Find Me a Job

Like I said, crap.

I'm all for Cheezwhizz's suggestion, by the way.

Let all the jobless / soon-to-be jobless gather and burn mementos from their former / current employers in effigy.

Nepotism aside, the funding for my wee li'l non-profit organization is dwindling to a pittance. By the end of April, I'll be sitting at home, in my dirty bathrobe (2 sizes too small), staring at the TV (turned off, of course), a trail of potato chip crumbs leading from my drooling mouth down to my belly, smacking my lips like a cud- chewing cow.

Oh - and I'll be unemployed, too.

I'm not worried about finding a job, mind you - not yet, anyway. I'm just relieved, actually - this org has been in the Kung Fu Grip of Death ever since I was hired. I'm just glad it's finally taking itself off the respirator and dying.

For the record, I am looking forward to finding a job with a definite future. I relish this opportunity to prove myself, and am positive that I will be successful. My ideal working environment will be a challenging one, an environment where my skills are tested on a daily basis and hard work is a valued commodity. References are available upon request.

Ahem.

And, damn it, this ain't a pity party just for myself! Where's everyone else? I can't eat this entire cake!

Marines is an anagram of remains, i have just noticed...

Preferrably something that involves writing (about arts/culture/entertainment), which includes proofreading/editing. Am I being too picky?

You should work for VIZ (http://www.viz.com/)!
Somehow.

Or...you could try Wired magazine? It's local and would cover some of your interests.

Also - we need to hang out again!

or do you think youre too good for that huh

Hi dere! Find me a job!

me too, altho i havent lost mine (yet???)

Dog Latin impersonator

kill myself

i'd love to get into subbing/copy editing/journalism or something like that. I hav teh English degree, a bit of InDesign on my side and some writing (mostly online). I'd like to know how one gets started in freelance writing too.

Dog Latin impersonators don't really get much money these days so I here. And the hours are awful!

ironically i just found out i might be let go this week :(

the only thing keeping me here is that my employer hates the idea of former employees getting unemployment

My school district is always looking for school bus drivers. It pays more than minimum wage, and you get the summer off.

is it located in chicago il

Who's got two opposable thumbs, speaks limited French, and needs a job?

This moi.

Take my boss's job... PLEASE.

Wait, you need mad progamming skillz for that. You can learn, right?

I can learn anything.

Srsly I have no pride keeping me from working retail or anywhere really--I just need to make some cash, I don't mind WORK. But there is something really depressing about begging to be accepted for a position that'll be all 'HMMM I'm not sure if you have the right amount OF retail experience' and I'll have to explode YES, I WORKED IN A SHOP I WAS FIFTEEN--SINCE THEN I'VE COMPLETED THREE DEGREES AND AM NOW A DOCTOR EVEN IF A KIND OF RUBBISH SORT OF DOCTOR I THINK I'LL BE ABLE TO ORGANIZE THE STOCK IN THE BACKROOM OF YR BOOKSHOP.

don't know why OF is capitalized

what i mean is:

a)I'll work pretty much anywhere--I don't think many jobs are 'below me'
but
b)I just want to work it, I don't want to go through the whole process of applying, proving, begging for the privilege to be underpaid for a shit job that I could do in my sleep.

Ah, you may have to do the MVE thing until something comes along; you go in and they give you 200-question music trivia test which if you pass, you get a job selling secondhand records and it starts almost immediately. And most of the people working there are in bands/have small labels/are grad students.

that is a sort of idea, thanks!

find me one as well please, i find out in a week if i get the boot or not!

how about temping? it's not as reliable but there is cash and only one application involved, the one to the agency.

i'm working on this - i have an interview for a (cool but far away and badly paying) part time job. if i get it i'll need to find at least one more part time job, and if i don't i'll go back to turning in applications for full time stuff.

Well i'm going to have to find something quick if i do lose it, so that may be handy.
I there an age thing with temping, i'm 35 and don't want to be treated like a kid...

it must be awful to wait around to hear! i hope your job is safe.

well it's not so bad, as i'll be getting a months wage for every year i've been there.
i do want to get another job straight away, as i don't want to waste the money.

fuck everything

I am seriously in trouble here

Hey LJ what's up?

