A Heartening Day

It turned out to be a good day.

I got adequate sleep and a nice bath and shower, grabbed a High Baggins (egg salad) sandwich, and then met with three different recruiters from three companies. The one I was nervous about, with a recruiter I hadn't met before, went especially well.

Come to think of it, my usual placement service also had me meet with someone new. I liked him, but the vibe wasn't quite as positive. He told me about rumored further job cuts at the company that laid me off this spring (not a big surprise), and that they're seeing displaced CFOs and controllers coming through and taking lesser jobs, potentially causing extra competition for me. Still, he was impressed with my preexisting test scores (in Excel, General Ledger, etc.), and said that I'd gotten good feedback from my employers, which mans I was probably right in thinking I accidentally overheard the Interesting Manufacturer say something nice about me over the phone on Tuesday. The economy is a mess and long-term jobs are a little hard to get right now, but he did make one good suggestion about my resume, and I in turn firmly insisted in his crossing out a lowball minimum salary requirement his colleague briefly talked me into in a moment of weakness. It may slow things down a bit, but I'm not taking a $2 an hour pay cut, to less than I made at First Magnus.

My first appointment with the new recruiter was right across the street from the established one. When I was done with both, I drove a couple lights north and dropped in on the third recruiter. She complained that the other agencies tend to snap me up and get me placed before she has a chance to find me anything good; this has happened to her twice now, and is something I needed to hear today. He also compared me favorably with the job candidates represented by the stack of resumes on her desk. "There's only one of you," she said.

None of them had anything right off the bat to send me out on, but I didn't expect instant results. I repeatedly heard something about their needing "a couple of days" to track something down. That's fine. Meanwhile, they've done a lot to restore my battered ego and self-confidence with respect to career matters.

The only other thing I've got for you tonight is a few LOLdogs I made tonight for TwitPic, Twitter's new photo feed. Click on the photos below to get the larger, uncropped versions:





Karen