How do you know it is the right job until you have worked there?

My current job has gone from being "great" to being "average". Down to a number of factors, none of which would have changed in the job description. In the beginning I was designing and building a database system. Now I am maintaining it, and getting a lot more donkey work to do (fixing excels, tidying up the data when something hasn't been entered correctly). The organization has grown - I started in an office with one other person. Great for being able to concentrate. Now we have 4 people in the office. This makes learning new stuff a lot more difficult, as there is a lot less quiet time. Got an extra boss, on top of my team leader. So rather than concentrate on a task until it is complete, I have two people changing my priorities for me, forcing me to switch tasks, and destroying my productivity.

I'd wager this is ~90% of the problem with the modern day employment market. Monster et al made it too easy to apply for a job. Now every position gets 1000 applicants and every applicant applies for 100 jobs. The applicant thinks the more they apply, the better their chances. The employer thinks there is a cookie cutter, definition employee out there that will fit 110%, be overqualified, and willing to work for less because the applicant won't get any of the other 100 jobs they shotgunned. The employer passes on applicant after applicant and waits until they find the 10x employee. The applicants move on to their next 100 cover letters.

Moreover, everyone who is in their 5th week of unemployment, for any reason, has spent 300 hours - not 100, not 200, three hundred hours NOT doing anything even tangentially related to getting their next job.

Life is literally a zero-sum game, and over the course of 5 weeks, 840 hours passes, of which 210 hours are kind of nonnegotiable (6 hours of sleep per day). The rest of the 630 hours over just 5 weeks are spent however you want. Two discretionary hours per day on sleep, maybe even thre (totalling 9). Six hours on not doing job stuff. Three on job stuff. Another four on not doing job stuff. Are you keeping track? Another two on not doing job stuff. That's 24 hours, including 9 hours of sleep and/or nap time. Every day. "It adds up, Jerry!"

We counted 630 discretionary hours over just 5 weeks. Sure, some could be spent on "search". But as for the rest? Why not plough it into specific jobs you're entertaining.

I would never be above spending 40 hours on a single programming sample showcasing a set of technologies I really wanted to work with, especially if this entails learning it for the sample. 100 is not far off.

How much of those 100 hours included learning something? I would say that you need to spend ridiculous amounts of time preparing for and working on getting a specific job.

You can spend a year on it! Part-time. Just on getting a specific job that is open for a year.

Please can and do.

No reason not to.

While on unemployment, people are often required to spread their search across hundreds of companies.

After being laid off, I was unemployed for several months and was required to submit at least 3 applications a week. On the face, that doesn't sound like many, and for some fields it probably isn't heard. But if you're in a specialized field, even finding 3 open positions to apply for becomes a full-time job. And each of those openings tended to require many hours of specialized work. Some of that time was moving a nicely developed resume into their proprietary applicant webpage (urgh!!!). There was one job that actually required me to develop a dummy website. Because I knew there were weeks when I wouldn't even be able to find 3 openings, when I found more than 3 I would intentionally wait until the following week to apply to the more promising openings. The idea being that I could do the minimum work on the required 3 applications, then spend the rest of the week diligently working on the more promising openings, and submit it first thing the following week.

Then there are the weeks that I couldn't even find 3 in my field and didn't have any left over from the previous week. For those I applied to complete throw-away positions. I felt sorry for whatever sap had to review my application.

All the while, I wish I had been able to focus on a handful of desirable positions and personal retraining. Instead, I spent months doing B.S. work just to be able to pay the mortgage until I was able to get a job, which ended up coming through a personal connection and would never have shown up on the radar that the unemployment office required me to use!

This. One take-away here is that if you find the one place you absolutely want to work, put your all into it, don't take no for an answer, and who knows what you may achieve. This is not advice for everyone: many people just want a job or any job. But if you want the job, go for it. For another example, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p28MFt8RBA#t=110

A more general take-away from this post is that "everything is negotiable," which is also an excellent lesson. Don't play by all the rules. Explore what you can get, often just by asking.