Hey ENBB! I'm unemployable, wretched and without a hope of moving out. Nobody is even replying to my applications.

go to law school

c-post ^^I hear you Louis

Haven't got a single interview from about 15 applications in 2009. It's sick. At this rate I might have to actually try and beg someone in my old BBC office for work! Which prob won't work...

at least you have the dole, nhs and youth on your side

Yeah fuck, I've got none of those.

me either

Oh, yes the nhs. But not if we're kicked out of the country. (Could happen!)

A law conversion is something I couldn't do. Sorry.

Those things are indeed on my side, cold comfort for a lad whose life has ground to a halt.

Apparently my next recourse should be to quite literally go round the local area and hand in my CV to every shop and business I find.

don't become an estate agent

Hi. I'm still in my pajamas and have barely left the apt in three days. I worked my ass off to get MA and now NOBODY IS FUCKING HIRING and I'm still jobless. I filed an unemployment claim nearly three months ago and it's still being processed. Tomorrow I have an apt at a temp agency because we're running out of money.

This is all to say, I hear you Louis. You are not wretched it's just a shitty shitty time.

OK, I'm going to shower now. At this rate at least I'll be dressed by 4:00.

such terrible times that "apartment" and "appointment" find the same apt abbreviation ;-)

we're even having to economise WORDS

you should just make that movie you were talking about

or become an editorial assistant at a 'shelter' magazine

go listen to 13

I had to get dressed today, for my fortnightly fitting at the jobcentre. Thank the good lord for 44 quid a week, all scrounged off our long-suffering state.

Lamp, that movie is in the works. My best friend and I had a long discussion about it on a ramble by the Thames last weekend. But he needs to graduate and get a job first (he has about 1800 quid in a savings account, which he wishes to spend on a good video camera). His ultimate aim is to be a movie director, so I'm sure things will start to happen.

lol mookieproof, I'll probably get until about halfway thru "1992" before breaking down

When I graduated I had to move to a new city, but hey, I just got a first class degree so finding a job would be a piece of piss, right.
I spent 6 months applying for tons of jobs every week, I even went to a fair few interviews (probably 20) and didn't get a single one.

In the end a temp agency finally came up trumps and got me something decent (and at the same time one of the crapper jobs I'd applied for finally offered me something). People said don't give up then and I didn't believe them. But, you know, don't. As far as I can tell it is all about chance, pretty much. At least you have a roof over your head.

in britain, no job, no skills, and no recourse to public funds. times are ruff :(

my girlfriends looking for a new job, anyone need an assistant or something in their office

I wish there was a Google for jobs ... something that would become the definitive, inescapable resource for job hunting and job finding. No blindly surfing corporate webpages, no stupid Monster-type sites with confusing interfaces and weird procedures, no recruiters, no Craigslist, etc. Just type in, say, a postcode and BAM, see all the jobs.

no recruiters
no recruiters
no recruiters
no recruiters
no recruiters

yeah esp that

no stupid Monster-type sites

these sites have my express permission to take the next rowboat into the inferno

i am also unemployable, starting to go a bit stir crazy.

work i have done since finishing my MA: installed and tore down big goofy biennial thing. that is all.

i have been on three interviews, none of which went anywhere, and seen less educated, less experienced people somehow land full-time and benefits. i am out of cigarettes, haven't had a drink in days, eating food given to me by my surely snickering ex-girlfriend. i am well beyond stir crazy.

worked in music retailer over christmas. was told i would get that job back at end of january, but it was decided against for some reason. agencies ain't lookin' for more people, and bars bitch about experience.

x-post I would be at that point if I weren't married to an employed man. I'm so hoping something comes out of these interviews tomorrow because as much as I hate temp work I need to start getting out again. This blows.

I'm in a job but desperately searching for another.

