Just found this blog today (June 3rd). It was with a sense of Deja Vu that I read through it. I went throught the exact same thing (different companies, but seriously, almost EXACTLY the same) from Nov 1st until mid March of this year, on the job hunt.

It's amazing how much things have changed if you haven't been on an IT job hunt in a while. You don't get feedback, callbacks, you get jerked around, put off, time wasted, bad interviews, wrong jobs, mismatched, misplaced...the list goes on. I even had a very large company fly me to a different city to interview (I cast my net much wider than yourself), and still they jerked me around for months.

For the people who comment saying don't use job boards or headhunters, well, welcome to the new world, because you can't NOT use them these days. Yes, 99% of jobs you get in IT is because of someone you know, and I got my current position because people here knew me from other places, but it still went through a headhunter.

I did a lot contact work with a buch of different recruiters, including Tek Systems, who I am mostly impressed with, but these days you get a six month contract, you can't count on it actually going that long. They don't have to keep you for a full six months. Which is what happened to me on Halloween. Sorry your six month contract ends tomorrow, after four months. Ouch. Before the holidays. I'm in a good place now, but that was a hard LOOOOONG four months of job searching. And there's so many IT guys out there doing the same thing.

So thanks to Ron for doing this. I'm surprised you haven't mentioned how a person kills themselves thinking about what they did wrong on an interview, the second guessing, the "I KNEW the answer to that!" moments coming too late, and the depression that comes after so much rejections, even though you know not to take it personally, it still wears you down. And the interview burnout. So many questions, over and over, a blur of people, of technologies. I wish you'd talk about some of that, too.

Thanks.