Your first decision in a job search is what kind of work you will look for. For a lot of people, this is a very difficult decision, particularly if you lack any specialized education to prepare you for any given field.

If you aren't sure what you want to do, get counseling, as much as possible. There is the agency that you apply to in your state for unemployment insurance, and depending on your area, they may have centers with classes on job search and interviewing skills, resume counselors, and a library. They will also know of other agencies in your area that you can approach.

If you go to an agency specializing in job counseling for people with disabilities, you will have to disclose your condition. With agencies that are not oriented toward such people, it might be best not to mention that you're bipolar, since some counselors who are not familiar with mental health issues may conclude that you are emotionally unfit for just about anything. State agencies will have lists of other agencies, and you might be able to find out about the agencies for the disabled without disclosing your condition.

There's nothing wrong with going to an agency for the disabled, getting counseling and maybe even training from them, and then searching for jobs on your own (rather than through that agency) so that you don't have to disclose your condition with employers that you apply to.

One advantage of the state employment agency and agencies that cater to the disabled is that they tend to be free.

In 1997, I decided to make a job switch from being a software engineer, because the meds affected me so that I had great difficulty meeting deadlines. I had a lot of money saved up, but no idea what I wanted to do next. I went to a private job couneling center in my area. They offered different levels of support -- costing thousands of dollars, where counselors would talk with you, and a cheapo membership where you got to use their library and that was it. I opted for the cheapo $40 membership, which was a huge mistake -- I didn't find anything satisfactory in the library on my own.

I eventually decided, based on one conversation with a total stranger I met at a Sierra Club dinner, to become a web designer. This turned out to be terrible, poorly informed decision, firstly, because the main talent needed in a web designer is artistic talent, and not only did I have no artistic background, but I hated drawing, and in addition, web design jobs paid about half what the person I met at the dinner told me she was being paid, which itself was far less than I was used to making as a programmer.

If you're thinking of switching fields, it's a good idea to see if you can meet with someone who's in the field and learn from them what it's like.

It's very hard to get a job unless you have confidence that you will be able to do it well.

In the late 1990's, I tried web design, but my lack of artistic talent was a big problem. I thought the websites I built in web design school looked great, but employers were unempressed when I showed them to them. After going to about two interviews a week and failing all of them for about six months, I decided to try to get another programming job, even though I had grave doubts that I could deliver software on time.

I did about two interviews a week for about nine months at software engineering jobs, but it was pretty transparent that I had no confidence that I could do it well, and no one hired me.

My shrink said that he had never seen anyone do so many job interviews without being hired.

It might be a good idea to see if you can do some mock interviews with counselors.

I eventually got a job doing Software Quality Assurance (SQA). It was less challenging than programming, and I was able to do what I was asked on time.

But there was a problem with my co-workers. I went out to dinner with several of the guys in my first week on the job, and one of them said to the others "Do you know that so-and-so in this other department is a reactionary?". His tone of voice implied that, in his mind, the fact that the company employed any reactionaries was unacceptable and something that they do something to rectify.

These guys would always be making these far-left economic arguments at work while we were supposed to be talking about computers. A lot of it was really stupid, and I began arguing with them.

I'd been at the company six weeks when my boss (who was apolitical) told me I had been asking my co-workers too many questions. It isn't possible to do an SQA job without talking to your co-workers, and I was only going into their cubicles when I had technical questions about work. I wasn't asking a lot of questions, and if I asked fewer I couldn't do the job, so I disagreed with him and was firm. The conversation escalated and he said "Look, I can fire you. All I have to do is assign you tasks that you can't do for a month, thereby proving you incompetent, and then I can fire you.". A common question on job interviews is "Have you ever been fired?" and I wanted to be able to say "No.". And I figured that if he maliciously gave me tasks I hadn't been trained at, he could fire me. So I quit on the spot.

Then he told me that three different co-workers had independently gone into his office telling him that I was asking them too many questions.

So these bastards had conspired to get me fired because I was a "reactionary".