Thought I'd found something good and interesting and that the interview went reasonably well - but had informal feedback that they were worried I'd have too many ideas on how things should be done and want to do 'too much' and consequently find it difficult get on with the rest of the team, so after a bit of consideration I didn't get it. {of course, they could have been being polite and just thought I sounded like a pain in the ass].

Job interviews - what are you supposed to do: illustrate some ideas and dynamism and risk being thought 'difficult', or play the faceless endlessly malleable clone and risk being thought 'unenthusiastic'?

Both.

I should have gone to acting class then rather than acquired some resource-intensive qualifications.

hope your luck turns around soon, louis & erica & everybody else. even my high-flying ivy league lawyer pal got caught up in this recently, he's got wealthy family to help him out but he has two kids and a wife who's just a freelancer. hearing about his situation really freaked me out in a "nobody is safe" kinda way.

I hate the part where I have to write a personal statement about how I meet all the key criteria even though I'll spend ages on it and not get a call back. Thankfully I already have a job, but part-time hours aren't quite cutting it, so I too am desperately searching for another.

Someone should poll this list of opening lines for cover letters

I have 20 years experience writing and editing sports.
I am an award-winning reporter ...
Arson, murder, rape, torture. These are ...
My most valuable lesson in four years at the ...
I have covered small-town politics in Texas, crime in Atlanta and environmental issues in New Jersey. I am ready for my next challenge.
Persistence and patience are two things a reporter needs.
I love my job.
I am a small-town girl with my eyes set on the world.
Every valuable lesson I ever learned about reporting I learned in a taxi -- from the front seat.
At my newspaper, They kill me the grammar czar.
They said it couldn't be done, but I ...
It's a pain in the neck, going through that stack of resumes.
You: Busy editor working late and staring at a growing mountain of job applications. Me: ...
No fancy cover letter here. No custom-bound clips or professionally designed resume. Just good, solid ...
Let me save you some trouble ...
I'm sure the ad for a (job) at the (paper) unleashed a torrent of applications ...
So many candidates, so little time. Let me help you cut through the clutter.
I would be an asset to your newspaper staff because ...
I meet every one of the requirements in your job posting. (Bullet points follow.)
Having just received Editor & Publisher, I saw your advertisements for both a features writer and an assignment editor. If the positions have yet to be filled, please consider the brief resume which accompanies this letter.
If you haven't filled the sports writing position, look no further ...
Look no further ...
Let me save you some trouble ...
You would be crazy not to hire me.
You'd have to be crazy to hire me.
The competition hates me.
Readers love my stories.
You never know what you might learn when ...
I have been yelled at, lied to, kicked out of meetings and threatened -- all in the pursuit of journalism. What a great business.

haha...

I realised my Monster profile had "Journalist/Sub-Edtior" on it for a few months today.

also I HATE filling out those huge dedicated forms for places, it's such a fucking undertaking. just let me send a CV FFS.

Yes!! Those forms suck so bad. ugh.

So I had two meetings this morning with temp agencies and were told things are (unsurprisingly) slow. So now I wait. Argh.

ps - Thanks Velko

temp agencies around here are doing alright, mostly bcuz every office has fired full time staff but still needs some people to do the actual work

temp agency is probably my next viable step tbh

my company's hiring, but we're only looking for energy engineers

i just spent a day sending out resumes & find out that for some reason, every time i uploaded resumes & cover letters, my computer was turning the documents into gibberish

also explains why i cant upload images of any kind

what the fuck

Also, one of the things that rears its ugly head during job searching is insufficient adoption of the PDF format as a worldwide standard for document exchange. If you don't understand what to do with a PDF file you have no business sitting anywhere near the computer you're being paid to operate on behalf of the recruitment agency that employs you. The other scenario: if you are a recruitment company that likes to receive .docs so you can "touch up" your candidates, fuck you.

if you are a recruitment company that likes to receive .docs so you can "touch up" your candidates, fuck you.

