The Depressing World of Want Ads for the Unemployed

[marmar]

from In These Times:



The Depressing World of Want Ads for the Unemployed

Thursday
Jul 28, 2011
10:04 am

By Kari Lydersen


The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported on two disturbing developments on the front lines of the job search recently. A July 26 Times story said employers only want to hire people who are currently employed or recently laid off – and specify as much in their want ads – because they think people who’ve been out of work for longer have lost the competitive edge or fallen behind in the field.

In most states it is legal to advertise that only the employed or recently laid-off need apply, since job status isn’t a protected class like race or gender. And even in states including New Jersey that prohibit such ads, employers can easily tell from one’s resume whether they have been long out of work.

Meanwhile, a July 12 WSJ story relayed the strange phenomenon of unemployed people outsourcing their job hunts to Indian service centers – often with surprising amounts of success. Through various automated services, most of them staffed by tech workers overseas, people can send out thousands of resumes to recruiters based on certain words in their want ads. Job seekers can determine roughly how wide a net they cast by setting the search parameters – for example, to include all jobs in “sales.” That means a salesman like one featured in the WSJ story can end up applying for jobs as a manicurist, fitness coach and hair stylist.

This resulted in awkward situations where people got job call-backs for jobs they didn’t even know they’d applied for. And apparently in many cases they actually got the jobs, often where their own human searches had failed. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11757/the_strange_world_of_want_ads_for_the_unemployed/

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1. k&r

[iemitsu]

2. the job situation in america is scary.

i hope that i can hang onto my job for a few more years so that i never have to face the prospects of finding a new one.
in my job history there is twenty-one years of public school teaching that would probably keep me from successfully finding other employment.