In today's terrible economy you must be constantly looking for work. Today's jobs are tenuous at best; e.g., HP just terminated 500 SW Engineers in California. I've seen comments about the layoff attached to articles about this event, and some of them are very pro HP. The pro HP crowd says that HP should offshore it's SW engineers to stay in business. I would agree with that if HP was losing money and needed to do something to stay afloat, but that isn't the case. I went to forbes.com and looked up HP's assets; total assets: 124,503,000,000 total liabilities: 84,054,000,000. That means HP has $40,449,000,000 more in assests then in liabilities. HP can afford to pay 500 employees. I.e., the SW engineers that were terminated didn't have any indicators to show them their jobs were in jeopardy.
My wife told me she was watching Rachel Madow, who had on guests that said HP terminated these SW Engineers because HP is selling their products in other countries, and not the US. HP wants to employ people in the countries where they are selling products. If HP and other American companies would employ Americans and keep those jobs in the US then Americans could afford to buy HP products. HP is well aware of this, so the propaganda on the Rachel Madow show doesn't explain why HP terminated these employees. I.e., the terminated employees still didn't have a clue they were about to be terminated.
There are lots of companies out there that really are having problems and the people working for them do have a clue that their jobs are in jeopardy, so these are the people who are actively searching for work. Considering that unemployment is so high, the techniques these people are using couldn't be all that great. You can hear employers on TV and the Internet complain that they would hire if they could find employees to fill their jobs. So what you have to do is let these employers know that you are looking.
If you are just replying to adds on the Internet and the newspaper then you probably aren't finding these employers. What you need to do is flood the market with your resume. I'm talking about sending out a couple of thousand resumes/day. I've only done this on two occasions. The first time I was sending out my resume every day for a week, and got back a modest number of replies. I did get one phone interview, so I can't really complain about my results; any results are good today. The second mass-mail of my resume occurred two weeks ago (this time I only did it for one day) and I'm still getting replies from employers. The difference was I restricted my search to job websites. Statistically, I had a better chance of finding a potential employer by restricting my search to job websites and sending my resume out to people who posted their e-mail addresses on those job sites.
I do have another change in mind for my next mass mail. I've been attaching my resume to the mailing; I'm going to stop that. An attached resume takes up bandwidth when you send it, and unless you have an unlimited plan with your ISP then you are limiting yourself to how many e-mails you can send out. I got a warning from my ISP the first time I sent out a mass mailing of my resume; I went over my quota (I'm only allowed so many GBytes each month). My second attempt was actually modified by the warning I got; I had to think of a way to hit more real employers and send out less e-mail at the same time. My third attempt will use an iFrame in the e-mail body; my resume will stay on my website as a web page and the iFrame will be a view into that web page. This will allow the recipient to scroll through my resume while reading my e-mail. Employers who are still using Outlook Express won't be able to see the iFrame (Outlook users can), so I'll also include links to my online resume and the download address for my MS Word format resume. This will allow me to send out a much greater number of e-mails (there won't be a resume attached, taking up bandwidth), and therefore increase my chance of finding a job. If you are looking for work you should consider my suggestions.