This is SO a reality of life, tho. I mean it sucks, but that's what a recruiter is all about.

they all do it

yeah saw a recruiter recently who was asking me about different skills I hadn't put down and then saying "okay so let's say email marketing, you can do that, I can tell."

if it's any consolation/worth hearing, I applied for a job last week which looked acceptable at best and then after getting an interview (my first in about 4 months) it turns out the job sounds incredible and I want it really badly. So I guess what I've learned is to just apply for everything you're remotely qualified for. I almost didn't go for this one as I thought I wouldn't be the right person.

Anyway interview went really well, as I said elsewhere the interviewer halfway through suggested going for a pint?! Ended up discussing John Cooper Clarke. I'm hoping this helps me get into the second round of interviews...

I sent a PDF to a recruiter and before he sent it away to the company in question he had to call me back and say 'can you edit your name and contact details off your cv? I can usually edit PDFs on my end but for some reason I can't on this one.'

Yes, because I make my PDFs uneditable. But he didn't seem to care about changes other than that, and to be honest he was a pretty decent dude as far as recruiters go. The company were a bit flaky so the job didn't work out but after many awful experiences with agencies that guy was a star (relatively).

.docs = suck. I have a really nice Indesign resume I'd rather use but rarely ever can because it's all either docs or those horrible in-house Word application forms.

Ugh at "touching up" CVs, since in my experience most recruiters/agencies, even the specialist ones, have no understanding of technical terms and think they're all interchangeable.

Other half recently told a recruiter that he couldn't take a job which involved travelling, so obviously the recruiter nodded kindly and then told some employers that he'd be perfect for their field engineer job (i.e. get sent all round the world visiting international clients and having to fix stuff for them) because he loves travelling.

OMG if some recruiter changed anything on my CV without my explicit permission I would go completely and utterly apeshit.

I am waiting for an HR person - for a company that came to me- to get back to me with feedback on a writing sample I know is a-OK but hiring managers have been dithering. There is no email chivvying them along that would not be passive aggressive even though it's my one-month Anniversary Of Waiting today.

I have been unemployed for a month.

It's starting to feel scary now.

my recruitment consultant is a g. i managed to get sacked for accidentally sending highly sensitive docs to my mate and my boss at the same time, slink me into the marketing section of the DOH which lasted a month before they caught on i blagged it and still sorted me out another job in less than a month each time. Admittedly its all PA work and not design but i cant really be picky in the current climate considering how average i am at it

The problem is that desperation makes you apply for jobs you're not really best suited for, which you inevitably don't get, and then begins a downward spiral of confidence.

('you' = me, btw)

Also the 'sunk cost' of applying for jobs and preparing for interviews is incredible these days - a real barrier if you're still trying to do a demanding job at the same time.

The problem is that desperation makes you apply for jobs you're not really best suited for, which you inevitably don't get, and then begins a downward spiral of confidence.

completely OTM. spent a couple of months earlier on this year and it overwhelmed me to the point i ended up in the worst brain melting bout of depression ive had in my adult life. Best thing i did was chill out and see breaks in employment as a chance to learn new skills which i should have done at uni and i dont have time to work on when 9-5. And baking.

new skills would be a fine thing

ive got dreamweaver and flash touchups/actually learning how to use them planned for my next bout in a few weeks

i just found 3 good leads on USAJOBS.gov and the advanced search is really helpful

oh and if you think being unemployed for one month is irritating, try being unemployed and not being eligible for unemployment benefits ever since you graduated in may 2008

oh, and my .pdf scans of my cover letter and transcript always were a bit blurry because of the upload size limit... does this ever happen to any of yall or am I just doing it wrong?

hmmm probably because i made the .pdfs using .bmps instead of .jpegs

i kinda like having my transcript being little bit blurry though :p

oh and if you think being unemployed for one month is irritating, try being unemployed and not being eligible for unemployment benefits ever since you graduated in may 2008

yeah I graduated in june and I have a short-term thing that's ending at the end of this month. as *horrible* as it is to be our age and looking for any post-college job right now - and not having any government support while doing it - I do count my blessings that I have zero obligations beyond paying my (relatively) cheap rent. no family, no mortgage etc.

just signed up w/ Monster.com, no one has a fucking positive word to say about em, eh?

