Unemployment by the numbers

A month into unemployment, I looked at some data 🤓

It’s officially been four weeks (and a day) since my furlough—time really does fly when you’re having fun experiencing high levels of stress and uncertainty! It’s a Tuesday morning, I’m sitting in bed after a long shower and doing some kitchen cleaning. I’ve had my coffee and I’m still in my robe while my hair air dries. I have two quick interviews later today, I’m off to babysit an adorable 3-year-old who lives a few blocks away from me for a few hours, and then have someone coming by the apartment to pick up some extra baby things I don’t need from my Buy Nothing group. Really, life could be so much worse!

This will be a short one—I first became curious about how my job search was progressing and started looking at the numbers in my job tracker (Notion template here, if this is your thing), and thought it would be fun to share these a bit more broadly, as well as some other numbers from this month in general. So without too much pomp and circumstance, here are some numbers (as of 4/18/23) 🤓:

• Jobs applied to: 220

• Initial phone screens: 17

• Hiring manager conversations: 6

• Panel interviews: 1

• Recruiters who ghosted me at an interview: 1

• Hours of interviewing: 14.5

• Number of projects/presentations: 1

• Job applications declined at the resume screening stage: 77

• Job applications sent and never received an answer from: 131

• Rejections after any interview: 8 9 - a rejection email came through as I was writing this

• Number of jobs I’m waiting to hear back from post-interview: 4 3 (see above and said rejection)

• Miles walked (on tracked walks): 39.56mi

• Hours applying to jobs, doing interview prep, and working on projects: Hard to quantify, I tracked about 40 hours, but there are a lot of off-the-cuff activities that add up!

• Cold outreach received (and responded to): 5

• Hours of Grey’s Anatomy watched: the limit does not exist

• Kicks from the baby: the limit does not exist

• Kitten cuddles: the limit does not exist

• Hours babysat: 40, but we’ll be at 64 by EOW

• Weekend trips taken: 1

• Buy Nothing pickups: 7

• Clothing swaps attended: 2

• Baking endeavors: 2

• Board/card games played: 7

• Coffee chats/networking conversations: 2

• Calls with an unemployment case worker: 1

• Allergy pills taken: ~24 (1 per day for the past 4 weeks, with a few days forgotten)

• Hours of therapy: 3

• Hours of midwife appointments: 1

• Hours spent cleaning the apartment: not enough

• Pages of birth prep/pregnancy books read: 125

• Pages of fiction read: 2 (I tried)

Maybe at the end of all of this, I’ll apply some data visualization so we can have fun with charts and graphs and such 🤓. But for now, it’s just fun seeing the numbers as they stand. Thanks again for being here!