Maybe there's not 3 or 10 wanting the job you applied for. Maybe it's 626 people.
The poster on this blog I ran across is a guy with a Master's degree in English, had trouble finding a job, went through most of the known sites, couldn't hardly get responses (sound familiar?) and in the frustration of never hearing back from prospective employers one day decided to do some market research on his competition.
He posted a fake job listing of the type he was applying to. If you have the luxury of being employed at even a bad job perhaps you can spare a few minutes for outrage. The rest of us can learn from this data, such as in the comments section where the blogger is told that the masters degree might hinder the search.
He got 653 responses the first day. Throwing out the ones with bad attachments or bad formatting, leaves 626 people with resumes applying for the one job. He combed through them for data such as educational background, experience, and made graphs from the coffee-cup stained napkin (clever graphic).
What he learned made a good story, here, and included this quote:
“No matter how much you want this job, there are 652 other people who want it, too.
The problem with this is that mantras are usually meant to calm one down, not bring one to tears.”.
In other words, until we see job reports (such as tomorrow) that report three or four hundred thousand better paying jobs, we are just bumping along the bottom. In the consumer-driven economy we have built, that's just marching to the grave.
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