How do I get back into the job market?
I have a background in finance with many career bumps. I am now 35 years old.
Summary of my career is as follows. Technically speaking I have 4 years of full time work experience (middle market ER and IB) and some internships.
On my resume, I have 6 years of full time work experience. 2 of those years were spent as a non-paid intern (in PE). I had interned during the 2009-10 years of recession in order to gain experience as well as to pad my resume. During that time, i tried effortlessly to find a job but could not. The place where I was interning is run by 1 main guy. He had then offered to vouch for me as if I was working there full time. I leveraged that to get another job.
2 years later I was laid off. Coincidentally, my greatgrandmother became ill. I spent about 1.5 years helping to take care of her and running the family business (unrelated to my career). She then passed away. Shortly after, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. During that time, my mother undergone chemo. It was up and down. I never knew when she would become better. I had continued to help manage the family business. In fact, I turned down a dream job offer across the country for her. I made many sacrifices for my family in which they don't seem to even appreciate (which is another story). Recently, she became better and I feel comfortable going back to my original career. I have 2 big gaps on my resume and need to explain it somehow. Any advice would be appreciated.
*First gap: 2 years as an unpaid intern. The guy that running it seems to be unresponsive/unwilling to vouch for me. Since i wasn't paid, how do I prove I even worked there? I was thinking of purchasing a fake reference online. Has anyone had any experience doing so?
*Second gap: 3.5 years helping my family. Basically i was a property manager which is unrelated to my career. How do I explain the departure of my family business? When I go on interviews, I feel that interviewers think i am already "SET", which is not true. Is it better to leave that job experience out?
I am truly feeling hopeless....
I just recently returned to the job market, my family has a school in my hometown and I had to return in order to help them for about 1 1/2 years. You have been through some rough times man, but don't give up.
At first I thought I was never going to find a job (my country - Brazil - is going through some horrible crisis), my background was in Asset Management and credit analysis and banks and boutiques were firing everyone. How could I get a job in IB with no experience and in the middle of all this mess? But it happened after a couple of months and I'm currently working in a pretty neat boutique.
It may seem dark, man, but don't give up. Have faith in yourself. I wish you the best, and please let us know when you get the job! =)
Love from Brazil.
As someone who is much younger than you (and has less full time exp), I'd think about saying you were running the family business (instead of saying that you were a property manager)
Same advice as always on WSO: network like you've never networked before. I think a lot of IBs - probably more boutiques - actually look favorably upon entrepreneurial activities, which you could sell that on the property management piece.
And it's a numbers game. I'd put that slaved-away internship on your resume. Chances are that if they are going to contact previous employers, they will contact a more recent employer than one from almost 10 years ago.
This is a tough sell, you have to look at it from an HR perspective as well.
I think network is key though, as we get older the positions we end up receiving are more referred-based then it is applying via online.
Good luck.
its pretty rare for HR / IB's to do a thorough background check during the initial stages of the interview process (this comes later...they hire a security company to confirm all the details on your resume...and you will be fired if you lied). Sometimes, if they know a person who you worked with/near, they will discretely call them and ask their opinion of you after you've had the initial interview.
For example, It doesn't matter if you an unpaid intern...what matters is the experience and what you did /learned. For legal reasons, the only thing a company will normally confirm is dates of employment and title.
So, for an intership (paid or unpaid) or any other prior work, i would not indicate how much you were paid at all.
Also, At the IB's interns are usually called "summer analysts" or "summer associates". Everybody knows that these are interns. Your title doesn't really matter. what matters is the work experience.
Regarding the family business....same thing. What matters is the work experience. How can you phrase the actual work, to put it into a responsible, hard working, detail oriented, creative problem solving, plays nice with others, sales oriented, description.
In a family business, you should have the title "Director of Operations" or something like that....which sounds much better than "manager"
The hardest part is getting an actual interview...because your resume is competing against 200 other people...and its hard to stand out amongst that crowd. This is where networking can save your ass.
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