Several years ago, I found myself in the long line of Tulsans unemployed and down on their luck. For job seekers not directly graduated from college or high school, the technological age has become, in some instances, the bane of our existence.

Only a few years ago, I can remember creating a one-page resume and hand delivering copies to different offices that I knew were hiring. Today, at first glance, one might think that the internet is a super convenient way to find a job and that it’s much easier than the “good ol’ days”.

Today’s application process is as prickly as a cactus. The days of perfecting your resume are long gone. The era of online applying has created a tidal wave of applications that has reduced human resource departments to tears.

Some might think that having hundreds of applicants for a few open positions is a good thing. I would venture to say that it’s not because the time it takes to weed through all of the applications, narrow the search, schedule interviews, follow up with call backs, then verify that their information is accurate is much more time consuming than the previous way of applying.

After 18 months of ramming my head into the proverbial wall, I started thinking more analytical about the way in which I applied for jobs. Questions popped into my brain like :

How do I find a decent job?

Is my working career over?

Am I destined to menial jobs for minimal pay?

What am I doing wrong?

It took awhile, but the light bulb finally went off. Instead of not getting a response or receiving a quick rejection e-mail, why not take some of the stress away and give temp agencies a try? Finding work was never this difficult, but as Tulsa has risen in population, so have the prospective job applicants.

Since I didn’t know which temp agency to try, I decided to visit a big job fair at Tulsa Community College. This ended up being the single most time effective thing I could have done. Several staffing agencies had booths set up and talked to prospective applicants about some of their clients and the types of jobs that they currently had a need to fill.

After visiting with six different companies, I narrowed my search down to two companies and decided to take the time to complete all of their testing requirements and paperwork. In the blink of an eye, I went from almost two years of unemployment to steady work.

The downside to this was that most of my job assignments were not at the same company. I did do a little bit of bouncing around, but this actually ended up being a good thing because it gave me a chance to see what some of the bigger companies offered. Jobs that are considered “respectable” and coveted are not easy to acquire. A quick back-door way into some of these major corporations is to rely on staffing agencies to place you in environments that give you the opportunity to shine and attract the positive attention of the person that hired you through the temp agency.

Your parents might look at you confused and not understand why getting a job is so difficult, but that would be a generation gap because they don’t understand what technology has done to the application process and how hard it is to land that “big career payday”.

I’m not suggesting that you completely ignore the application process or submitting resumes to companies that you hope to gain employment to. What I am suggesting is that you take advantage of career fairs and temp agencies to find Tulsa jobs that are the right fit for your needs.