109 credits in 10 months

[Jenniferinfl]

Have you tried public accounting firms? They do hire new grads who are working on their CPA, and that experience is gold for moving into private companies later. In the worst case, I'd suggest taking one of the administrative assistant positions and parley it into the accounting dept. At small companies, the admin staff gets to know EVERYONE, and once the accounting manager becomes aware of your background, you might find it easy to move.

I haven't been picky- I've been applying anywhere that had even an accounting contingent position. I've gone to a few administrative assistant interviews and been told I didn't have adequate experience. My resume is pretty clear, if they'd read it at all they would see that the library job I did for 5 years was essentially an administrative assistant position with pretty much the same duties. I know I've applied to a couple public accounting firms, but, even though there are a lot of jobs, there are even more applicants. For a brief while I had Linkedin platinum where you get to see how you compare to others applying for the same job. There were often 700+ other applicants for the same accounting clerk job and 20 of those people had masters degrees. I'm going to need a masters degree to be competitive for a $12 an hour accounting clerk job.. lol 

I've been very non discerning about my first accounting role. I've even applied to truly terrible places with really bad culture issues. I've applied to part time accounting jobs with no benefits that paid $9 an hour. I understand that to get in I've got to start at the bottom. I apply to jobs like billing clerk, AP, AR, admin, secretary and so on. Spouse and I keep talking and the more we talk the more we agree that we probably have to move. The lowest job I've applied to so far was with Belk, a retailer who was offering $7 an hour for a cash office clerk and the job was 2 hour shifts 6 days per week- which is funny because minimum wage in Florida is $8.46 and they used to have to pay your for at least 4 hours if they made you drive in to work. But, maybe that's not a thing anymore and you can work a 2 hour shift. Anyhow, irrelevant because there was a better candidate than me for even that job.. lol

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Just something else to consider: What does your actual resume look like? Did you get a second opinion on it from anyone else? Despite the other factors at play, it's possible that it isn't conveying you effectively.

I do think I could do a lot better with keywords- the fact of the matter is that there are so many applicants that a human isn't even seeing my application. Even the lowtech county job I had reviewed resumes through a computer program to weed 95% of them. When we posted positions for library assistants, we got over 1200 applicants. I've been trying to keep my resume down to one page because some of those programs discard long resumes, but, I need to imbed the keywords where they don't take actual space on my resume but are there for the scanning program. 

I was actually being sort of cheap and hoping one of the recruiting firms would offer to do that for me.. lol But, they've all been happy with it in the current form. 

But, I have been mulling that over- my current rendition of my resume has gotten me more interviews for other positions then previous renditions, but, not accounting positions. I feel like it's a solid resume- as soon as I move away from accounting.. I just sent it to a recruiter a couple days ago who supposedly has a resume writer on staff- so I'm going to give it a few more days in the event it gets rewritten for me.. lol 

I've shown it to a few people- nobody had any real feedback on it either way. But, realistically, I don't exactly run in a social circle that knows anything about this stuff. I'm the only person in my immediate family who even has a resume.. I might hunt down a resume writer who knows accounting and see what they can do with it.