It’s rough times for me, I haven’t had a real job with benefits since 2006 and haven’t had health insurance since my COBRA ran out in April 2007. I could no longer afford to make payments when they jumped from less than $200 a month to more than $600 a month. I try to be extra careful because I can’t afford to get sick or pay a doctor. I’m one of those people whose only option for medical attention is the hospital emergency room. I consider myself lucky since I have only had to go once in four years. I only went because I was forced, that unbearable pain I was having required a shot of morphine.
The only job I have managed to land is a part-time job working at retail store for minimum wage. On a rare occasion, I can land a temporary assignment for a day or two making $10.00 an hour. In the meantime, I try to make ends by running a small, socially conscious business. It is a struggle.
I can so feel this job hunter’s pain because I have gone through the exact same thing in my job search. I have an undergraduate degree in liberal arts, more than fifteen years experience in the insurance, banking and financial services industries and skills that are easily transferable to another industry but I can’t buy a ‘real’ job. I’m hard-working, honest and a quick study but have yet to land a job interview. I have at least five versions of my resume but none of them can even get me an interview.
The last interview I had was with a temp agency doing a cattle call for a non-existent job. I was evaluated in a two-minute interview and given a ‘B+’ by an office clerk who, I am sure, barely got a high school diploma. Needless to say, I have yet to get a job assignment through that agency.
This ad from Craigslist accurately reflects the frustration that I feel with the current job market and potential employers. As of September 2009, the unemployment rate was 9.5% and in the state I live, it’s expected to reach 11%. I can hardly wait!
Dear employers with job openings,
I just want to take a moment or two to thank all the companies that now only use online applications for the jobs for which I am best qualified. I’m so happy to know that in the past eight years, you have dropped the very impersonal practice of requesting well written resumes (which took the place of having me come into your place of business in person and fill out an application by hand) and now for convenience, give me the opportunity to waste my fucking time trying to guess what it is you want me to write in your online application fields in eight words or less, what work I’ve done that will make you call me for an interview. Because of this new-found simple-mindedness of yours, I can guarantee that you will have the weakest, most uninteresting, unmotivated new-hires EVER!
Because I have had to have more than three jobs in the past eight years, at which I have excelled, some of which I was laid-off from due to down-sizing, and most of which are your competitors in the marketplace, you will never know what I have done because you only allow three previous employers in your simple, automated application program or only want experience from the past five years.
Because I have always been capable of doing more than one thing at a time, you will never know that as a free-lance writer/costume designer/photographer, what I have done Monday through Friday to support myself quite well, thank you, is to be the most efficient, bright, hard-working, easy-going, intelligent and dependable administrative assistant an employer could wish for. But you will never know that because your measly-ass job application program is only looking for words your witless HR staff has programmed it to look for and then spitting out applications by people like myself with a form email thanking me for my interest and wishing me luck.
Thank you also for the Myers-Briggs psychometric type test to see if I actually would be able to sit next to another person and not drive them crazy.
Thank you for sparing me the waste of my time outshining most of your other staff in their presence by having me come in to your office in person, dressed to the nines, flashing my intensely alert eyes at you, and shaking your hand with confidence, yet sensitively. You wouldn’t hire me anyway because I’m probably more interesting than you and therefore a threat.
You have saved me from the humiliation of taking a position with a company that probably has the dullest, most unadventurous, most boring staff that has been hired through this elimination process of an online application to which you have given ultimate authority to decide, only by the selection of some dozen or so “key” words, to interview.
And we wonder why there are banks going under, businesses making toxic loans, stock market losses, medical errors, corruption, Bernie Madoffs in the world, and police who can’t allow a family to be with their dying mother so he can write a ticket.
Yours very truly,
The one that got away