I guess in theory I could've kept the job if I had just avoided expressing any political opinions at work, no matter how stupid these guys got.

I got a job doing tech support for a software product. During the interview I asked what it was and got a vague answer.

Once I was hired, my boss gave me a manual and said "Go to your cubicle and read this and don't ask anybody any questions.".

The manual wasn't a user's guide, it was a reference manual, it didn't explain the basic concepts, and it was terrible. I couldn't make sense of it. I could barely stay awake looking at it. But after getting fired for "asking too many questions" I wasn't going to disobey my boss and talk with my co-workers.

After a couple of months of making almost no progress, he put me answering phones. At that point I started getting help from co-workers, and immediately found out that they were using a manual that was way better than the one I had been given. Basically the original manual had been so bad that they had re-written it from scratch, and I had just spent months staring fruitlessly at the bad manual.

But I was way too far behind to catch up fast enough, customers complained to my boss, and he fired me.

I got another software quality assurance job, this time there was no discussion of politics at work, and I could do what was asked of me just fine.

However, after I'd been there a year, we had gotten nearly all the bugs out of the product so I wasn't needed any more and they laid me off with a generous severance package. Unfortunately, this was at the beginning of the dot-com bust, and there weren't any jobs to be had, so I was unemployed and unable to get interviews for about a year and a half.

Gaps of unemployment on resumes, especially during economic boom times, look really bad and are hard to explain if you want to avoid disclosing your illness.

One trick is to show only the years and not the months when your jobs began and ended. For example, I was in web design school from September 1999 - mid-January 2000, and then was unemployed until March of 2001, when I had a job that lasted six weeks, followed by another long period of unemployment. That's a very long period of unemployment in a total economic boom time.

So instead of:

• Sep 1999 - Jan 2000 Web Design School
• Mar 2001 - Apr 2001 Software Quality Assurance
• Oct 2002 - Oct 2003 Software Quality Assurance

I would say

• 1999 - 2000 Web Design School
• 2001 - 2001 Software Quality Assurance
• 2002 - 2003 Software Quality Assurance

At some point, I took a very low-skilled, low-paying retail job walking the floor at a store like Best Buy just to get out of the house. That looks really terrible on your resume. I was only there for a few months, and years later I found that I would have better results if I just didn't mention it on the resume.

I had many extended periods of unemployment or working at embarrassing jobs over the years from 1997 to 2003, but my resume afterward was a walk-on-water work of art, not mentioning the embarrassing jobs and only mentioning years and not months. While I was interviewing after that, if the interviewer demanded that I fill in the months and explain gaps, I was toast - I didn't get the job. But it was just a matter of keeping trying until someone didn't ask.

There was a lot of technical content on my resume about the things I had done, and I was always interviewing with engineers, who are rarely trained how to cross-examine a resume, instead they wanted to talk about technical things and if they dove into that, which was what usually happened, I would be in great shape.

When I was unemployed, I would spend days perfecting my resume, then take it to the resume coaches at the state emploment development office, then perfect it some more. One problem is that, if you're a programmer, your resume is full of jargon, and the Microsoft Office spell-check doesn't understand the jargon, so you have to eyeball it very carefully for typos.

Your resume should probably be 2 pages long or less, and mention your name on each page, in case a recruiter or hiring manager has a pile of unstapled resumes on their desk, so they can remember which page belongs to which person.

At one point, a recruiter told me about a job at ABC Corp that sounded really good, but when he saw my resume, he demanded that I mention months and explain any gaps.

I gave him the months and told some sob stories about the gaps (but didn't disclose that I'm bipolar) and he told me "Look, ABC Corp would never hire someone with a background like yours. Goodbye.".

About a week later, another recruiter asked me "Would you be interested in working at ABC Corp?". I said "Yes, I'd love to work at ABC Corp.". And she took my resume and neither she nor anybody I interviewed with there asked me for the month information and I got the job.

