Employment Index: Floating World

This is a quick update about what is happening on the employment front.  I’m still working a part time job.  Not exactly happy about that.  I had an interview with a local company.  They told me at the outset that normally they wouldn’t consider me for the position because they thought I was overqualified.  Funny, I’m not overqualified to eat, pay taxes or buy expensive health insurance, but I digress.

So, anyway, I think I see what they mean.  Someone else told me today that when I talk about my former work in structural biology and drug design, my whole demeanor and cadence changes.  Twenty years in research will do that to you while you’re not paying attention.  I might not have a PhD, but I sound like one.  The position I interviewed for was fairly low level, because that’s what your options are when you are over 45 and don’t have a PhD even if you sound like one.  The interviewers all told me they hoped I would find something more appropriate to my qualifications.  Ok, thanks for that.  I just spent a ton of money on this interview suit.  Lovely.

Then a surprising thing happened.  I’ll go into it a bit more when the dust has settled but let’s just say that I am relying on the kindness of strangers right now to help me find a job. (I thank you profoundly, whoever you are)  I didn’t realize how horrifying the last couple of years actually were until I saw the blood drain from the faces of a couple of people who listened to my saga after they brought me in for quite a different kind of interview.  Yep, it really has been that bad.  But when you’re in the middle of it, it’s just like rolling with the punches.  I’m in my own floating world.

So, I have been learning how to update my LinkedIn account, spiff up my resume, network with everybody.  It’s like a crash course inside the HR machine and some of it is not pretty.  Here’s what I learned today:

• New Times Roman will make you look oooooolllllldd.  Calibri is now the font of choice to make you look younger.
• For gawd’s sakes, dump your aol email address.  (Ha!  Doesn’t apply to me but I know what they’re saying.)
• Believe it or not, there are young, callous recruiters in some HR departments that take great pleasure in rejecting a resume simply because the periods at the ends of sentences are followed by two spaces.  OLD people use two spaces; young, attractive people use one space.
• You may have to get up in the middle of the night to apply for jobs.  That’s because with so many resumes for each position, HR staff have decided to look at the first 50 resumes.  Anything more than that will be rejected.  Yes, you may be the perfect person for the job but if you are unlucky number 51, you are SOL.  So, figure out when the server refreshes the job database and apply at 12:01AM.  You may have to reformat your resume at this time of the morning as well.  Them’s the breaks.

I just had to ask the presenter of these toothsome tidbits why it is that there are up to 500 resumes per open position if the unemployment rate is almost down to pre-financial catastrophe level according to all the news and stuff. Shouldn’t the number be tapering off if more people are employed? She told me that employers are now regularly churning their workforce.  They are always laying off a great number of staff and rehiring shiny new people to replace them.  This happens among the bigger companies with more frequency.

That doesn’t make any sense.

Or does it?

On the one hand, it’s very reminiscent of the finance industry where job flexibility (that is, YOUR flexibility) is highly desirable.  You are expected to lose your job on a regular basis during constant restructuring.  Business school grads plan for it.  i guess they like living on the edge.  But it means that it is almost impossible to gain any meaningful experience, except in job hunting all the time.  I’m trying to see the up side in this but it is eluding me.  We are seeing financial industry employment styles and values trickling down everywhere.  It was getting to be ridiculous when it infiltrated the pharma industry. In the research area, where continuity and experience really are very important, it has created a lot of havoc.  But when the trend expands to the general workforce that doesn’t work for ginormous end-of-the-year bonuses like the kind you get on Wall Street, the damage it creates can be even more dire.  Who is going to invest in a house, car, kids when they know that their next paycheck could be their last for a long time?  And don’t even get me started on the stress that constant uncertainty brings.

What we are seeing here is an artificially created employment crisis.  It’s constant.  It’s bound to continue to erode wages, benefits and working environment.  It serves no useful purpose for the employer in the end except where it applies to the short term bottom line, and it’s going to continue to depress the economy.

You can’t make plans, spend money or have a life if you’re in a perpetual floating world.

