Gearing up for my first day back to a corporate job after 2 years. A little bittersweet but it shall hopefully give me some much needed stability. After two years without a stable income, I’ve been craving some financial stability in my life and to a lesser degree some structure to my days.

Given the current economic outlook, I’m pretty aware how lucky I am to be landing a job I wanted this quickly and I thought I’d share the most important lesson I learned- use every single resource you have. And I mean, EVERY SINGLE. Leads when searching for jobs can come from anywhere – a causal encounter at the grocery store, a family friend, an uncle, or an old buddy you reconnected with on facebook. I had spent over a month dealing with numerous worthless recruiters, cold applying to jobs online, trying out The Ladders.com, Startuply, the NextNY discussion board and numerous other job resources and was becoming quite disappointed by the process. Then, I received an email from my Univerisity’s career center about an engineering career fair. I keep getting updates on new events that I tend to automatically delete. So without thinking, I had deleted the email when I saw it first, but went back into my Trash folder to revisit it and thought to myself ‘Why not?’

I went to the career fair the next day out of sheer disillusionment with every approach I had tried thus far and surprisingly, it turned out to be quite refreshing. It gave me a very good visual sense of the job market (each company had a placard with what positions they were looking to fill and programmers have become one of the most sought after talents), let me talk directly to people who worked at the companies I found interesting immediately and ultimately led me to my current job.

Lesson learned was ‘Why not?’ is precisely the kind of question you need to be asking yourself have when searching for leads for a job.