfox. I rather enjoyed the questions I was asked, and I found the user interface to be interesting, if somewhat idiosyncratic. The resume critique, which was free, proved to be insightful, for instance, it never occurred to me that younger recruiters might not be familiar with Lotus 1-2-3.
I was also relieved by the lack of scam recruiters on the Jobfox site. In the past I struggled to determine when a job advertisement was too fantastic to be true. But on Jobfox I never see these obnoxious little job scams. I also don’t have to wade through for-profit college advertisements at every mouse click.
The really interesting thing to me, and the reason I can heartily recommend Jobfox to anyone, is that my new employer reached out to me directly. It seems they were impressed by my SAP experience, something I’d failed to adequately highlight on my resume. If it weren’t for my Jobfox About Me page, which displays this skill set, I would probably have gone unnoticed and ignored.
Perhaps that’s the most frustrating aspect of the online job-search experience: the acute sense that you’re not getting anywhere in the process and that your information is being mysteriously archived. With Jobfox, I know I have a reason to maintain my own information since I use the About Me page as a supplement to my LinkedIn profile.