At one point, the economy was terrible, there were almost no jobs, and I was sending a lot of resumes to jobs. But my resume mentioned a period of time I'd been working at the store like Best Buy.

I was sending resumes to jobs for 10 hours a week (the rest of the week I was building my programming skills at home) and would only be contacted by one recruiter per month. And these recruiters were always so incompetent that the contact never turned into an interview.

Now I realize what had happened. Job recruiters are trained to look for people who are "on the way up", going to higher and higher paying, more prestigious jobs. These are the successful people that the hiring managers want to talk to. And my resume at that time told the story of a downward spiral, starting out in software engineering for years, then Software Quality Assurance and Tech Support (both a step down from that) and eventually walking the floor at a store like Best Buy at a fraction of my former salary with no benefits. So only incomptent recruiters wanted anything to do with me, and they were too incompetent to get me an interview, let alone a job.

A prospective employer will probably want to look at your LinkedIn profile. You shouldn't have anything on LinkedIn that you wouldn't want a prospective employer to see, anyway. If you talk politics on on other social media, avoid friending anybody at work. Twitter is dangerous for discussing politics, because anything you say could attract a huge global lynch mob of thousands of idiots who don't even know you, screaming for you to be fired for your beliefs. Facebook is a bit safer because you can choose your friends. Google yourself (if you have a common name, Google your name plus the name of your school) and see what shows up, and if you can, clean up anything that you wouldn't want a prospective employer to see.

It may be against the law for a prospective employer to Google you and use any information that turns up, but if you never get an interview, it's pretty hard for you to prove in court that you were somehow wronged.

Go through your Facebook feed, setting controversial posts to "private" and uncontroversial ones to "public", so that anyone going through your feed without friending you will see lots and lots of boring, uncontroversial posts, and get bored before they go far back enough to see anything incriminating.

If your name is very common, you can just hide your Facebook profile by removing all information about your education and work history, removing the town you live in, and replacing your profile picture with a cartoon or baby picture, so they won't be able to find you.

If you're over 40, there's a lot age-discrimination. You may want to reduce your employment history on LinkedIn to the last 10 years, and not mention the year you graduated from school.

When I was 47, I was looking for a software development job. I had only the last 10 years of experience on my resume and LinkedIn.

At one point, I had a job recruiter on the phone and she said "You don't mention what year you graduated from college on your resume. When was that?". I answered the year, which indicated that I was 47 years old, and she immediately interrupted me, saying "Excuse me, I've got a call on the other line. Can I call you back?" and even though that was technically a question, she hung up in my face before I could answer. And never called me back.

And exactly the same thing happened with another recruiter a week later. They're that blatant about it.

If you have gray hair, it's worth dying it out before you start interviewing. Most hair dye for men is specifically aimed at job interviews.

Always eat a big breakfast before an interview, you don't know what kind of lunch opportunity you will have. I've worked in a place where they'd interview people all day and not give them a chance to eat lunch.

Usually, someone talks with you in a conference room, and when they're done, asks if you'd like a coke or something before you talk to the next person. I would always say yes and make a trip to the coke machine (and bring lots of change to the interview) to be wide awake all day.

Always bring several copies of your resume in your blazer pocket. I put a lot of effort into my resume, and recruiters would always edit it before passing it on to the hirers, and always make it worse. At a very minimum, recruiters want to remove your contact information so the manager doesn't contact you directly and cut them out of the deal, but they usually modify a lot more than that. And the thing is, technical job recruiters are not technical people, and they have no idea what any of the jargon on the resume means, so they have no basis for deciding what's important and what's not when they're rearranging everything. So I'd give the interviewer my version and they always agreed that it was better than what the recruiter gave them.

Eventually, once I was on the new meds that left me smart enough to be a competent software developer, and I had a couple of years of experience under my belt, and the economy had recovered, I was able to get interviews reasonably easily.

There's something that happens when you interview a lot, where eventually you get one where they keep asking technical questions that you know the answers to, and nobody looks too deeply into the dark past that you've concealed on your resume, and you (finally) get an offer.