The Time Flies By

Hello everyone, this is Mike. Long time no blog. Well I always don't know what to say since Adria always seems to cover every aspect of our life when she blogs, but there are a few things to get you all up to speed on. Number one being that Jake is just the most adorable little kid in the world (biased of course). He spends much of his time looking cute while playing with his toys or trying to get mommy's attention. He loves trying to eat our noses, and has successfully managed to french a nostril or two. When he is not playing he is rolling around, he is becoming more mobile everyday and will soon have carpet-burned knees when he finally figures out how to move around on all four. Number two happened on March 25th. I got a call from my little sister, Katie. Back when I was on my mission I met a member family that had a friend who wanted to listen to the missionary lessons. As my missionary companion and I taught the family's friend, I got to know the family's daughter, Katie. She was just about to turn eight and expressed a desire to have a brother or sister; her parents could not have another child. Well my parents only had boys so I never had a sister and so I asked Katie's parents if we could pseudo-adopt each other; they said of course. So now Katie's my sister and I am her brother. Well I haven't spoken to her for a few years (my fault), other than birthday and Christmas cards; so this year I called on her 16th birthday (March 23rd) to sing happy birthday. She was not home (I got to talk to her mom and get all the dirt on what she had been up to); she was out on her first date, but she called me back on Sunday and we had a good chat. The job hunt is going. I have learned an immense amount about the hiring process these days which has led me to change my strategy on finding a position. You might think getting your resume out to as many recruiters, businesses, and job postings is the way to go when you're not networking; but that just isn't the case. I learned that in the world of hundreds or even thousands of emailed resumes to one position, that companies have gone to reducing your nicely presented resume to a few keywords in a database of keyword searches and if your resume does not have the necessary keywords the computer pushes you to the proverbial trash bin. Not only do you have to worry about the cold, calculating server chomping up your resume but you have to watch out how many times and how many ways your submit your resume to a given position or company. Some companies will let you send numerous resumes to the same or different position from yourself or a recruiter without punishment; however, the majority will only allow you to submit once to any given position by either yourself or a recruiter. If you double submit you run the risk of being rejected all together and even in some cases you are only allowed to submit your resume to one position to a company during a given period of time. So with that knowledge in hand I have visited with several St. Louis recruiting firms (of which I have also learned a lot on how the recruiting industry works, but that is another story) and have selected two of them to represent me so I can have an in with the companies the recruiters have contacts at while I continue to locate work through my own means. Like Adria said I have been to a couple of job fairs, but they turned out to only have entry level positions in non-technical fields; the one company that did advertised they were hiring for IT positions asked me to visit their website to see what IT positions were available and to submit my resume through their online resume crunching machine. While I was at one of the job fairs I did run across a Career Seeker Support Group provided by the state; I attended it on Tuesday and it seems like a potential help so we will see what happens there. Well beside looking for work and spending time with Adria and Jake, I have been studying for my fifth out of seven tests to complete my MCSE certification; my test is on the 16th of April. Also, I have most recently been assisting Gary, Adria's dad, with reconstructing a basement bathroom that was damaged during a water leak. I have been learning quite a bit about framing and installing drywall; which will help if we move into a house that has an unfinished basement. Well that's it for me.

Michael