It's like a full-time gig

Wrong.

“You can’t be just meeting with a friend of a friend of a friend,” Hutchison said. “Those are valuable. That’s probably how you’re going to get a job. But ultimately your contact has to be with someone who has the power to hire you.”

So what does count? Finding an answer to that question proved maddeningly difficult.

The state’s booklet for job-seekers, called the Unemployment Claims Kit, says, “A valid job search contact is a contact with an employer to inquire about or apply for a job.”

One WorkSource counselor told me last spring that to record "job-search activities" I had to send applications in response to advertised openings. Another said it’s OK to cold-call employers and ask if they have any openings.

The people at my orientation had received similarly mixed signals. So had others I bumped into through the summer.

So I donned my reporter hat and called WorkSource officials, something most unemployed people can’t do. What counts as a job-search activity?

Margret Graham, spokeswoman for the agency that oversees WorkSource, said that question would typically be referred to the Employment Security Department. When I told her I’d gotten conflicting interpretations from WorkSource counselors, she agreed to ask around. She got back to me two days later and said she hadn’t been able to get any feedback on the issue from counselors.

I called Hutchison at Employment Security, too. She didn’t know the answer. With me on the phone, she looked at the state’s website and found nothing. After reading the Unemployment Claims Kit, she interpreted it to mean cold-calling is OK.

Then her communications manager, Mark Varadian, called me and said the opposite: “You need to be applying for a certain opening for it to count as a job-search activity.”

Finally, Varadian called me again with what he dubbed his “grand unification theory”: “It’s all true. Because it all depends.”

He used me as his example: Say you want a job as a technical writer and you don’t know if ABC Technical Writing company has any openings. You call the company, and that can count as a job-search activity for that week — as long as you’ve talked with someone who would know about the company’s hiring, not a receptionist.

If the company has an opening and you apply, then you can’t count your application as a job-search activity because you can only count one contact per company. And if the company is not hiring, you can’t keep calling them and counting those calls as contacts. Also, if you’re a writer by trade you can’t call a medical clinic and ask if they have openings for medical assistants, something you aren’t even remotely qualified for.

“You can’t game the system,” Varadian said.

OK, I thought, I’m finally feeling a little more informed.

Never mind that for many weeks, I’d been diligently applying only for official openings just to be safe. For a little while, including after my surgery, I took a class that exempted me from the job-search requirement. But there were other weeks when I’m sure I applied for openings I had no business applying for. There just aren’t that many jobs for onetime newspaper editors.

In fact, I should go look at my job-search log. I’ve got a nagging feeling I was one of those horribly under-qualified applicants at the Seattle Rep. If so, Katrina, I’m sorry. But if you ever need a writer, I'm available.