I can only agree with what folks have already said here. Genixia's comments regarding resume/apps I think are particularly well refined. What few other thoughts do I have?

- I guess that since you don't work for Enron, sending your snapshot to Playboy is out of the question....

- The first supposed rule of unemployment is to do anything as a "stop loss" job -- keep some income coming in. If it's burger flipping then you don't have to put it on your resume. It's probably up to you to calculate whether that will yield more than whatever unemployment comp you would be entitiled to.

- No, I wouldn't get overly euphoric about a contract job, but it's a job, and they can sometimes lead to more work whether more contract or perm; they can sometimes do a lot more to get you some visibility than a resume in a stack of resumes.

- I keep my base resume in a simply-formatted text file at about 70 columns. I want something that I can paste into an e-mail if needed and not worry about how munched it will get. I also use that to cut-n-paste into engines like Dice and Monster. Then I take the text base resume and pull it into RTF/DOC and I only add as much in the way of headers/bold as is needed to have it make sense.

- To one of genixia's points: KISS, two pages max. Fancy paper, fancy fonts? Not necessarily a plus and perhaps a negative.

- Spell-check everything. If a hiring manager is having a bad day and has a stack of resumes, an obvious typo can earn you the trash bin.

- WRT Monster, Dice, et al, be aware that the army of recruiters that mined those services during the boom is a significantly reduced army now working with fewer requisitions from employers and a larger pool of applicants. You might want to pump more key/buzzwords into your on-line resumes than your working resume as that is a lot of the recruiters work with; with luck that'll get more recruiter attention. My experience, though, if that half of the recruiters working off those services couldn't tell a database from a patch cord, so be prepared for calls from people who ask " do you know how to do X?" when that's not even close to what you emphasized in your resume. Don't let it get you down. Happens to everybody. While the Dices/Monsters don't produce as many calls as they used to, it is still worth covering as many of them as you can. They are still a high yield/effort proposition, relatively speaking.

- So long as you are actively looking, go back to Monster/Dice every few weeks and make some trivial edit to your resume. I can't confirm this, but my experience tells me that some some of their search algorthms use a "last edited" stamp to indicate new/updated resumes.

- On recruiters...I don't consider them a negative or anything, but be aware that (on average) they can have a tendency to butter you up -- tell you great you are, how much the hiring manager enjoyed speaking with you, how you are the #1 candidate for this particular job, etc -- essentially to keep you on the string. Don't let any of that go to your head or deter you from pursuing other positions until you have a solid job offer that you want to accept (and even after that!). You can't really tell what's going on on the other side of that recruiter -- is the hiring manager really as pumped? Or about to get fired him/herself?? Is a hiring freeze a day away? Keep all options open. Let every potential employer know that you continue to be interested in their position (even if some of them aren't exactly interesting).

Well, in the end I guess you know I was just kidding about Playboy, and I hope, best case, that your suspicions aren't confirmed Monday.

Best of luck.