After a 17 year career break, I found I was completely unemployable. I had relocated from the east coast back to my hometown in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had a few childhood friends, but no professional contacts whatsoever. To make things harder, my pre-break career had been in financial services and everything in the Bay Area seemed to be in the technology space. I could not get recruiters to return my phone calls and every job application I submitted went into the "black hole"