Good luck, you need it. You're going for a niche job in a
field that's in a steep decline, without experience. You should
consider to present yourself as broader based than just
"Perl programmer".
That's another thing, is I'm not just a perl programmer! I develop in c, java and (visual) basic; I program actionScript in Flash and am an animator/Flash developer; and there's the multimedia talents I've talked about here. There's plenty I can do, but in interviews I've actually had headhunters get angry with me if I demonstrate too much diversity in my skills. They can't pigeonhole me when I do that, of course; besides, since they just screen resumes for keywords and don't even know what we do in IT, me talking about my range and bringing up related subsets of info gets them confused and frustrated. Which is bad. Don't mind my vent....