Job Hunting Chronicles

Happy Wednesday 🤎 I hope everyone who celebrates it takes some time off this #Thanksgiving to relax and do something just for you. If you have a full-time job, I hope you get the long weekend off from work, and if you're looking for work, I hope you take the weekend off from the job search, you deserve a break. And to those who have to work (retail, restaurants, first responders, airport workers, truckers, etc.), thank you! This is my view as I finish billing a cat sitting job. I really do #LoveWhereILive. #freelancer #FreelanceWork #FreelanceLife #WorkFromHome #RemoteWork #CatSitting #CatSitter #JobHuntingChronicles 

Happy Wednesday LinkedIn 🤎 I woke up this morning to a text from a potential client saying she thought my price was too high and would continue her search for someone else to help her. She gave an example of pricing she had recently paid to someone else (as a justification) and then added, "of course, if my assessment is wrong, I would reconsider with more information". I told her I understood and wished her luck in finding the right person. Freelancers, do you try to win over a potential client if the hang up/hesitation is about price? For me, it's a case by case basis, and this one was telling me that lowering my price initially to get a client wasn't going to be in my best interest in the long run. I appreciate her position and the fact that she didn't ghost me, but not enough to discount my services. I'm also not a fan of having to justify my prices. Maybe I could convince her of my worth initially, but this weirdness would probably always be between us a...

#MerryMonday LinkedIn 🤎 Freelancers, let's talk about all the unpaid work that we do. I'm not talking about you estimating a job taking 3 hours and quoting a fee for that, then the job actually taking 6 hours. That sometimes happens because of things you can't control (or don't know about up front). No, I'm talking about the work we do when trying to land a job. I don't think non-freelancers really understand how much time we spend on correspondence and then, if we get to it, writing proposals, all in the hopes of getting the job. Last week, I had to tell a potential client that I didn't think I could help her after all. We had spent 3 weeks going back and forth on emails (I think 15 in all!), and yet I was no clearer on what she was looking for with email #14 than I was with email #1. I have written about this potential client before, the red flags that I was trying to excuse, because I do think this woman needs legitimate help, and her age (mid-80s)...

Happy Wednesday 🤎 There's a debate going on about salary transparency and not surprisingly, candidates are for it and recruiters/hiring managers/companies are usually against it. Recruiters and hiring managers like to say things like "if a candidate asks about salary up front, I know that's all they care about". Like wanting to make sure a job can pay your bills is somehow wrong. It's Economics 101. Look, we all work to pay bills. It would be nice if recruiters and hiring managers could just normalize accepting that instead of trying to spin why salary shouldn't be a candidate's primary concern with things like great benefits and culture. If the salary isn't there, not much else about the job matters. So recruiters/hiring managers/companies, do everyone a favor and disclose the salary up front. Candidates shouldn't be disqualified because they want to know if the job will pay their bills, and you can avoid them having to ask the question by just...

Happy Friday and Happy Halloween 🎃 This week has been long. A potential client reached out to me last week about an on-going freelance job. She's in her 80's, doesn't have a cell phone, and her landline doesn't have voicemail or even an answering machine, so email is her preferred communication mode. She's been unable to really articulate what kind of help she's looking for (she initially reached out to me about bookkeeping) so I've been trying to set up an in-person meeting with her. She's been quick to reply to all emails (within a few hours) until I tried to pin down a day and time to meet, then it took her 2 days to reply (which started with "just finding this" - no excuse, no apology), and she didn't give any days/times she was open (well, that's not true, she said she was available "today" - the day she sent the email 🙄), so I replied with a specific day and time I could meet and asked if that worked for her, and if ...

This morning I had a recruiter (on the other side of the country) email me about a relatively local (to me) position, after seeing my resume on a job portal. It's not in a city that I'd consider commuting to, so I thanked him for reaching out but stated that the commute wasn't doable for me. I then asked him where he found my resume because to my knowledge, my resume wasn't available to the public. Not surprisingly, I haven't heard back from him. I get that ghosting is the new norm, but as someone you reached out to (and who hasn't applied to a job on any job portals in well over a year and a half), don't you think I deserve to know where my resume was found? It's unnerving to me that my resume (or some previous version of it) is floating around in cyber space. Recruiters, Hiring Managers, and other web detectives, if a candidate asks where you found their resume, PLEASE tell them. I personally don't want to think that companies who use job portals t...

As a freelancer, I get to set my rates, and while non-freelancers have said to me, "I'd LOVE to dictate what my boss pays me!", it's not that simple. Yes, I get to decide what I'm going to charge for a job, but it has to be reasonable. It has to be in line with what the market will bear. What it deems acceptable. What someone is WILLING to pay. I can't decide to charge $2,000 for a bank rec because I think knowing your cash balance is key to running your business successfully. I have to be reasonable about what it's actually worth. About what someone's willing to pay for it. But here's the thing: so do people looking to hire.  Recently, I had an inquiry for some services on another social media platform. I quickly replied with a preliminary quote and answered all the questions the potential client asked in her message. I received a reply back thanking me for my time but saying she couldn't afford me. Because I wanted to understand w...