(my last unemployed search, the web was a blip, ca '94-95)

Do you always follow up a mailed resume with a phone call 3 days later?

re: the talk of .pdfs vs .docs upthread - surely it's easier to search for keywords on a CV database if it's a .doc, or am i wrong? in my experience the majority of recruitment consultants are cretinous morons who couldn't find their ways to their office chairs in the morning, let alone search and edit a PDF file.

i am sure lots of these places have software that scans pdfs and converts to .doc or just scans pdfs for keywords... i've definitely used software that would do the former.

Dr. Morbs, I got my current contract via Monster, though I really hate that site.

what would you search for on a C.V.? "awesome"?

Um, keywords associated with the job your filling, like:

- programming languages
- development platforms
- past job titles
- operating systems
- development methodologies
- database names

etc etc etc

ok - i just can't imagine that would be faster than scanning down the page with your eyes..

It's faster when you're trying to pull together a bunch of resumes that have been submitted to the site but not necessarily to your position.

pdfs are text-searchable fools

o i c

xp

explaining to 25-year-old agency recruiter my '80s/90s antiquarian jobs; oh, the fun

IIII am getting nerrrrrrvous. Do NOT want to have to borrow money from my mom. :( :( :( :(

oh, the jobs on Craiglist that fit my history. 35-40K in the Hudson Valley... with no benefits.

wow, THAT's the max NY weekly unemployment payment? Family loans going to start soon.

monster was bad enough for job seekers before the recession, now it's got to be awful. positions at my company that used to get 5-6 applicants are getting hundreds via monster.

as always, the best way to find a job is through friends and contacts. monster is probably going to be a black hole into which your cv is thrown unless you've got some superstar background which miraculously fits exactly what they are looking for.

pdfs are text-searchable fools

not if they're scanned < /pendant>

if yr scanning yr resume to pdf to upload to a job site you dont deserve to have a job!

im working @ wrigley field dudes, how bout THAT

today a register jockey stole $5

im basically a glorified babysitter

by 'glorified' i mean my shirt is burgundy, & everyone else rocks red

job interview in about two hours, wish me luck.

I have 24 days to study for my first actuarial exam - financial mathematics/economics (where people are told to spend 300 hours studying). I'm hoping I'll pass and feel like Frank Abagnale beating the bar exam ('catch me if you can'). I imagine going insane over the next few weeks.. not to mention my second exam is 1 week after the first.

I'm new here on ILE btw

24*24 leaves you 276 hours fro eating and sleeping. what's the problem? i'm currently trying to fit in 8 all day seminars worth of notes into the next 5 1/2 hours :(

g'luck roz

thanks darraghmac, you too.

and welcome mulvaney! relax, 24 days and one week between 2 exams is plenty of time - make good notes, stock up on caffeine and you'll be set.

there's a new verb in job ads: "liase."

kill me now.

Forget a job (for now), where can I find a stopgap health plan for about $150/month (ie, cheaper than COBRA)? There's one I've found online which is ER/hospital only, I need office visits...

HALLO

^^ Events Organiser for a Mobile Telecommunications Multinational

THAT IS THE DAY I FINALLY FLING MYSELF OFF CANARY WHARF

LOVE WHAT YOU DO, LOUIS

DARE TO BE BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD *splat*

xxp mis-read that as THIS IS THE DAY, and I was about to say 'Let me know how big the flashing red light is on top, because I've always wondered about that...'

IT'S A WHITE LIGHT NOT A RED LIGHT

and now, time for a MUSICAL INTERLUDE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMWzYip6R30

There should be a The The tribute band called 'teh teh'...

maybe my band could be called that

lol 'a band' really is my big plan atm, I am such a tit

LOOK I HAVE TWO DEGREES

why didn't I just leave school at 16 and get a proper job

there's times for a degree, and times for good honest work.

you got two degrees.

kinda says it all mayne.

says it all.

*smh*