The Employment Index: Wish me luck

This week’s version of the index will be brief.  I have an interview this morning and I need to jump in the shower.  The job is in a different area of research than I’m used to but I passed the preliminary placement exam so there’s that. Just in case, I looked up some material on YouTube. I bought a new suit, that I will probably never wear again, and got an investment haircut.  Got my berry smoothie ready.  Everything copacetic.

Now all I need is a little bit of luck to go with the preparation.

This is ze time on ze Confluence vhen ve dahnse.

The Employment Index: Week Two

I pass the test.

(See last week’s Employment Index for background on this project.)

Week two and I’ve already diverged from my original intent.  I was busy the first two days of the week so I wasn’t able to devote as much time to my job search as I wanted to.  But on Wednesday, I submitted 7 applications.  So, in addition to the 3 additional ones I submitted last Saturday, that makes 10 online applications since the last unemployment index post.  I also made two networking connections.  

So, why so little activity this week?  Well, as it turns out, I went a little outside my search territory on Wednesday and submitted an application in a different industry.  About 3 hours later, I got a call from that company.  They were very positive (I’m trying not to get my hopes up) and asked me to come in for an assessment test in several different areas.  That had me sweating bullets.  I was really worried that I was going to have to do heavy math and the last time I had to take a derivative of anything was back in the late 80s.  That’s what server clusters and scientific software are for.  They do the work so you don’t have to.  Oh sure, you have to know the equations and relationships but the heavy lifting is done by silicon.  Anyway, I freaked myself out unnecessarily.  Most of the stuff I reviewed wasn’t on the test and there were sections of the test that I would have needed much more time to learn because it was outside the scope of anything I’ve ever done.  

I passed it anyway.  The HR person said I got a score of “awesome!”.  Whew.  She says I should be scheduled for interviews next week and will know by the end of the week if I can rejoin the middle class.  I’m trying not to make plans because even though I give good interview, I’m getting to be very superstitious about these things.  The universe can be random and weird.  But the thought of having a full time job with benefits and a decent salary has driven the thought of useless application churning right out of my mind for the moment.  I will pick it up again on Monday.  

Some other notes:

One of my networking contacts was an old friend from the Pittsburgh area.  She’s a little older than me.  She and her husband were also tossed out of the middle class during the recession.  They had a hard time making ends meet for about 4 years until they moved back to Pittsburgh.  She’s a little bitter about the fact that older baby-boomers are retiring comfortably while she and her husband can’t buy a house and will probably never retire.  

She told me that their luck turned in a single day.  In both cases for her husband and herself, they applied online and heard back from their current employers within minutes to hours.  

That makes me wonder if there’s a sweet spot for submitting an online application.  It could be that HR reps or hiring managers scan the resumes online at certain times of the day.  It could also be the case that the sooner you apply to a posting, the better your chances.  

The other thing I noticed is that there is one company that I apply to frequently that everyone I know says is low hanging fruit but for some peculiar reason, I can’t get a response.  Not even a nibble.  It’s ridiculous.  It might have something to do with their online application system.  It reformats my resume every time I submit to it.  It also asks if I’ve been out of work for a period of more than 30 days during my entire working career.  Come on, who hasn’t been out of work for more than 30 days in the last 6 years?  Is that a realistic question?  Some of the best people I know, the hardest workers, the smartest people, have been out of work for more than 30 days.  Not their fault, especially if they were located in NJ when their turn came.  I used to go to meetings where everyone was looking for a job.  When sites are closing all around you and the competition is high and jobs are few, you tend to spend more time out of work than you intended. It’s just that random universal thing.  But it does suggest that there is a  level of prejudice against the unemployed that may be impossible to overcome if the criteria is set at how many days of unemployment a candidate has faced.  

Total applications this week (end 09/06/2014): 10 

Total applications since the beginning of this project: 35

Total number of calls for interviews: 1 

                           Temp agency: 1

                           Direct position: 0

Total number of assessments taken: 1; Number passed: 1

Total number networking contacts: 2